The Beat Surrender

Leeds as a City (and especially musically) is known for it’s vibrancy, the fact that it’s upbeat and looking to the future, it’s come from being a fairly run down place to being the fastest growing City in Europe, in the book Pies And Prejudice the Northern leftfield travel guide it’s described as “The Barcelona of the North”.

This of course all filters through into the musicv that is pouring out of the city, The Kaiser Chiefs and Pigeon Detectives specialise in pogo-pop, The Sunshine Underground and The Hair mix things up between indie and dance, Stateless fuse a modern twist of rock and electronic elements in their sound and you can add hundreds of other artists onto that list as well.

One type of music that we’ve never really specialised in though is bed sit romantiscism, music made by dreamers for dreamers, the type of stuff that Heavenly and Sarah Records used to turn out by the bucketload, it has a certain tweeness to it, but ultimately it has the romantic feel of a Parisian romance. One such band could well be about to put Leeds on the map in these musical circles.

The Rosie Taylor Project are a group who blend romantic imagery with soothing acoustics and delightful trumpet flourishes, they sing about lifes great pleasures and lifes way of knocking you, they sing of relationships with the tenderist emotions and they do all of this brilliantly.

This City Draws Maps is the result of all this, eight tracks that softly glide along and take you to distant places, tracks like A Good Cafe On George Street and Black And White Films that both feature some truly delightful melody, Anne Sexton with it’s female backing vocals and glockenspiel and the ravishingly simple Reveries that reminds you of early Belle And Sebastian.

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