WATCH: Hella Better Dancer - Sleeptalking [Premiere]

*Originally published for The Line of Best Fit (9/12/13)

Lo-fi London quartet Hella Better Dancer present their magical new video for 'Sleeptalking', premièring today on Best Fit. 

Directed by Billy Boyd Cape, the video sees actors and bandmembers caught in a starry daze, dancing with eyes closed in a blue and red hue. It’s well-suited to the track’s dreamy harmonies, powerhouse rhythms and ricochet guitars, hypnotising you with it’s clever slow-mo camera twists and turns.

'Sleeptalking' is available as a free download here. The band play Roundhouse Rising on 23 February 2014

LISTEN: Hella Better Dancer - Sleeptalking

*Originally published for The Line of Best Fit (28/10/13)

Brighton/London four piece Hella Better Dancer have been making dreamy, lo-fi guitar pop in their bedrooms for a few years. 'Sleeptalking' sounds like a band ready to flock the nest.

Perhaps it’s the prickly guitar solo and half-shouted harmonies that’s allowed the band to take on a more immediate personality? Or the weighty reverb and shaded vocals? Maybe it’s the band’s adoption of Norwegian songstress Farao last year as drummer? There’s certainly a cathartic experience when listening to both Hella Better Dancer and Farao’s music, made all the more appropriate by them playing church gigs together.

Whatever the reason, 'Sleeptalking' is a sure-fire step in the right direction. It doesn’t shed the band’s hallmark spacious sound (check out 2012′s Living Room EP) nor is it a simple repetition of their previous efforts. We can’t wait to hear more.

The self-produced/recorded single is out available as a free download here. Beautiful Strange will release 'Sleeptalking' on limited 7″ vinyl on 11 November.

REVIEW: Hella Better Dancer - 'Living Room' EP

 

*Originally published for For Folk's Sake's 'New Bands Panel' (20/3/12)


It would be an understatement to say that Hella Better Dancer's new EP, Living Room, is quite good. As the title suggests, here lie four calm and unobtrusive gems, restful in the comfort of what appears to be a very lo-fi/bedsit recording. Each track is so completely charming, provoking and infectious that you simply have to stop what you are doing and listen.

Living Room constantly swells and grows, offering sparse nooks and tinny acoustics akin to Big Deal in opener, ‘Brother’, before moving to wistful harmonies, multi-layers and a Spanish-inflected vibrato guitar at its close (‘B2’).

Dusky vocals scream teenage lust on ‘After School’, with boxed hip-hop beats and an improvisational tremolo guitar. Though, like ‘Brother’, it is maddeningly short.

Stand-out track, ‘Last Song’, is oddly evocative of Parachutes-era Coldplay, with its tender, aquatic guitar chords. The looped melody, ‘daytime is too bright’, is contagious; spinning over crackling drums, hand-clapped rhythms and melancholic accordion notes.

These deeper textures are what will really get the band noticed, but it would also be a sorry affair if they were to negate their generally unassuming and fuzzy sound. Whatever lies ahead of them, Living Room is extraordinary and I hope that others will find it equally captivating.