If you’re a regular at Breaking More Waves (thank you!) you’ve probably seen us reference the Rules of Pop a number of times. Somewhere in an older edition of this hallowed tome there was a chapter (Chapter 15 to be precise) titled Selling Out. However, with the development of the internet, illegal downloading and streaming this chapter was slowly reduced in size, until in 2013 it was finally deleted completely. Why? Because it was finally deemed OK for artists to do anything that would earn them an income, even if it had nothing to do with music. More perfume ranges than days in the week for Katy Perry? Sure why not. A butter TV ad for a member of the Sex Pistols? No problem, that’s some more $ in the bank for Johnny Rotten.
The arguments of art vs commerce became less and less of an argument, because commerce won.
So it was with a certain sigh of inevitability this morning when we saw that one of our favourite new popstars, who we’ve been writing and tweeting about an awful lot this year, was announced as the singer on this year’s John Lewis Christmas TV advert, which as the Daily Mash has pointed out may well be about a perverted old man living on a crater on the moon who is given a telescope to spy on couples having sex or even worse, maybe he's just watching your kids.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise really, even although our money had been on an older band doing it this time round, someone like Texas. After all in the last few years, acts that we’ve written about in their early stages such as Tom Odell, Ellie Goulding and Gabrielle Aplin have all been chosen to record the Christmas advert cover. Whoever commissions the songs obviously has at least some similarity in taste to Breaking More Waves, which means that there’s still hope that Mura Masa or Aphex Twin might get to do it one day. Imagine that.
So is Aurora’s cover of Oasis any good? It’s pleasant. It’s ‘nice’ in the way that pretty much every John Lewis Christmas cover is. Aurora's vocal is lovely and the instrumentation is straightforward so as not to offend the masses, except perhaps some hardcore Oasis fans. It's all very tastefully done. Yet we prefer her own songs. But then it’s hardly likely that John Lewis would use a tune about mercy killing (Murder Song) or returning to nature (Running With The Wolves) to front their Christmas campaign, so Half The World Away it is then.
Of course the sentiment (and let’s face it, every John Lewis advert is over the top f*cking sentimental) is on the face of it very sweet. “Show someone they’re loved at Christmas.” Yes, being lonely at Christmas can be pretty horrible. But isn’t this advert just cashing in on making people feel guilty? Possibly even a bit sad? Of course it’s nice to be loved, but there’s 364 other days of the year as well and you don’t have to give someone a present to show them that. Breaking More Waves says show someone you love them far more than just at Christmas and in terms of music, wait till Aurora releases more of her own songs and feel the love for them then.
Aurora plays the Union Chapel in London on Tuesday 2nd February and will release her album next March.
The John Lewis Christmas Advert ( Aurora - Half The World Away)
It’s been an all time (s)low on Breaking More Waves this week. Somehow the new music that has passed our ears just hasn’t connected. There’s been lots of reasonably good stuff, but for some reason nothing has 100% captured our imagination. So we've taken a step back and at that point we remembered Ary, one of those artists that we had fully intended to write about some time ago and somehow just never put whatever the internet’s version of pen to paper is. So in this drought let’s fill up the musical reservoirs. Ary is a Norweigian singer with roots in Trinidad who has a sound that sits very comfortably alongside the likes of two other scandipop singers from the same country, namely Emilie Nicolas and Aurora. She has just two tracks on line, the first being Higher, which manages to capture some of the spirit and dance floor sensibilities of yet another Norwegian (Todd Terje) in its pulsing electro bass lines. The other, which we’re streaming below is the beautiful Telescope, a track Ary worked on with electronic artist Carl Louis. With its expansive spacey sound it manages to perfectly capture the scale and wonder of the night sky and the universe, developing from a glacial ambient soundscape to a pulsing piece of electropop that aims for and achieves the heavens. Ary plays Eurosonic Festival in Holland next January and by:Larm festival in Oslo in March. We can only hope and pray that someone in the UK is working to bring her over to our music loving shores as well (Great Escape organisers take note!). Carl Lewis - Telescope (featuring Ary)
Right from the off there’s something desolate and sad about George Cosby’s song Vacant Grace. “Please take your clothes and leave,” he begins, his lonely voice generating a stillness in the air, spectral guitars the backdrop for his tender bruised thoughts. Take a listen and you'll discover there's some seriously great downcast crooning going on here. With debut track Ritual Blush Cosby knocked our socks off, now here he stops the show. This isn’t music to necessarily enjoy, but to feel, and when it ends, to play again and again. Vacant Grace is taken from George’s debut EP which will be released on the 20th November. He plays a handful of shows in London in the next few days. George Cosby - Vacant Grace
