Irish artist Gemma Hayes sings "Shock to My System" from her indie album Let it Break.

http://youtu.be/1fXLAthxze8

Official website:

http://www.gemmahayes.com/music.htm

Leona Lewis - "Trouble" (live)

Her new single.

From Ohbliv titled Up:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/26/12/2612400441-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://huhwhatwhere.bandc...m/album/up

Interview: Goapele on Reception to Break of Dawn Album , Being Business Savvy, What’s Next

September 20102

We’re here at Central Park summer stage. It’s a celebration of the African National Congress, so how important was it for you to be a part of this?

I was really honored to be here today at summer stage especially because that it’s the 100th anniversary for the African National Congress. The ANC has been a subject that has had a presence in my life since I remember from knowing different people that were politically active in South Africa and fighting against the apartheid movement, so this was just an amazing honor to be here for the celebration part.

Your album “Break of Dawn” released last year. You tried some new things on the album, how has the reception been as you’ve been doing shows?

Goapele: My fans have been really supportive. They’ve followed me through these albums and I feel like my fans encouraged me to put new music out and really get “Break Of Down” out there.

You took 5-6 years between your last album and this album. What do you see as next for you?

Goapele: Yeah there was about 5-6 years in between the last two albums and I see my fourth album coming sooner and not as much space in between, but I’m also working on different things right now. I’m excited, “Sparkle” will be coming out in a couple of days and I would love to get more into films and songwriting.

Something I admire about you is that you’re business savvy. You have your own label and you’re very involved, so how important is it to be involved in that side of things?

I wouldn’t say I’m passionate about the music business, but I’m passionate about having creative freedom and feeling like my music really represents who I am and feeds me creatively just as much hopefully as it does my fans. So I end up being involved on the business side with our family label “Skyblaze” just so that the vision can stay fitting.

I’ll be doing some more shows coming up in the East and West coast. I really appreciate having the loyalty of my fans over the past years.

http://youknowigotsoul.com/?p=26277

Busdriver, an experimental underground hip-hop artist had a great new LP this year.

This is an instrumental group called Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, this is a recent song they had with bass legend Victor Wooten

New Talib Kweli & Z-Trip free mixtape, pretty good in my opinion:

[img:$uid]http://edge-img.datpiff.com/m861405c/Talib_Kweli_Attack_The_Block-front-large.jpg[/img:$uid]

[Edited 9/9/12 3:36am]

From Sean Wood titled Sudden Love:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/31/63/31630404-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://seanwood.bandcamp....udden-love

Blacktree artist Erica Paige stunning visual for her debut single, "Everything". Available now on iTunes.

http://www.reverbnation.com/ericapaige1

Sophomore album from indie pop star Clara C.

Featuring 10 new tracks:

1. ''You've Got It All''
2. ''Quesadilla''
3. ''Let Grow''
4. ''False Start''
5. ''Brighter Days''
6. ''Eventually''
7. ''By The Blue''
8. ''Wanting What I Need''
9. ''Fish'' (remastered)
10. ''These Are The Good Old Days''

From the band The Classic Crime titled Phoenix:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/30/05/3005950822-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://theclassiccrime.ba...um/phoenix

MickyDolenz said:

i love this album

From The Finer Points of Sadism titled Full of Hooks:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/16/01/1601680006-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://thefinerpointsofsa...l-of-hooks

From Lemolo titled The Kaleidoscope:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/22/34/2234077199-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://lemolomusic.bandca...leidoscope

The rather good new album, i even paid for it through pledgemusic.

Leona Lewis' new music video for "Trouble", the second single from her third album Glassheart, due October 15.

http://www.telly.com/BZQC...mtwitvid=1

New video: Frank Ocean w/ John Mayer - "Pyramids"

From the album channel ORANGE.

From Phil Rey titled The Mythomelodeicon:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/83/99/839962528-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://phreymusic.bandcam...melodeicon

Darren Jeffries on Freshly Squeezed interviews rising UK star Delilah.

Ex-Dirty Money singer Dawn Richard unveils Goldenheart cover art & tracklisting. The album arrives in stores on 10 Oct.

Track listing:

1. “In the Hearts (Intro)”
2. “Return of a Queen”
3. “Goliath”
4. “Gleaux”
5. “Northern Lights”
6. “Pretty Wicked Things (PWT)”
7. “Frequency”
8. “War-Faire”
9. “Tug of War”
10.” Ode to You”
11. “86”
12. “In Your Eyes”
13. “Break of Dawn”
14. “300”
15. “GoldenHeart”

From Broken Fences titled the same damn thing lol:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/40/45/4045208431-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://brokenfences.bandc...ken-fences

Erin McCarley

Free EP: http://noisetrade.com/erinmccarley

Elle Varner's new video for "I Don't Care" depicts interracial and same sex couples under immense pressure from various opposing forces. From the album Perfectly Imperfect.

From Bear Mountain titled XO:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/20/91/2091998511-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://mybearmountain.com/album/xo

(Pic: Aluna Francis of AlunaGeorge)

(Pic: Jessie Ware)

Britain Exports Its Soul

September 2012

The desperate center of Jessie Ware’s debut album, Devotion, is “Taking In Water,” a languorous and arresting tragedy about punishing oneself so that someone less worthy might live. Over gaseous, melancholy synths Ms. Ware unfurls her tale heavily.

I wish I was you, a piece of gold at the bottom of the blue/Too heavy to swim, but too beautiful to lose,” she yowls regretfully. At the chorus she’s all resigned exhale: “I’m taking in water for you, my love/Pulling you out, I’ll take the blue.”

“Your Drums, Your Love,” the latest single by the duo AlunaGeorge — like Ms. Ware, from London — takes the water theme even more literally. The opening synths recede like ebbing waves, and the vocal part of the hook has a bit of viscosity to it, over which the singer Aluna Francis sings, with surprising cheer, “I’ve been treading water for your love/Whether I sink or swim, it’s you I’m thinking of.”

Water cools, and water soothes, and water obscures. That forward-thinking British soul music is hitting an amniotic phase isn’t so surprising: after the club always comes the comedown.

Ms. Ware’s sensuous and stirring “Devotion” (PMR/Island), and the limited but impressive output of AlunaGeorge (which also includes the producer George Reid) repeat a familiar pattern in British soul music, which in its more mainstream forms has in recent years tended toward the retro-minded, like Amy Winehouse, and Adele.

But British soul countermovements have long been more experimentally inclined than their more popular British cousins and also their American counterparts, and this is where Ms. Ware and AlunaGeorge reside. They’re in the shadow of club life — Ms. Ware more so than AlunaGeorge — an approach that’s come to feel especially British, and one that doesn’t directly contest American R&B on its own terms.

Often the singer that the husky-voiced Ms. Ware brings to mind is Lisa Stansfield, the Briton who made dance-friendly R&B in the late 1980s and early ’90s that became internationally popular. “Running,” from Ms. Ware’s album, sounds modeled on the Stansfield sound, with its unsteady splashes of synths, its falsetto counterpoint vocals, and Ms. Ware’s singing, which is woozy but purposeful. “Your words alone/Could drive me to/a thousand tears,” she moans, not sad at all. The same goes for “Sweet Talk,” which is part rushed, past lush.

Ms. Ware got her start singing for restrained electronic music producers like SBTRKT, though early on she was trying to do too much. Quickly, though, she learned to ooze into the beat. On “Sanctuary,” from SBTRKT’s debut album, she’s basically just sighing.

Working in that realm also got her comfortable with propulsion, which is why “Devotion,” while no means a dance album, has the outline of club music on it, a trick similar to the one pulled off in recent years by the British singer Jamie Woon, who starved dubstep down to an unexpected folk core.

Ms. Ware’s high point is “Wildest Moments,” a stunner of feeling and warmth that, with its booming opening drums, verges on trip-hop. “You and I, blurred lines/We come together every time,” Ms. Ware sings. “No to Love” has a loping drumbeat reminiscent of Soul II Soul, early British hybridizers of R&B and dance music, and “Night Light,” maybe unintentionally, has echoes of the soft post-disco soul of George Benson’s “Give Me the Night.”

In the United States R&B has been hopelessly conjoined to hip-hop, suffocated at its center trying to serve a nonnative constituency. (That’s not counting R&B’s middle-age-aimed adult-contemporary wing, which mostly aims to remind listeners of the music they grew up on by polishing up its rough edges.) Generally the genre has come to live in hip-hop’s shadow; most singers choose to stand close to it in hopes of catching some refracted glare.

Club-aware electronic soul hasn’t been a factor here since the early-mid-’90s time of CeCe Peniston or Des’ree (who is, in fact, British), singers who mainstreamed the tradition of the house music diva. Nowadays this sort of club-aware electronic soul isn’t just a British phenomenon — listen to “Head Shake” by the Swedish producer Saturday, Monday with the yelping singer Julia Spada — but it’s notably un-American.

What AlunaGeorge does that Ms. Ware does not is accept the dictates of the dance floor. Its music moves directly, rather than luxuriating in the empty spaces left behind, like residue. Its music is brisker and chillier, and also at times exorbitantly strange.

Ms. Francis doesn’t have Ms. Ware’s softness of voice. Instead she’s thin and nasal and punchy. On the EP that immediately preceded “Your Drums, Your Love” she tightly embraced the club-pop of the early ’90s. “I’m not hard as a rock I’m just not easy to break/But don’t take it as an open invitation to try,” she cooed on “Just a Touch.”

Mr. Reid is doing the complex work here, creating tracks that reference New Jack Swing, 2-step garage, Timbaland and other innovative approaches to R&B. But they’re all a bit blurry, as if you’re listening to them underwater.

From Tom Milsom titled Alien Home:

[img:$uid]http://f0.bcbits.com/z/37/96/3796973126-1.jpg[/img:$uid]

http://tommilsom.bandcamp...alien-home