Natalie McCool – America
We’re big fans of young Widnes guitarist and singer songwriter Natalie McCool, signed to Grammy Award winning producer Steve Levine‘s label Hubris Records. Writing gorgeous big pop ballads that reveal a mind and musical sensibility far beyond her years, inspired by our favourite TV show Game Of Thrones (listen for the references in Fortune, below) and having spent an afternoon brainstorming with Sir Paul McCartney on this very track she’s a sure fire hit in our opinion. So why no daytime radio play on Radio 2? Or Radio 1? Hollyoaks have featured her a few times and they KNOW their audience. Sigh. The radio peeps will catch up soon enough.
The Shh – All Things With Love
The Shh are Alison Galea & Ian Schranz of Maltese/ Parisian outfit Beangrowers. The Burning Love EP is a little something they quietly put out a few months ago and we revisited on the show on Sunday, where it was unanimously decided that such a strong indie offering deserved a big up on FOTN. Joyous but with slightly ominous overtones, it’s indie pop with a respectful nod to American surf rock and Alison’s beautiful vocal sets it leagues apart from it’s contemporaries. Someone get onto it, there’s an audience ready and waiting!
Ruth Barnes presents the Breakfast Show every weekday morning and The Other Woman on Amazing Radio on Sunday evenings. Fancy some airplay? Create a profile on Amazingtunes.com and upload your songs.
Nice picks again Ruth – hadn’t come aross The Shh before – loved the charming naive pop of “Summer” in particular.
Have also been aware of Natalie McCool for some time through my mate Steve Levine, though I’ve always been puzzled by her policy of only putting little one-minute snippets of her music online. You start out enjoying her track “Fortune” above, only for it to peter out after 80 seconds. We couldn’t for instance include just half of a song on our Listening Post – what would be the point?
In fact it’s also doubtful whether many other bloggers would bother embedding it – given that 95% of other artists (including many of the very biggest names) will happily let them play their entire new singles in full. Which is why if you type “Natalie McCool” into Hype Machine it comes back with the answer Couldn’t find anything! 🙁
At risk of boring everyone with my habitual rant about the importance of streaming audio, I do know that producers at Radio 1 and Radio 2 always look at how much blog action and how many online plays an artist has before deciding to support them with serious airplay.
Since we can watch the official video in full on YouTube – where any 14 year old could nick the audio in seconds – why on earth can’t we listen to it in full on her Soundcloud and Facebook pages?
Can anybody explain?
Hi Tom,
I take your point, I’ve made the ‘Fortune’ full track available on my Soundcloud account, enabling listeners to stream and embed the song. Here’s the link:
http://soundcloud.com/nataliemccool/fortune
More to come!
Natalie
Hey guys, I’ve embedded that track now Natalie – it’s a good move, get it out to the bloggers now with a great pic and a nice short snappy biog and you’re away! X
Hooray – nice one Natalie (& Steve!) If you ping it to us via https://freshonthe.net/submit I’ll pick it as one of my choices for the Listening Post this weekend…
Hi Tom – done!
Thanks,
Nat
The Shh’s “Summer” video is now on MTV Japan!
http://www.mtvjapan.com/artist/show/17026
Thanks to Ruth for all the great music. Tom, glad you like it too 🙂 We hope that both The Shh and Bark Bark Disco (both part of the So Lo-Fi collective) will play some UK gigs in the near future.