Week 2: Richard Dawson

Posted by jill on January 31, 2015

Pretty much every week I receive an e-mail off the Upset the Rhythm mailing list. When I first moved to London, they were probably one of my favourite promoters. However, in the last couple of years their gig listings seem more and more full of bands whose names were picked from some random word generator. This seemed a pretty good place to start with my second post on music I’ve not heard before.

Their next gig is in a couple of week’s time by Richard Dawson, a singer from the North East.  His music is a sort of gritty folk, stripped as bare as possible. There’s an element of bluesy-ness in there too.  There is such a dynamic range, such as ‘journey’ in the song that about halfway in you forget that you are listening to just a man with a guitar. While I can imagine listening to this in a dark room with the wind howling outside, I’m not sure if I could survive a whole set of such emotional music.

A new band a week – 2015’s blog challenge

Posted by jill on January 24, 2015

No updates in 2014. To be honest, 2014 was a pretty dry year for new music discoveries, even looking through end of year lists I didn’t seem to miss out on very much. But  yet, there must still be some decent new music out there. In an attempt to restart my new music listening (and regular blogging) here’s the challenge for 2015: Each week, listen to 1 band I’ve never listened to before and blog about it. This was inspired by @kirmie‘s Track of the Day on twitter, where she’s tweeted about a song every day for well over three years now, and Tom Ewing’s daily album a week. Let’s see how long I last…

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Week 1: April Towers

Firstly, where do you start to find new bands? The age of the mp3 blogs seemed to have disappeared, it’s been so long since I’ve kept up with those all my reference points don’t seem to be updated anymore. So, starting with a random selection off the Drowned in Sound recommendations for 2015 instead (luckily they are still around).

The thing that caught my eye was all the references to 80s synthpop. And yes, that’s a pretty apt reference point, sounding like the Pet Shop Boys if only they were a bit more indie. At just over 3 mins, it seems to end pretty abruptly though.