Emma Louise - Freedom

Australian pop chanteuse Emma Louise has been biding her time before releasing her debut album Vs Head Vs Heart this spring. It was as long ago as January 2012 when we first featured her on the blog in one of our introducing ‘New Waves’ features with the song Jungle. New track Freedom takes a couple of steps forward without veering from the path, sounding like the bigger lived-a-little sister of Jungle. A smart and soft electronic production make the perfect backing for Emma Louise’s smooth melancholy vocal as she sings about drinking too much and smoking too fast. For one who sounds and looks so healthy you’d never have thought it would you?

Emma Louise has also been previewing some of the songs that you’ll hear on the forthcoming album over on her You Tube channel and judging by what she’s uploaded so far the record will be a must buy purchase if you’re a fan of much of the music we feature on Breaking More Waves. 

Emma Louise - Freedom

St Lucia - Before The Dive (Chvrches Remix)

Having finally seen Chvrches live last week we can confirm that their album is likely to contain 100% killer and no filler, so good are their unreleased songs. We’ll have a while to wait for that (hopefully) glorious moment though, as the long player won’t see the light of day until September. So whilst testing our patience, to tide us over, here’s a new remix of St Lucia’s Before The Dive. Vocal differences aside the Glaswegian threesome stamp their identity all over the song, taking away the smooth flows of the original (which you can hear here) and instead giving it a jerky, sexy, sampler stabbing punch.

In fact after about two and a half minutes of the song we’ve pretty much forgotten that this is St Lucia at all and that instead Chvrches have just sneaked one of their own songs out under a different name and taken us to plugged in heaven all over again. This makes us happy as Entonox.

St Lucia - Before The Dive (Chvrches Remix)

Josh Record - New Waves

As soon as a new artist begins to breakthrough and find public interest you can almost guarantee that the cynics will be lurking in the shadows ready to plunge their knives deep. Of course a certain degree of cynicism is healthy to keep things in perspective, but the difficulty for all those with this negative world view is that it’s nigh on impossible to keep the momentum going on just one target. Witness for example Lana Del Rey; an artist that found herself the subject of a heightened level of early career backlash before the internet assassins moved on to their next target leaving Lana to find a fan base who appreciated and cared for what she was doing.

For those looking to fire their bow of bitterness, Josh Record could be the next one to aim for. The reason?  No, not for wearing a silly hat (although the photo above suggests he's pretty gutted about that) but because he’s committed what some may see as the musical crime of getting an education. For attending the London School for Performing Arts and Technology (or Brit School as it is more commonly known) conflicts with dated views that the school just churns out manufactured artists. Yet ask many a musician from the past who had their fingers burnt by dodgy music business managers or accountants and you’ll find that they would have welcomed the opportunity to be educated about the industry they were entering in their time. Besides, not every artist out of Brit school is terrible by default. Adele and Amy Winehouse were both key alumna. OK it also gave us The Kooks, but as Ian Brown of The Stone Roses once said “it’s not where you’re from it’s where you’re at.”

So let's see where Josh Record is at. When he’s not running a young person’s music / film project in London or music workshops in schools and prisons he records his own songs, the results of which are demonstrated on his debut EP Bones. It shows off his considerable talents as a singer songwriter. We’re streaming the lead track from the EP For Your Love below. With a falsetto style not dissimilar to the likes of Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes, Record croons in a way that has the potential to make knees tremble, hearts melt and other body parts do things that they weren’t designed to do. 

Josh Record - For Your Love

Aquilo - New Waves

Today we introduce a band that come from the cold and wet North-West of England, but on their debut offering they purvey warm sonic soundscapes to chase the clouds away. Calling Me by Aquilo is a slow motion gentle wonder of restraint, yet it still manages to convey a sense of scale. It’s a difficult balance to achieve in these days of bedroom laptop production where (just because you can) the temptation to paint another layer onto the musical canvas to make it even bigger lurks in every corner. Thankfully Aquilo hold things back in the same way that James Blake or Mount Kimbie do, allowing the core of the song to shine through.

Having each originally fronted local guitar based bands (dig around a little on the internet and you’ll be able to find out which ones), Tom Higham and Ben Fletcher (pictured above) first got together in Summer 2012 with a mutual interest in production techniques to start to create their own brand of electronic pop. They were then followed by Fin Kay Lavelle and Lucas Button to complete the line-up as a four-piece.

If we’re talking musical Venn diagrams then we’d put Aquilo in the mellow set alongside The XX, Seasfire and London Grammar; for besides the late night silkiness that all these groups harness in their sound, they all use technology as a vehicle to deliver the melodies, harmonies and atmospheres  that are the key to a great song. Did we mention chill-wave ? Oh, go on then, let's throw that one in as well, as we could imagine this sitting neatly alongside that Washed Out album from a while back. Calling Me opens Aquilo’s account, more is to follow soon.

Aquilo - Calling Me