Lisa Crawley – Hey You
To be honest, record label people have never known what to look out for. The only thing that they know is that they’re completely lost and about to lose their jobs once somebody finds out.
Because of this, and because of the way that pop music tends to evolve, they just assume that the new big thing will be something eccentric, something completely different to what is going on in the charts right now.
They don’t know exactly what it is that they are looking for, so they assume that it must be something that utilizes modern technology, that sounds dissonant, and that would fly in the face of people who love old music. Well, most of the time, they are wrong.
In recent years, we’ve had a steady stream of retro singers who have enjoyed tremendous success. Just looking retro and using instrumentation popular back in the day isn’t enough. More than often, what is required is a warm, memorable voice that can sing on pitch in any situation.
Lisa Crawley could well be that singer. “Hey You” blends the warmth of singers like Duffy or Gabriella Cilmi. But short psychedelic elements are added to the production enough to make this interesting and to have it sound like a radio transmission from the 1950s. It will do Crawley just fine. What record people don’t realise is that many of the greatest things that pop music invented well over half a century ago still exist in a modern form and continue to be tracked down by audiences.
GeorgeAlley – Fake Sick!
The right kinds of books, the rights kind of songs and movies tend to reach the right kinds of people. It’s a kind of universal law of attraction when it comes to art. That’s why all those gloomy statistics about how people don’t read, buy records or go to the movies these days aren’t quite as alarm-inducing as the headlines might have you believe.
But you gotta play your part as well. It’s very likely that modern art that speaks directly to you is out there. Still, other Alt77 and a handful of well-wishers, nobody’s going to deliver it to you. The days of MTV shipping both Slayer and Britney Spears to your living room are gone. You have to do some digging and look out for the artists trying to connect with you!
It’s quite amazing, in some ways, that GeorgeAlley’s “Fake Sick!” is, for the most part, an indie release. It is written as a pop-rock anthem, complete with a Morrissey-like delivery and inspired, as Bowie was, by the writings of the genius, perverted French trouble-maker Jean Genet. That would just make for an interesting story were it not for the music that is quite pretty, palatable, and ready to be included on your playlists.
