Blue On Blue (12")

Description

"A new London band who make pretty songs about summer love (which sounds awfully twee, but really isn't) set to a loved-up shoegaze soundtrack" - VICE

"Recommended. Blue On Blue stand out. A force easing their way into a music niche of their own" - i-D Magazine

"Blue on Blue are a stripped-down, garage take on shoegaze; the boy / girl guitarists could be Bobby Gillespie and Kim Deal…the point is: they could be tremendous." - Drowned In Sound

"Leading the shoecaze revival in London. Blue On Blue have a fan in the form of the Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess. A band who quite literally sound like the Cocteau Twins playing a summer's BBQ, alongside Veronica Falls, Blue on Blue are one the rarest things on the planet – a modern British shoegaze band who don't suck." - Spoonfed

"Blue on Blue is one of London's latest rising stars. Creating eerie, ethereal shoe-gaze, they are undeniably cool and ridiculously good. Truly mesmerizing" - Subba Culture

"A brilliant act…definitely a band to watch out for." - The Line of Best Fit

"A jubilant take on early 90s jangling pop crawling to the sound of 80s heartache…it's hypnotic giddy stuff. What will really keep you warm is Cinnamon Swirl - a beautifully simple guitar hook." - Loud & Quiet

"Epic shoegazing…beguiling free floating feel…I Feel Warm's becalmed Twin Peaks feel is interrupted bystaccato burst of shoegaze guitar (as if David Lynch were conducting proceedings)" - Artrocker

"Blue On Blue has the showgaze ooze mixed with New Order basslines, and singer/bassist Dee Sada coo's all over it all with Kim Gordon-like confidence" - Future Sounds

"London shoegaze act melding gently-throbbing guitars with trippy digitalisms to become a funkier, clearer version of the XX. Languid, blissful and fuzzily warm" - Some Of It Was True!

Blue On Blue's debut EP is released on alternative London label, Tip Top records this October. Dee Sada (vocals/bass/electronics) and Billy Steiger (vocals/guitar/electronics) have been working on an intense, claustrophobic and therapeutic set of songs discussing everything from love to heartache, mental breakdowns and insomnia.

"This EP sums up the last 18 months for us. Billy and I are the core of our music. We're the only people who understand and connect with each other and when we do, we sink to real depths of musical explorations. It's a real journey as well as a constant challenge. We challenge ourselves to express our music with only the most intrinsic emotions. It's a very primal approach to music but we believe you should only express yourself with conviction at all times."

The duo produced, engineered and recorded their EP themselves in their tailor-made Morgenrock Studios in Cable Street, east London. Using an array of custom-made instruments to create their own unique sound, the band are dedicated to pursuing the intricacies of sounds and music.

"Billy is a natural at not only playing instruments but also at taking them apart and building them into something truly original. The majority of his setup is either custom-built or modified, which adds complete precision when we hone in our sound," Sada says.

The first single from the EP, We Never Sleep is a claustrophobic dance track which is about "our relentless insomnia and rather bizarre sleeping patterns, which is a consequence of when you're in a band and do anti-social jobs to get by."

We Never Sleep is then followed by the heart-wrenching, I Feel Warm. Lyrically opaque and culminating with a swelling string section, it acts as a contrast, if not a relief to the preceding track. This is then followed by the instrumental number Thue-Morse, which attempts to put to music a fractal binary sequence. Steiger says; "this pattern has been in my head for as long as I can remember. I only found out what it was called a few months ago, but I've wanted to do something with it for a long time. It's an exorcism of a sort, if a totally abstract one".

The fourth EP track, Mad Girl Love Song was inspired by the Sylvia Plath poem, Mad Girl's Love Song. "My greatest passion besides music is confessional poetry," Sada says. "I find reading and writing poetry so therapeutic and my approach to lyric-writing is confessional too. I highly respect female poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and so naming the song, Mad Girl Love Song was my way of paying tribute to these women. The actual song itself is about falling for someone and feeling unsure about whether your feelings will ever be reciprocated and even if they are, what impending doom could stop your happiness. It's about the intense mixed emotions and uncertainty you feel in letting yourself go for the sake of love."

Letting yourself go is certainly what the last song of the EP, Paradise Syndrome feels like. A dark journey into loneliness, depression and feeling guilty about one's own shortcomings, it is a 6 minute noisescape which is both deeply intimate and aggressive in nature.