Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 4

This is our final blog highlighting some of the bands that have come to our attention during our current involvement in the longlisting process for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition. At the risk of boring regular readers we have to first utter our usual disclaimer that we’ve issued on every one of these posts and that is that the bands identified in this and the three posts that precede it will not necessarily be our 3 choices for the longlist – although they are being considered – but they are all artists that we’ve been enjoying. It’s the last we’re going to say on the competition until the official list is announced in March, when you’ll be able to see the acts that this and 39 other blogs chose to go forward to the next stage of the competition.

Red Shoe Diaries (pictured above) from Nottingham are very much a gentle indie band – call it twee if you must – and share a similar sonic territory to Belle and Sebastian and Felt. They’re the kind of band that are never going to have the word muscular applied as a tag to their songs, but that’s fine because sometimes a subtle and tender kiss is all the more tantalising than a drunken hard and fast tongue sandwich up against the wall. The band released an EP simply entitled Debut EP back in 2009 and don’t appear to have issued much else since, so fingers crossed that the fact that they’ve entered the Glastonbury competition and have a show at the Lexington in London on February 7 supporting Allo Darlin’ means that they are still a going concern and further material may surface. Our favourite tune from the EP is Underage Disco which should get old school Belle and Sebastian fans doing that awkward I’m-kind-of-cute-but-kind-of-embarrassed dance that they do.

Our final choice are Temper The Wolves, a band who you can find hard gigging all over London in the next month or so with shows at (amongst others) 93 Feet East, Relentless Garage and the 100 Club. This Camden based five-piece create well-crafted electric guitar tunes that have just a hint of darkness in their sound. They reference bands such as The National, The Smiths and Joy Division as influences and certainly their music contains elements of classic indie-rock structures. With a Myspace that was only created late last year Temper The Wolves are very much a new band, but certainly show some promise with songs such as Cold Hands that both soar and swim in equal measures as their lead singer sternly intones “we slow dance tonight.”

Cold Hands by Temper The Wolves

Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 3

You can imagine that when faced with around 160 bands and solo artists, 99% of which you’ve never heard of before, it can be a fairly daunting task to listen to them all and form judgements about which are best – particularly when you have fairly wide tastes and enjoy everything from chart based pop to lo-fi underground noise.

But as a Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition judge, that is the task we have taken upon ourselves, alongside 39 others representing many of the UK's best music blogs.

Today we offer up another four acts for your perusal in two blogs (the other comes later today) that we’ve been enjoying from the list of artists that we’ve been asked to judge. Once again, and we apologise for repeating ourselves from yesterday, any of the bands we feature here are not necessarily the ones we will be choosing as our selected three for the longlist – we’re still giving consideration to everything on the list.

So here’s our next choice – Codes, from Ireland (pictured above). Codes produce sonically huge pop / rock songs that immediately jump out from the first second you hear them but are also layered with vast detail that draws you in further and rewards repeated listening. With hints of next-big-things-that-didn’t-quite-make-it Geneva (remember them anyone?) and a soundscape that towers with euphoric and explosive magnificence Codes have already recorded an album Trees Dream In Algebra in the UK which was nominated for the prestigious Irish Choice Music Prize. Although as yet no UK physical release has been secured it is available to download. Watch the video for Starry Eyed below – and no it’s not a cover version of the Ellie Goulding song.

Anchor & The Wolf are a very different but equally intriguing proposition. Formed by Swindon’s Zoe Mead, Anchor & The Wolf produce sweet folk pop out of ukulele, acoustic guitar and glockenspiel that makes your heart feel a little lighter and the days a little better, even if some of their lyrics are a little melancholy. Their new EP -The Cinema Suite was released this week and is available to purchase from the Anchor & The Wolf Bandcamp here. The song below Trampolines and Chandeliers is a dreamy, velvety piece of work and is featured on the EP.

Trampolines And Chandeliers by Greyfoot

Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 2

This is the second of four posts highlighting some of the bands who have entered the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition that we’ve been listening to in the capacity of long list judge and have found most agreeable. Once more, here’s a quick disclaimer – just because the band is featured on the blog doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be one of our final three choices to end up on the long list.

Lizzie and the Yes Men is a London based surf-pop four-piece fronted by the short cropped Lizzie (pictured above) with three young gallants named Andy, Keir and Brendan providing the music. Their riffs and twangs have a darker and edgy feel to them than you’re a-typical Hawaiian shirted, pearly smiling and bronzed tanned collection of beach dudes and sound all the better for it. However there’s still enough chirpiness in their song Broadwalk to party to, especially when they drop in some hooky whistling over the top of some snappy guitar frolics. We can imagine if Tarantino ever heard Lizzie and the Yes Men, he’d get them on his next film soundtrack sharpish. You can download Broadwalk for free below.

Broadwalk by Lizzieandtheyesmen

The next of the eight bands we're featuring are called Shadow Orchestra. Using cello, harp, guitar, drums, and keyboards this group take elements of ambient pop, jazz, classical and experimental electronica to produce something that may not be instantly memorable, but lilts and drifts, soothes and caresses its way along a musical journey that is tastefully subdued. They are due to release an album this spring and last year bagged a slot in the Bimble Inn stage at Breaking More Waves favourite festival, Bestival.

02 Matilda by Shadow_Orchestra

Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 1

Having been approached by the organisers of Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent competition late last year, Breaking More Waves is one of 40 UK based music blogs that has been selected to help judge the 2011 competition – the prize for the winner being a main stage slot at the 2011 festival.

Each blog is given an individual list of bands to listen to (in our case around 160) and asked to select its favourite 3, forming the long list of 120 acts which will be published on the Glastonbury website in March, together with the name of the blog that chose the act. The list will also be distributed to all the Glastonbury stage programmers (with listening links and genre details).

The longlist will then be whittled down to a shortlist of just 10 artists by judges including Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis and these 10 will be invited to appear at a live final.

The judging process for the long list is simple enough with each judge being sent a selection of the bands that where possible accord with the blogs own preferences in terms of musical genre. At Breaking More Waves we have a fairly broad spectrum of taste and have therefore found ourselves listening to a mixed bag of music.

At this stage in the process we’ve listened to at least 1 song by every band in our cluster and have begun the process of whittling the 160 down to a more manageable number that we intend to listen to more before selecting our final 3. At this stage we’ve not made any firm decision – sometimes the most important ingredient of great music is time and we intend to give the acts we’re enjoying some more of that.

Our own criteria for choosing an act is does the music grab us, excite us and move us emotionally in some way? Does the act sound amazing or even better, do they sound A.M.A.Z.I.N.G ? Ultimately are they worthy of Worthy Farm?

As we continue the judging process the festival has very kindly agreed to blogs being able to feature some of the acts they are enjoying prior to the publication of the longlist.

A disclaimer is required here; just because we feature a band from our cluster group here on the blog does not necessarily mean that they will form part of our final three. We’re still considering the acts and no decisions have been made yet. In fact, our final three may contain acts that we’re not featuring here at all.

So without further ado, here comes the first of four posts, each featuring two of the bands that we’ve discovered through the competition. Enjoy and maybe let us know what you think? Our first two acts are Leaving Atlantis and Cloud Castle Lake.

Leaving Atlantis describe their music as progressive electroacoustic pop and are based in London, Copenhagen and Helsinki, and we guess that they have been allowed into the entries because of their London base - as acts have to be from the UK or Ireland. Having already gained some play on Amazing Radio, the only UK station dedicated to exclusively playing emerging and independent music ( a station that featured Breaking More Waves as their website of the week in January) they have also been hailed as Soundclouder of the Week. The song we have selected from their repertoire is Paradise, a sensual piece of gentle electronic bliss but we also strongly recommend the string laden and weighty Solitaire which you can listen to here.

Paradise (Dec.) by Leaving Atlantis

The second band we’re featuring are Cloud Castle Lake from Dublin, Ireland, whose song A Wolf Howling is constructed from a repetitive beat, textured atmospheric guitar noise and near falsetto vocals that have an element of Radiohead to them – it’s a song to utterly lose yourself in.

A Wolf Howling by cloudcastlelake