Digg it
del.icio.us
So far this year’s iTunes Festival has thrown up few surprises, most of the acts booked are reasonably well established and have have fairly loyal fan bases.The festival has certainly moved on to the next level and whilst I enjoyed last year’s ICA shows the event at Koko is certainly a much bigger and better coordinated affair. That said most of the support acts so far have been fairly well known so it was great to watch a new band who have been around for less than a year who have been tipped by many in the know as the next indie band to breakthrough band of the summer. 
Florence & The Machine who are from South London have been making waves in the Radar pages of the NME and have been tipped by Dev Hynes from Lightspeed Champion as ones to watch. Musically they or more rather Florence is really hard define. Many of her songs remind me of early Kate Bush however I can’t look at her and not see a resemblance to the American folk singer Stephanie Dosen, which is certainly not a bad thing. Her best known song ” Kiss with a Fist” has been receiving considerable airplay on the cooler shows on XFM. This song which is much harder and rockier than the rest of her set could be mistaken for Ida Maria however in my opinion is much more commercial than the rest of her work and a marked change from the rest of her set.
I guess the problem nowadays is that if a band has a decent press agent, which they do, that invariably it will not be long until they find themselves in the pages of the NME and the likes being tipped as the next big thing. The problem in my opinion occurs when this is so early in a band’s career that they have not already figured out which musical route they are going to explore. Any band who switch between a cover of a Cold War Kids song to a PJ Harvey/Ida Maria(ish) number is obviously interesting and well worth watching however is probably at least a year away from defining their musical direction.
Written by John Rahim