Tag: Music

Bristol-based band SEASFIRE first made a splash early last year with their track Falling. They are back, this time with an EP release titled We Will Wake. The eponymous track We Will Wake has a quality that is at once eerily disturbing and soothing. Much of that quality is replicated across other tracks in the EP – Human Sacrifice and Undone in particular stood out for me – which all conjure the imagery of a fever dream. The band has said it’s not rushing to produce an album any time soon, which is good because they produced this tightly-focussed EP instead.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

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The first I heard of Mexico City-based band The Plastics Revolution was when they released their music video for single Invasión last year in December – which they claimed was the “first music video ever to be shot entirely using Instagram”. Well, not quite. This becomes apparent when you watch the music video, as in one scene the shots are underwater. Turns out it was shot on a DSLR as a series of 1905 still shots, imported onto an iPhone, edited using Instagram and then finally stitched together into a video.

I don’t buy the claim that this is the first ever music video to be formed from Instagram shots. This is a technique that has been used by at least three other artists that I know: Father Tiger’s Shell, Ellie Goulding’s Anything Could Happen, and (most prominently) The Vaccines’ Wetsuit. Each of these were produced by stitching together thousands of fan-contributed Instagram shots. It’s a trick that’s a win-win for everyone but one that’s sure to get dated once the novelty factor wears off: fans get a fuzzy warm feeling to get a shot at having their pictures incorporated into the work of an artist they like; video directors get to cheaply produce a music video that at first look is visually different from other music videos; and artists gain additional press buzz for attempting “something through social media”.

What works nicely for The Plastics Revolution music video though it was designed with the development process in mind. I expected the music video to be gimmicky…but it does actually look visually stunning. Using still photographs gives it the quality of a stop-motion animation film, with the characters in it appearing to move around jerkily like clay dolls. This ties in well the ‘story’ of the music video too as its about a guy dream about his lover, which complements the cutesy tones of the track. Sadly, the rest of their album – titled King Bono vs Los Flight Simulators – is nothing to write home about.

Information on who the Norwegian-based artist Cashmere Cat is scant: some sources that he is 24-year-old Magnus August Høiberg, while others claim it’s a woman. Whoever s/he is, the one thing we know for sure is that both the artist name and release name for Cashmere Cat’s Mirror Maru EP were generated by some description of random name generator that spits out a random spaghetti of words. (Well, okay, we don’t know that for sure but it can’t be far from the truth). What I do know is that this four-track EP is a genre-defying mash of orchestral symphonies, warped foley sounds, slow jams, bass notes, and electronica that has been catching a lot of attention in the electronic dance music scene. Incredibly upbeat and refreshing because the sounds feel so new.

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I discovered American alternative-rock band AWOLNATION a year ago, around the time when its single Sail became a massive commercial hit across the Atlantic (even going platinum), especially – for some bizarre reason – among extreme sports fans. Blame it on the fact that they are signed on with indie label Red Bull Records, or perhaps, as Sail‘s lyrics go “blame it on my ADD”. Since then, their first album Megalithic Symphony has grown on me.

To say that AWOLNATION’s is similar to the “new” Linkin Park would be a fair comparison, I think. (I realise that itself can be a very divisive statement to make as there’s a fair share of detractors to the direction Linkin Park has taken, but I happen to like them a LOT too.) The similarities are so close that Megalithic Symphony has non-music tracks Some Kind Of Creature and My Nightmare’s Dream that I found very much like The Radiance / Wisdom, Justice, And Love in Linkin Park’s A Thousand Suns album, apart from the alt-rock-with-nu-metal-esque vibe in general.

The life-force of this band is lead singer Aaron Bruno, who weaves through many different alt/indie rock styles in Megalithic Symphony. His personality does overshadow the band as a whole; in fact, AWOLNATION gets its name from Bruno’s nickname ‘AWOL’. (He also tries to crowd-surf during every single live performance, according to what he said when I saw them live in London this year.) While some may call that approach incoherent, I quite like how varied this album is: from Soul Wars to People to Burn It Down to Jump On My Shoulders to All I Need, AWOLNATION will remind you of what many 90s alternative rock bands stood for.

Rating: 10 / 10