Since being asked to curate music side of things for NOISEfestival 2008, I've felt like a rabbit in the headlights, with so much to listen through and not enough time in the day. My overall impression was that there was nobody as good as me (I'm joking). Actually, I'm just amazed at the amount of people there are making music, and these top five picks are really just scratching the surface.
Alec Splatt
Alec Platt, who's changed his name to Alec Splatt, which is pretty funny, is from Chorley. His track Look Away is one of the oddest I've heard in a long while. He struck me as a young kid, a bedroom artist, like Beck, or a bit like I was at the start of my career – somebody dabbling with a four track. I related to it because that's the way my career began – just messing around with loads of different sounds with no real direction.
Rubakon
Here We Are Again didn't blow me away at first, but it resolved itself towards the end in a really good way. They're quite a straightforward, traditional-sounding band. Halfway through the song had nowhere to go, but they had this nice way of ending it with a cyclical kind of coda. It reminded me of the Oasis song Don't Look Back in Anger – it had that kind of feel to it.
Carwyn Ginsberg
Strike Me Down by Carwyn Ginsberg (AKA The Fennel Seeds) sounds like a song tailor-made for the radio. It's already good enough to be a hit – it reminded me a bit of Nirvana in places as well, but it sounded original which is always what you're looking for.
TheRoSsMaNnFrIsTeRPrOjEcT
Next up is TheRoSsMaNnFrIsTeRPrOjEcT, a band from Sheffield. TheRoSsMaNnFrIsTeRPrOjEcT is a bit of mouthful - it's taken from the sewing machine company Frister and Rossman. I met the band just last week and they were talking about how people kept saying they should change their name. Now that I've heard it a few times I think they should stick with it. I was impressed with a track they've got called See, which stood out because it had a real immediacy to it.
Jessie Rose
She's a young girl from Stockport. I must admit I'm a bit biased because my Dad's from Stockport and I've recorded there a lot, and that drew me to her. She's got a great voice and her pop songs are melodic and immediately catchy. Bless Beats, NOISEfestival.com's curator for urban music, picked her out too, so she seems to be doing something right. I think she's only quite young, too. I was nowhere near that level of songwriting when I was eighteen.
