Tuesday 20 April 2010

Bye Bye Blackbird - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

With summer finally around the corner in the UK, the scene that has been dubbed as chillwave begins to take on new meaning. Now idle childlike days on the beach, stoner campfires with friends, skinny dipping and falling in love take on a new fuzzy warm reality. Of course this is all cliché but sometimes its nice to dream that perfect moments do actually last forever.

Bye Bye Blackbird is the latest chillwave act to come across our radar, straight out of San Francisco. The audio obscurity of Bye Bye Blackbird is created by one Mikey S. His Myspace lists his music as sounding like dreams and voices, pots and pans, waves of sound and light, sun hitting your face amidst a cool breeze and coffee-induced scatterbrain comas. Bizarrely this actually seems to sum up his blend of synthy heaven perfectly.

What surprises us is that in a genre that seems to drift lazily along, like the comedown gentleness of ambient house, Bye Bye Blackbird songs are almost devilishly short. It feels almost wrong, like a camper van journey following the sunset that runs out of petrol on the first road. Nevertheless these short tracks are burbling and blissful, from the cover of Float On by Modest Mouse to Happy High, formed from warm eighties sounding synths, floaty distant vocals and dreamy twinkling percussion - a distant cousin of other Breaking More Waves chillwave favourites Active Child and Washed Out perhaps. Other tracks such as the quirky Heartbeat bring owl hoots, sampled noodlings and chunky beats whilst the slowed down piano groove of Ups and Downs has just a hint of Passion Pit about it. Grab them before winter comes and they fly away to warmer climes. Lovely.



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