Welcome To The Beautiful South - Introduction

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Over the next five days we will be showcasing a variety of acts that are based around the south coast of the UK. From Brighton based female fronted harmonic anti folk with soul, blissful summery grooves and unusual instrumentation hailing from the Isle Of Wight to traditional acoustic singer songwriter softness from Portsmouth. We will be interviewing these acts to find out what it means to be an artist in the south, discussing their music and quizzing them about their attitudes to their towns, recording, playing live and the music industry. And of course, what their favourite song by The Beautiful South is.....

Yes Giantess - No More Giantess

A tip for any potential new band out there; before you decide on a name make sure you Google it. Boston keyboard party dudes Giantess, one of Breaking More Waves Ones To Watch in 2009 could have well been advised to do that. It’s a bad pun we know but the number of entries relating to Giantess on the internet is huge. Even searching on ‘Giantess band’ can be confusing, with more than one band taking this name. In our wired up world it’s important for fans to be able to easily access a bands Myspace page, and it hasn’t been that easy to find Breaking More Waves current favourite funked up synth wizards.

It seems the band may have also realised this as they are about to rename themselves Yes Giantess. Now let’s get this straight, these guys may not have cropped up on many peoples radar yet, but since we named them in our Ones To Watch the influential Popjustice site picked up on them, and our favourite label of the year (hell to the fact that it’s only March) Neon Gold are due to be releasing their debut single soon. How good are Neon Gold? Well they put out Passion Pit as their debut release and Marina and the Diamonds as their second. These guys know their stuff.

Yes Giantess also have slots coming up at SXSW, and although not yet officially confirmed by the organisers on their website, the bands singer Jan Rosenfeld has told Breaking More Waves that they will be at The Great Escape in Brighton for their UK debut. See you down the front for that one.

For the moment however Yes Giantess remain resolutely underground, which is we understand partly by choice. When we talk of the underground it provides stereotypical images of a sound that is non populist, dark and left of centre. There is plenty of underground music in the rock genre, but pop music is not something you would associate with the term. Pop is by definition popular, colourful and usually mainstream. However what Yes Giantess do is underground by a slightly different definition. This is a band that can be termed underground as they play hip Boston dance parties, have only played a handful of gigs, are yet to come to mainstream recognition and have not yet released any material except via Myspace. What material it is though.

Yes Giantess crank up their keyboards to create instantly catchy happy melodies with big funky hooks designed to get in your pants and shake you until you groove. This is a band who are like Justin Timberlake with an 80’s record collection and a big hard on, and they have come to chat up your girlfriend. Boys you have been warned. To give you a flavour they have been compared with New Kids On The Block, MGMT and Chromeo but it’s all done with a slightly geek chic Boston dance party attitude. We’ve been lucky enough to hear some of their unreleased demos such as the ear grinding Demons which takes a big heavy industrial robotic beat and slashes thrusting warped sex synth across it. Then of course there is Tuff N Stuff and You Were Young, both currently on the bands Myspace. These tunes are guaranteed to make you woop and swing those hips with camp abandon.

Yes Giantess. Big banging keyboard brandishing boys it's OK for indie kids and pop fans to savour. They're gonna make you sweat.

The Great E Mail Challenge (Part 1) - The Conclusion & Email #4

The opening line of this blog was due to say something along the lines of “So, we failed again.” Except we didn’t.

After just 3 emails, we’re proud, but also a little gutted to announce that already the first part of our challenge is over. Before we had even got going with some of the comedy letters we had planned, the bloody NME have only gone and printed our email about bands being over exposed and not being allowed to make mistakes from two weeks ago as their Letter of the Week. They’ve edited it slightly for grammar (never the strong point here) and to reduce the word count slightly which we feel is acceptable. But what rankles is that they only went and got our name wrong. Who the hell is 'Gary' ? Idiots. And then they had the cheek to adjust our description of Robert Smith of The Cure as Fat Bob, to just Bob. We think they got scared that uncle Bob might send his goth lawyers round to burn down NME towers if they insulted his ‘Godlike Genius.’

We quite liked the response of Emily Mackay, this weeks letters editor to our little rant. It almost made us laugh. This is what she wrote.

“There’s no mystique anymore because of Twitter? Nonsense! You want to create a bit of enigmatic magic, just put up a Tweet that says “I’m doing something. You don’t know what it is, but it’s incredibly exciting and glamorous.” Instant stardust - EM. Just a shame you can't get my name right Emma, sorry Emily.

So before Breaking More Waves moves on to Part 2 of our email challenge, which will be revealed in a couple of weeks time, here is our final E Mail to the NME.

Dear NME

Thank you for publishing my email last week as ‘Letter of the week.’ What I don’t understand is how you can call yourselves journalists and then get basic facts wrong. You printed my name as Gary. Who the hell is that ? Idiots! I demand a full page apology and your weeks wages paid to a charity of my choice. Otherwise those pictures of you naked, laying in a pool of vomit after the NME Awards will be on their way to the internet.

Love Robin, Portsmouth

What disappoints us most about the end of this challenge is that we managed to get ‘Letter of the Week’ without even trying that hard. As we said a few weeks ago in our opening piece on this challenge, times have changed and the NME has undoubtedly dumbed down. This was just too easy. Our next challenge may be a little harder......

The Good Natured - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

The Good Natured is one Sarah McIntosh from Reading, Berkshire UK, and yes she is another young female singer songwriter with a keyboard and a slightly vintage fashion sense. But before you switch off thinking ‘Not another Kate Nash’, the fact is that she is that she’s pretty good.

The back story here is that Sarah found an old tatty keyboard at her arthritic nans house and thought she would put it to some use. The results may be lo-fi but they show a great dance pop sensibility that if it develops further could lead to a growing audience. With a voice somewhere between a slightly flatter more melancholic Rose Elinor Dougall and the aforementioned Nash with less stridulance, McIntosh brings stuttering electro with soft Casio overtones to songs such as Heart Of Stone. On this particular tune she mocks “I‘m not listening to what you say,” with wrath to someone who broke her heart. Then on How Can I Believe In You there are one hundred mile an hour baby drum and bass beats mixing it up with a home made church organ sound whilst Sarah sings sullenly over the top of it all. With a bigger crisper studio production these songs have a potential to reach out to those who enjoy this currently popular genre of music. Rock boys will hate it, but Breaking More Waves says yes please !