Very excited about Canadian band “Reverie Sound Revue”, not least of all because they are fronted by Lisa Lobsinger from Broken Social Scene. It looks like they are working on some new stuff and have put a video to a dreamy indie pop track called “An Anniversary Away”.
Lisa herself has quite the way with hairstyles, but her vocals coupled with the dreamy sound of the band really fuse into a lovely entity which can only make you smile. It all works together and you find yourself 2:30 in without realising it! Lisa’s creamy vocals have to be heard, she really has a dreamy voice.
After a short spell away from the limelight Longview seem to be kicking out some fresh anthemic indie rock from their studio in Manchester. The band sprung two surprise gigs on us as they get back into the swing of organising things.
Emma Scott of Kerrang radio brought Longview Long-view to the Actress and Bishop in Birmingham recently as they tried out some of the new material. They also played The Night And Day in the homelands of Manchester. Having followed the band for a long time I can safely say there is a mantra of if “it aint broke, don’t fix it” coming through and as such the band haven’t changed what they are doing or followed a tangent or felt the need to change as so many bands these days do, which is a very good thing, in fact as you may hear from the free track they have posted, things are even more anthemic than they were.
If you’ve never heard of the band before, Long-view are the kind of band who wouldn’t be out of place supporting Coldplay on a stadium tour, it’s anthemic music which is apparent in the massive hit “Further”. They launched themselves with a debut album titled Mercury and early on had produced a stunning video and DVD single release of “Can’t Explain”. A handful of singles were taken from that album and released and they toured heavily firstly in support slots and then in their own headlining gigs. You’ll find the band have added a hyphen in their name creating “Long-view” after a clash with a similar band name.
Found this gem of an artist lurking around on Overplay. Based in my home region of the West Midlands in England Caroline7, plays out acoustic melodic folk tunes which are booth soothing and haunting.
Likened to Eva Cassidy (perhaps a very young highschool easysreet Cassidy), she fingerpicks lightly and carries a lot of the work with her voice, a lot like Cassidy herself, haunting in some way. What you get with the track Childhood, is exactly the kind of track which wouldn’t be out pf place in an acoustic tent at a music festival, raw and melodic yet predictable. But then again there’s something safe about predictability.
Caroline has been featured on Classic Gold Digital Radio, BURN FM, BBC Radio WM and BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. She also played at Artsfest in Birmingham, which is a massive arts and performing arts festival in the second city of England. Anyone local to Birmingham will be able to catch this jewel in the midlands music scene at a number of venues in the coming days and months, including a local shopping centre in Wolverhampton, bostin! Be sure to check the gigs page if you happen to in this part of the world.
Oh my gosh I’ve been so out of touch with my own site. I had started the listening post as an MP3 blog to stream out some lush music which found its way to me by the interweb or otherwise, but it kinda never really got started.
Kicking off the return post then is a Sweedish singer songwriter, going under the name Hello Saferide aka Annika Norlin softly drifted across my last.fm player today. Almost like that time when that distinct Sunday roast fragrance manages to creep upstairs and draw you in. From reading her myspace page, it becomes clear that her stage name was inspired by an intelligent bus driver in a drug addicted neighborhood, glad that clears that one up then.
What you’ll find here are sharp lyrics and simple instrumental manipulation, telling a story sung by an edgy voice with a distinct Scandinavian accent which at times can fit awkwardly into an Americanisation, but this works to Annika’s advantage here and surprisingly adds something unique.
The track San Francisco, is a spring time tune, very upbeat with an electric athemic feeling. Backed by a full band and backing singers, it’s worth holding on right to the end for the backing vocals slam and baselines, cheesy yes, but very catchy. Valentines Day is one of those simple tracks with classical style finger picking and harmonies, quite soothing.
Well ok this is my first listening post, my MP3 blog, should I explain? There has been a new “micro format” emerge onto the web known as “mp3 blogging”. An mp3 blog is a list of links to legal mp3’s which unsigned bands have uploaded to gain exposure to an audience.
I’ll be running these listening posts, which will give you the chance to hear a lot more music from my site than is possible through the occassional podcast I produce. You can listen to each artist and track mentioned in these posts by using the flash music player below or you can run the feed of this listening post into your podcacthing software to have these tracks automatically delivered to you.