Saturday 21 January 2012

The Saturday Surf #27

The talk of the week has been copyright and piracy. First with the SOPA Blackout, followed by the news that Megaupload the planet's largest file sharing site has been shut down with its founder and others being charged with violating piracy laws.

Copyright of music has always been a difficult issue and at Breaking More Waves we’re very careful not to post any music that isn’t authorised by its owner. It’s why all of the Soundcloud embeds you’ll see on this blog are ‘official’ record label embeds, the bands own Soundcloud account or accounts owned by PR or management companies representing the bands. On occasion we will host a track ourselves but only where there has been consent from the band or representatives. It’s for this reason that in just over 3 and a half years of this blogs life we’ve only ever received one DMCA takedown notice and that was one which was served in error where a PR company had issued a track for us to host without getting full clearance from the US record label. That was one case where the phrase ‘not knowing their arse from their elbow’ seemed very relevant.

So here’s this week’s Saturday Surf. It consists of as usual a few legitimate streams that we didn’t have time to feature in our longer weekly posts and this week each of the artists has featured on Breaking More Waves a number of times before. No doubt the debate about copyright and ownership of music will continue for a long time yet.

Sleigh Bells – Comeback Kid

The visceral dirty riffing Born To Lose marked the return of Sleigh Bells at the end of last year, and this new single has already been all over the blogs. Comeback Kid is weirdly cute even if it’s full of what you’d expect from the band – namely demonic beats and trashy noisy guitars on the rampage. Not exactly that different from the first album for sure, but still a hell of a lot of fun.



Jess Mills – Gabriel

Covering Roy Davis Jr’s soulful house anthem Gabriel may seem like a foolish move – after all this is one of the songs that was credited with starting the whole UK garage scene, but Jess Mills is brave enough to do so and turns it into a sultry, sexy sounding jam. The track will feature on the Pixelated People single bundle which will be available to download on Jan 29.



Trust – Sulk

Our final track in this week’s surf is from a Canadian group that we posted a track from yesterday and then an hour or two after that a new song popped up on Soundcloud. Sulk is full of moody disco synths that take you back to an era when the cool kids with floppy fringes shuffled self-consciously on the dancefloor whilst staring at their shoes trying to pretend they weren’t cool at all. This track is synthetic melodic minimalism that holds a haughty euphoria in its pulses – fancy a dance ? 

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