Jaunt to the Theme Park

I really didn’t want to talk about music right after the post about French Films, for this is supposed to be a blog about many other things… But this guys I came across the other day are driving me insane and I thought it’d be a good idea to spill it all out and share it with you, for the Repeat button of my music player’s sake.

Do you remember the triplets in the Disney film Brave?
Well, one of them grew up.

Did you meet Theme Park before? No? Let me introduce them for you. Although it began as a quartet, now they are a three-piece band (with occasional companions) born in London a few years ago. Oscar Manthorpe and the Haughton brothers, Marcus and Miles are, in fact, school friends that fulfilled the classic adolescence dream and ended up working together. But, apart from when they started being a band, they’ve also been the talk of the town (the British Indie music town, that’s it) for a while, since in 2011 they supported Bombay Bicycle Club in one of their tours.

However, it’s in this very month when they’re going to release their first studio album. This long pregnancy will result in a self-named LP, consisting of eleven pop songs (“in a good way”, says Miles), with a catchy and happy vibe, relevant keys and electric strings sound and soul baritone voice, to cheer you up on a Friday evening. Well, I say that listening to the singles they released earlier on (such as Wax, Two Hours and Tonight), but until the 25^th of February there’s always the possibility of finding some more melancholic tunes. We’ll see.

Some music websites and Magazines have talked about them and shared reviews of their singles. Some of these some (cf. the Guardian or NME's articles) don’t lift the band to the Olympus of the music scene, mostly because they see Theme Park as poor successors of the 80’s band Talking Heads (or other 80's bands, such as China Crisis and the Simple Minds). I don’t know, but I agree more with those other ones (like indiefuzz.com and We all want someone to shout for) that label them as a promising music group that has something to say in its very own way.

When French Films are made in Finland

French Films aren’t French or filmmakers. They’re a Finish band formed in 2010, whose first album (Imaginary Future) was released in 2011, but, in my opinion, 2013 is going to be Their Year, with capital letters. They're one of the 2013European Border Breakers Awards winners (a recognition to those new European bands that are achieving more importance out of their countries) and they're about to shoot a new LP, White Orchid, in April (clic here to watch a making-of clip).

What do they do? Their music has been described as a mix of garage spirit, surf rock, post punk and new wave pop... Wow! And though it sounds like a very complex recipe, believe me, their songs are really easy to swallow and digest. It’s music full of energy and sun light, and lyrics about youth, about the will to live, about dreams, about growing up and how to cope with growing up. It’s that kind of sound that makes your day, that charges your batteries.

Now, if you Google them you won’t find any website, but they’ve got a quite active Facebook page and a pretty much abandoned MySpace (how cute is that!). And if you search a bit closer, avoiding all the 100-French-films-you-can’t-miss websites (or 10, or 50, whatever), you can see how some top level music magazines are starting to talk about them. This is their moment, they are here and they’ll stay. Get used to their name and give them a listen. What else can I say? Relax. Enjoy.

What is out there?

Everything! Out there is every single thing! We just need to look for them. But I know we don't always have enough time to do it: we wake up, go to work or to study, eat something, go to work again, have a little "siesta" if we're lucky... and at the end of the day we always visit almost the same websites, read the same newspapers or talk with the same people. And then we're tired and we just wanna jump (or be dropped) on the sofa, watch a bit of telly or go to bed straight away. Here you'll find things that you're going to like, things that are gonna amaze you, things worth listening to, watching, looking at, reading, knowing... Let's talk about what's going on out there, not just the important stuff, but rather the odd, interesting, new stuff that's not so easy to come across.  Keep your eyes wide open!