Music is: Waves on a shore | Featuring Seafret, The Winter Tradition, Path Unknown, The Blue Waves

27 November 2014 by heardaghost Leave a comment

My second themed review, Waves on a Shore, features Seafret, Tides and Telegrams by The Winter Tradition, Blink by Path Unknown, and The Blue Waves.

A little recklessly, I decided to tackle this series illustrating my ‘Music is’ strapline whilst tired through lack of sheep. This theme represents how music causes similar emotions – good and bad – to those I’m reminded of personally by coastland and waves crashing onto rocks on the shore.

Sticking to my blog’s emphasis on British unsigned and independent bands makes things trickier. Especially as I’m still sleep deprived, because my fence-leaping flock never made it back from Yorkshire. I did get a postcard, but they are movie stars now, and are busy drinking tea in Hutton-le-Hole with the North York Moors’ sheep and spending weekends living it up in Harrogate.

Seafret

Give Me Something – Seafret

This acoustic duo stumbled across each other late one night in the coastal mists of Bridlington like a couple of Marshmen rising from the swamp during Mistfall, and Seafret was born…

Actually, they met at an open mic, but that’s not nearly as mysterious.

Atmosphere abounds in Seafret’s very beautiful, chilled songs which have a stripped back, acoustic-led sound and soaring vocals.

They’ve just released their five-track debut EP Give Me Something, which made the BBCR1 Introducing playlist. The title track begins with acoustic guitar mimicking a warm rain shower on a sunny day. It’s a wonderful, simply produced song.

The others are more vibrant, such as Explosion, which grows with an emphatic, atmospheric crescendo, and Play with Guns, which is my favourite of the five. Its melancholiness draws you in whilst the melodic guitar and spiralling vocals pull at your emotions. It finishes leaving me wanting it to go somewhere just a bit further, it’s such a terrific track.

Here’s the music video for Give Me Something. Filmed at night, the budget only stretched to one light*, so the light became the star and they saved enough on the make-up budget to buy a Freddo Frog each. *not really

Give Me Something. The Oscar for best twirling in a video goes to Seafret

Tides and Telegrams by The Winter Tradition

The Winter Tradition

Tides and Telegrams – The Winter Tradition

The winter tradition have so many good songs I had to choose between two for this watery coastal theme. A ferociously cut-throat round of rock paper scissors ensued and Tides and Telegrams off their album Gradients triumphed.

The band are from Edinburgh and write excellent alternative indie-rock songs exuding tuneful noisiness veined with quietness. They are brilliant at cracking on with the music making so have songs galore to buy, (or stream if you are stingy).

The atmospheric intro of Tides and Telegrams sets things up nicely, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is a totally chilled song as it quickly hots up as is the way of things Winter Tradition. The electric guitar’s step up a little jarringly but quickly blend in again. Ewan’s vocals are particularly smooth and toneful on this track, a perfect track for lazy Sunday relaxation.

Try not to be alarmed when you watch this, as the band are quick to stress that no bottles were littered in the making of this video. Which is a shame, as I would’ve had a good chance of being the actual recipient of a message-in-a-bottle the next time I go to the beach, if all 976 of them had still been floating about out there. Bottle Post must surely be No 3* on BuzzFeed’s ‘33 delivery options that are more special than Royal Mail Special Delivery’.

*No 1 of course, is Bob the Pigeon from Yorkshire, No 2 is Owl

Tides and Telegrams. Poundland are now out of stock of very long extension sockets

Blink by Path Unknown

Path Unknown

Plutonium – Path Unknown

Path Unknown are an alternative rock band from Southport who are gearing up to launch their first album, Plutonium, in February/March 2015.

Their song Blink fits right into my theme, in a way that will become apparent when you listen. No trip to the coast is complete without a bet on how many ships there’ll be to see in the sea, right?!

Whilst checking out this song, in what I initially feared would be a too-much-information situation, I read that the writer’s inspiration came from a message-in-a-toilet, (like The Winter Tradition’s message-in-a-bottle above, except it didn’t make the BuzzFeed top 33).

‘Don’t wait for your ship to come in – swim out to meet it’, was the gist of it. This is fine as long as you have an aqualung handy. So the lyric seems to be about longing for your dreams to be reality at a cliff edge in life, being scared to jump in and reach for them in case of failure, but having to chance it to move forward and live.

Listening to the track, the opening bars are immediately compelling, but remind me a lot of another song I can’t quite put my finger on. Leaving that aside, I like this track a lot. It’s got great energy throughout, which is what I like in my music, and the vocal is a good’un. See what you think.

The Blue Waves

The Blue Waves are an unsigned indie rock/alternative band from Blackpool with a varied musical style, who got together in October 2013.

I haven’t been able to find out much else about this band, and I’m not even certain they are still together, as they seem historically to be fairly intermittent on social media.

I hope we’ll see more of them though, as the demos of their self-written songs on SoundCloud are sounding promising for such a young band.

I particularly like Running For Buses with its melodic guitar and very nice bluesy-tinged vocals; it’s definitely the stand-out track for me. Deep Lagoon is a bit more chilled with lots of fuzzy-sounding guitar and is also well worth checking out. Have a listen.