Delilah - Love You So

Delilah’s Chaka Khan referencing Go (first featured in these quarters back in August) has become one of the sleeper hits of autumn in the UK. With just the right amount of radio exposure and tours with the likes of Chase & Status and Maverick Sabre, she’s become a real commercial proposition without having been burdened with the weight of hype and expectation. It’s a difficult line for an artist to straddle – over exposure can so quickly lead to backlash, but Delilah seems to have got it just right.

So now it’s time for some new material. With lyrics about loneliness, falling apart, being left lost and ‘pointing a gun towards my oldest friend’ Love You So may not quite be the happily romantic pop nugget that you might expect from the title. Musically it bears fruit as a classy string-laden mid-tempo piece of excellence, giving the strongest suggestion that Delilah will soon be finding her way to the radio-waves again.

Delilah - Love You So

Embers - New Waves

Yesterday we read something on the internet written by a US based blogger (David Greenwald of Rawkblog) that suggested that you shouldn’t rush to post about a song and should give it due consideration - post something thoughtful about music you actually like seemed to be the advice. Now we fully understand where David is coming from; too many blogs rush to post the latest remix sent by a PR company to hundreds of bloggers, in an attempt to get listed first on Hype Machine, irrespective of quality or if they really feel passionate about the music. But we also fundamentally disagree that everything should be thoughtful. Music is like sex. It’s not always a bloody intellectual exercise – sometimes you just feel the emotion and have to go with it. You hear something, so beautiful, so incredible, so f*ckin’ noisily brilliant that you want to tell the world about it there and then. Sometimes you just want to rip each others’ clothes off and do it. Wherever you are. This is what makes blogs different from the traditional music media; the immediacy.

Sure, in the world of professional journalism there’s a place for considered analysis of music and sometimes even on a blog it makes sense to sit back and take a more reflective view. But sometimes, like we did a few hours ago, you press play and hear something so powerful, so dramatic and so hugely exciting you just HAVE to tell the world about it. It may not be well-thought out, it may not be rational or studious, it may be the heart talking rather than the head, but when it makes you jump up and go WOW, punching the air with delight and adoration, you don’t want it to be secret. As a music fan you want the world to know.

This is what we’re doing with Embers. We want you to know about them now. Their sound, from the three songs we've heard, is grandiose dramatic rock that shimmers with layers of transcendental noise sitting somewhere between the climaxes of Glasvegas and the shattering force of My Bloody Valentine. There’s even a hint of the good parts of Embrace in there somewhere. It’s incredible stuff. Tunnel Vision is the apocalyptic sound of World War III spat out of musical instruments, Without Fear or Favour verges on being some sort of religious experience and Days Turns Into Weeks takes stern pianos and synths to create a hymn of cinematic barefaced brilliance.

We could have waited a week, listened carefully and come up with a well balanced and reasoned argument as to why Embers have just become our new favourite band, but when we’re this excited about such an incredible noise we want as many people as possible to know as quickly as possible. Why delay something that could make a lot of people very happy?

Someone put this lot in a massive studio and give them the production and recording weight they deserve please.

This is Embers. Embers are four people from Manchester. They write music like this.

Without Fear or Favour

Tunnel Vision

Factory Floor - Two Different Ways

For most bands practically clearing a venue of its audience whilst you play would be the stuff of nightmares. The music of Factory Floor is the stuff of nightmares, albeit the most glorious, rhythmic disco-din type of nightmare that, given the right headspace, you will really want to experience. Frankly we’d rather have exposure to this any evening than some pathetically romantic wet dream that leaves an apologetic stain afterwards. And so it was earlier this year when at Leicester’s Summer Sundae festival Factory Floor put the ‘rave’ in the word ‘grave’ and buried any hopes or aspirations of them connecting with a mainstream audience who were looking forward to the likes of Example or McFly. As sequenced layers of repetitive electronics aggressively flooded over the rapidly dwindling crowd, those who stayed witnessed one of the most hypnotic and hallucinogenic sets witnessed at any festival this summer.

Now here’s an example of Factory Floor's pulverising and stupendous sound. Two Different Ways is released on November 14 on DFA records. It’s a brain melting menagerie of post-industrial-post-acid-house rhythms that takes you into a dark strobe lit room, shoves its tongue hard down your throat and reaches straight for your groin. This isn’t the soundtrack to feeling good about yourself, this is the soundtrack to utterly losing yourself in the moment and to hell with the consequences. If you like it hard, rough and dirtily sexy this is for you.

TWO DIFFERENT WAYS by Factory Floor

Music That Made Me #41 - Ellie Goulding - Starry Eyed

This is the penultimate post in the Music That Made Me series. Over the last 41 weeks I’ve written about some of the songs that I associate with particular people, moments in life as well as some that I love simply because they are great tunes, and nothing more.

Amongst those that I’ve mentioned, I’ve said very little about the two most important people in my life; my children. ( I’m sure my girlfriend won’t mind being third in the pecking order - in your role as a parent it’s something that you have to take on).

I sometimes feel a bit sorry for them, living with dad means being constantly exposed to music; the radio is on in our house a lot. However whilst I would probably prefer to listen to 6 Music for most of the day, in the world of a near teenager’s eyes it’s ‘boring’. Therefore the sounds of Chris Moyles, Scott Mills and the like are often heard booming from the numerous radios in our house, because daytime Radio 1 is king.

Someone once said to me that if you go abroad and then come back to the UK and want to quickly tap into what mainstream youth culture is listening to, then expose yourself to Radio 1 for a week and you’ll be up to speed. He was probably right.

It’s very easy as you get older to switch to Radio 2, 6 Music, Radio 4 or the like and before you know it you’ll be grumbling that ‘music isn’t as good as it was in previous decades.’ My kids know who The Beatles are but they probably couldn’t name any of their songs. They don’t mean anything to them. They could however name all of the songs on Ed Sheeran’s album or Rizzle Kicks debut long player. When I asked my eldest daughter (pictured above) what her favourite band was she replied “the sort of things they play on Radio 1.”

As you get older it’s very easy to sneer at today’s pop music. There's a sizeable number of times that I’ve had conversations with people in their twenties, thirties and forties who suggest that ‘pop music is the kind of music that just 14 year old girls buy,’ as if 14 year old girls are not able to be good judges of music. Yet surely good music is what you as an individual relate to emotionally, rather than a list of so-called ‘must have’ songs that have been featured by Pitchfork or that have been agreed by committee as being the best. What’s good to you as an individual isn’t necessarily what’s good to someone else. It’s why in many respects teenagers are actually the best judges of music because many teens have a huge emotional connection to the pop music that fills their lives at that time, far greater than at any other point in their future. It’s why people often say that ‘music isn’t as good as when I was growing up,’ because for a lot of people once parenthood, work and the like take up much of your time, the opportunities for developing those big connections to music lessens.

It’s why I’m really grateful to my children for moaning if I wallow in the middle-class middle-aged smugness of 6 Music for too long (great station that it is). I secretly love the fact that we listen to Radio 1 an awful lot. Because it keeps my love of music fresh, enables me to challenge my own tastes and ideas about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and stops me ever becoming too snobbish and self righteous about pop music.

It’s why I’ve chosen to include Starry Eyed by Ellie Goulding as a choice in Music That Made Me. It’s not a ‘classic’, indie snobs will laugh at it being ‘pop music for 14 year old girls’, but it’s a song that simply makes me and my children happy. When I’m away from them and hear it, it makes me think of them. Simple pleasures and emotions like that that are as important to our make up as any sort of deep intellectual worthiness. They make us the people we are.