Monday 18 August 2014

Lea Santee - New Waves


In the 6 and a bit years of Breaking More Waves life (the site is positively middle to old age by blog standards now) we’ve never featured an artist from Austria. In fact it’s a struggle to name any contemporary Austrian artist at all except of course for Falco (R.I.P). If you’ve never heard his album Falco 3, give it a listen and enjoy a bit of a bonkers musical education.

So today is a first as we introduce Vienna based electronic pop duo Lea Santee, who came to our attention by way of Hilly Dilly blog, although it seems others got there first.

Lea Santee is a project consisting of singer Lea Stöger and producer Manuel Hosp and they’ve been making electronic pop music together since 2013. There are a number of tunes on the band's Soundcloud and to a greater or lesser extent they’re all good ear-fodder. Dreams is a gentle rave-pop song in a similar vein to Emma Louise’s Jungle (remember that?), whilst Blue Eyes, an older number, is an orchestral-synth and piano ballad that sounds like if it was given a big budget studio and a real orchestra it really could be something.

The song that’s grabbed our attention the most however is Open Water. We like the way that Lea’s vocal, whilst strong enough, doesn’t sound like it’s been auto-tuned out of existence – it seems a little more live than some of the perfectly polished pop that comes our way these days. And of course there’s the nagging persistence of the tune with its three dimensional zooming in and out electronics and sampled vocal instrumentation that mark out Open Water as a very assured piece of pop. It's currently a free download from the Soundcloud player below.

Lea Santee - Open Water

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