Posts Tagged ‘ellen and the escapades’

Now you’ve been through our extensive Essential Listening 2012 series, which includes all our top choices from a past twelve months of albums, gigs and tracks, here some of our frankly super talented band of writers pick out their own favourite album of 2012, each making a convincing argument for the selected records in the process.

Looking for some free new music to tide you over this weekend? Well you’re in the right place with the Live4ever Ezine‘s New Tunes guide. We’ve sorted through our packed inbox over the last seven days to offer up the best in mp3s, Soundcloud links and YouTube videos for your viewing and listening pleasure.

Check out previous editions of the New Tunes Guide here.

Live4ever’s Essential Listening 2012 series begins today with ten of our own favourite debut releases of the year. Stay tuned over the coming weeks for essential music videos; EP, track and album highlights from the many bands which have featured in our Radar section during the course of the year; as well as the pick of the gigs Live4ever has witnessed over the past twelve months. And don’t miss our wider, main Albums rundown next month to see which, if any, debuts have also made it on to that list.

Is your favourite debut of 2012 missing from our Essentials retrospective? Remember, we’re recommending, not preaching, so make sure you highlight your pick of the year by leaving a comment below.

Summer 2012. We’ve just had the wettest June on record, the festival season has been fractured by a series of cancellations, and album sales have fallen in their millions.

And yet, for every music fan, there’ still reasons to be cheerful.

The Stone Roses have just completed – with no major hiccups – the fastest selling weekend of live music in UK history, Blur have deemed us worthy to sample the fruits of their studio labours, some faith in humanity was restored when The Voice had its live tour pulled and, most importantly, for seven months now artists both new and established have been releasing a steady stream of truly impressive albums, proving once again that, if you’re prepared to look hard enough, quality is still out there in abundance.

So, take a look through just some of those releases we’ve pulled together for our latest Essential Listening rundown, and maybe you’ll spot something which will soon occupy a prominent place in your own record collection for the remainder of the year. And when you’ve been through the list, why not do the same for us by leaving a comment below highlighting your own favourites of 2012…so far.

There’s a line of thinking that says you’re not really a fan of any band until you’ve heard them play live. That doesn’t say much for this generation of Beatles fans, but if you have any kind of love for folk or rock music, then one particular band’s madly beautiful fusion of the two is apt to start you down the path to dedicated fandom.

One breezy evening in Manchester, Ellen and the Escapades are assembling at one end of a back room of the Castle Hotel, all but nose to nose with their audience. A guy’s leaning his elbow on the keyboards at one side of the room; on the other, a girl sits against a radiator to avoid a clout from the bass guitar. ‘Intimate venue’ doesn’t quite cover it.

Some bands you don’t want to keep a secret. You don’t want them to play tiny clubs forever, shrouded in obscurity and ignored by all but a faithful few.

Ellen and the Escapades have made a record that cannot stay in the underground. It’s too big and too beautiful to simply live its life out as a password for hip-ness. The bulk of the material on ‘All The Crooked Scenes‘ has been around a good couple of years. In that time, precisely nobody has signed up the band. No matter. They started up their own label, Branch Out Records. From there they released an EP, ‘Of All The Times‘, and an Amazon Folk and Rock chart-topping single, ‘When The Tide Creeps In‘. Last October they started a Pledge campaign to pay for recording this album. Thanks to a devoted and rapidly increasing fanbase, they reached their target in a mere eight days.