Wednesday 14 May 2008

Gladiators, are you ready?


I heard a great song on that Gideon Coe's 6 Music show last night: Down The Alleyway by Slow Down Tallahassee. "Cor, this is a bit good!" I thought, before scuttling off to find out more about the band via Google. So, here are some facts about Slow Down Tallahassee that I garnered from the web search, mostly courtesy of the BBC South Yorkshire Raw Talent site.

1. Despite the evidence to the contrary in the pic above, there are actually four members in the band: Claire on vocals, keyboards and guitar (I wonder if she's ever considered the merits of a keytar? Both practical and stylish!), Rachel - vocals and bass, Nicola - vocals and keyboard, and Rich - guitar and camera-dodging.

2. They've been together since 2004, and describe their sound as "Thunder and gasoline. An explosion of harmony and handclaps at times, sparse and elegant at others". Which is all well and good, but I can't help wonder why they plumped for the American term for car fuel. Thunder and petrol would have sounded so much better - or funnier, at least; they also sound like names that a couple of the new Gladiators might have - 'Thunder' and 'Petrol'. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah - band facts!

3. They list their influences as: The Shangri-Las, The Breeders and Leonard Cohen (or 'Lemon Cone', as Spike calls him).

4. Their debut album, The Beautiful Light, is being released on the 26th May, and to celebrate this they're rather generously giving away a free download-only single, comprising the uptempo yet lyrically downbeat title track plus the much slower, piano-driven Limbs. And blimey, here they are!

Slow Down Tallahassee - The Beautiful Light mp3 (right click)

Slow Down Tallahassee - Limbs mp3 (right click)

Slow Down Tallahassee's My Space page

1 comment:

Spike said...

Those are brilliant! Limbs is fast becoming my favourite song on my mp3 player at the moment.

I shall have to further investigate Slow Down Tallahassee. Cheers!