Often I
discover music through association, for instance by looking at related videos when
browsing YouTube. Other times it's because artists I know collaborate with artists
I don't know yet. This last example was the case with SEKAI NO OWARI who I
discovered while doing research for my blog about Clean Bandit. SEKAI NO OWARI,
Japanese for 'End of the World', started out in 2010 as an indie-pop band. They
released several songs, most of which are decent sounding like Angel and Devil, but they're not really
my cup of tea.
Now try
to imagine combining an auto-tuned voice, marching music, a choir and classical
piano. Sounds interesting right? Well that's exactly what the group did in 2013
for their song RPG. It's a sound that
works well and the group continued to use it in songs like Snow Magic Fantasy and The Flame and Forrest Carnival. However the group didn't sit still and started
collaborations outside of Japan to diversify their sound. Dragon Night for instance was produced by Dutch DJ Nicky Romero,
while Mr.Heartache was produced by
Adam Young of Owl City. Nevertheless I like the band best when they do their
own crazy Japanese thing with instrument playing animals and folk-dancing
wolves in fairytale surroundings (look at Hey Ho and you'll understand what I mean).
SEKAI NO
OWARI has announced that they'll release a new album this year and I for one
can't wait until it's released. Meanwhile I'll keep listening to my favourite
song of theirs, ANTI-HERO, which
features one of the fastest piano-parts I've ever heard in a pop song.
Other favourites: Death Disco (gives an idea of their live-show)
Tokyo (collaboration with Owl City)
SOS (amazing piano melody)
Listen
to more songs on SEKAI NO OWARI's official YouTube channel
No comments:
Post a Comment