The random witterings of Jonathan Morris, writer.

Sunday 7 June 2009

The Revelations


On the recommendation of top author Daniel Blythe, earlier this year I checked out this video by girl group The Revelations. I liked it enough to download the track, and the song they entered into last year’s Song for Europe, ‘It’s You’. They grew on me further, and I downloaded a couple more tracks from their album on iTunes... until eventually I’d downloaded the whole thing.

Can’t recommend it too highly. Lovely summery vibe. You may remember a while ago when the word was that the Pipettes would be the next big thing, until it turned out their album was ghastly. Well, The Revelations are doing a similar thing – 60’s flavoured pop – but their album actually delivers on their potential. It should have done really well – as the album hasn’t even had a CD release, I can only guess that it’s a damning indictment of the state of the music industry that more people haven’t heard of them.

But what really attracts me to the band, other than the obvious fact that they are all extremely attractive, is the quality of the songwriting. Each track is a potential hit, if not for them then for someone else, the melodies are robust and catchy, and each song has more hooks than is decent in this day and age. It’s also excellent jogging music.

It would be easy to dismiss what they’re doing as pastiche, as many of the tracks wouldn’t be out of place in a production of Grease, but it’s actually much more clever and modern that that. So I’m passing on the good news. Check out this video. If you like it, download the track. Give it a few listens, if you like it, download ‘Baby I Want You To Know’, ‘You’re The Loser’ and ‘I’m A Lover’...