Weekly > Features
Reasons To Be Cheerful Parts 1, 2, 3….36
It’s time to wipe away the doom and gloom of being back at work / school / university and start to look to the future with a bit of optimism, because looking at things we have plenty of musical reasons to be cheerful this year, we have in fact 36 for you!
If you are looking for debut albums from bands that could well provide the highlight of this year for you then you could do worse than look at the spikey duo Blood Red Shoes from Brighton, Foals are going to be mashing up indie dancefloors when their album drops and we have similar expectations on Holy Hail, The Whip, Hadouken! and the bonkers but brilliant Malakai.
While they might not be setting dancefloors alight we expect to see many people shuffling ryhthmically to Los Campesinos, These New Puritans, The Courteeners, Black Kids, Friendly Fires, My Sad Captains, The Brownies, The Bookhouse Boys and Ipso Factor. If you want things a little more blues or rock influenced then you could do a lot worse than look up Captain Black, Mexicolas and The Sugars.
Returning heroes are always welcome and this year should see The Rifles, The Subways, We Are Scientists and Sons And Daughters give us sophomore releases. If you want even bigger names than those the Oasis are back with a new album later this year, you never know it might even be good! Talking of bands from the mid 90’s, Portishead are also scheduled to release their third album and whisper it quietly but those Blur to play together again rumours still aren’t going away. Add to that the fact that Coldplay are currently mixing a new album and Radiohead are set to play a number of dates in 2008 then it really could be a big year for the big hitters.
Last year saw a lot of male singer-songwriters bursting through, although we have high hopes for Paul Steel to blow everyone away this year, we are instead going to turn our attention to a flurry of emerging singer songwriters to look out for this year.
Duffy (pictured) is a young Welsh girl with an amazing voice that could yet rival Amy Winehouse, Beth Rowley gave us the Violets EP at the back end of last year and should be delivering her debut album soon. Helen Boulding is a Sheffield girl who’s upped sticks to London, we aren’t going to hold that against her though because her album is out soon and we like what we’ve heard.
The biggest hype surrounding any lady this year though seems to be centered on Adele, a young woman with a big weight of expectation on her shoulders, from hearing her Chasing Pavements single though I don’t think she’ll struggle to justify the hype. The final two females with potentially key albums coming out are Zero 7 contributors Sia and Tina Dico who both release albums in the early part of this year.
If you are sick to death of nu-rave music being forced upon you and want to get back to some good old fashioned ‘straight up’ dance music then this year could be a good one for you. Plump DJs have been quiet on the new material front since Eargasm came out, they hit back with a brand new album this year and Clark will be adding to the already massive reputation of Warp Records if his album lives up to it’s promise.
Yeah I know what your thinking, sounds bloody good doesn’t it, hopefully you’ll keep checking back to read the reviews of the above mentioned artists throughout the year as we see just exactly how many of these artists let me down and make me look a bit of a numpty for telling you to watch out for them!
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