Today marks the first of November, so therefore the next major globally-celebrated festival is Christmas. If you work in a department store or anywhere else that has a CD player connected to a tannoy, expect to hear endless Christmas songs being belted in to your brain non-stop for the next two months.
Although Noddy Holder must love this time of year, chances are if you're not him you probably won't. But do not despair; we will not be showcasing tacky cash-in Christmas records that are released just in time for Christmas. Instead, we still aim to bring you unique-sounding artists that are sadly not getting the attention they are worthy of. Hopefully our mini-reviews will inspire someone out there to invest in some undiscovered musical talent. This week we focus our attention on the London based The Real Tuesday Weld.
Combining jazz/electronica and a splash of pop, The Real Tuesday Weld really have a different-sounding collection of songs. We do admit that when we were younger and less intelligent, our perception of jazz music was not too great. Loosely based on The Fast Show’s hilarious Jazz Club sketches, we assumed that most jazz-lovers sat in dimly-lit smoky clubs that were full of old men that had been outcast from all other areas of society. So how wrong were we on our viewpoint? Well, quite embarrassingly wrong, and we fear that members of the jazz fraternity will hunt us down and beat us with their saxophones.
While we've opened our ears to this genre, to us it seems that the scene still suffers from silly perceptions like the ones we had. So it comes as a great relief that some funky-sounding, head-tapping rhythms are being created in good old Blighty. Songs taken from The Real Tuesday Weld's The London Book of the Dead somehow seem to capture traditional jazz sounds and yet make it all very accessible to a modern-day audience. Stephen Coates who is The Real Tuesday Weld has not only done this successfully but is almost challenging newcomers to do one better then he already has.
Kix – the first song on his MySpace – could easily appear on a 2 Many DJs mix CD. With its catchy little background beat and charming lyrics, it could almost be used in some sort of post-war countryside epic drama or dropped into a set to follow up a monster house anthem. Even its lyrics have a charismatic edge about them. It’s like a child’s story has been adapted to music and made in to a song.
Last Words is available as a free download and sees a skittering gentle background beat slide gracefully under delicate guitar strokes that could at any time pop the bubble created through the bittersweet lyrics that seem so personal, yet could be shared by anyone paying enough attention to them.
The Real Tuesday Weld reminds us a former trawled artist, Duke Special. Lyrically we can see similarities between the two, but musically they couldn’t be further apart. A more adventurous sound is being experimented with here. From sampled vocals that have been cut up and distorted, to electronic stabs and guitar riffs, it can all be found in here somewhere.
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