Old School Sounding British Chick Singers

I don't claim to be a trend setter. Like anybody else, I love discovering new things. Like things that may have been around for a while, but slipped under my radar. It's like someone my age discovering the Beatles for the first time, there's tons of their material out there just waiting to be consumed. Over the past couple of weeks I've made a discovery. Maybe the initial contact was longer ago than that, but recently it has been kicked up into another gear.

When I first heard Amy Winehouse I was very interested. It sounded like the sixties with a slightly new twist, the way she delayed her lyrics reminds me of modern rap artists, I've even heard Sing do it on Sacred Love. The instrumentation is classic. It sounds like something that was lost in a tape vault for 40 years. The drums are incredible.

I listened to an interview with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings on NPR and got that same feeling. They had that "old" sound too and Sharon Jones could really belt the vocals. It was in that interview that I learned that the Dap Kings were Winehouse's band on Back to Black... Makes sense. I bought one of their tracks and that was that until I saw the Duffy and Adelle appearances on Saturday Night Live.

I thought it was really odd that there were so many British White Chicks doing this style - I suppose that success breeds copycats. I'm not sure who started it and it's not that important to me. After the Adelle performance I created a Pandora Station seeded with the artists above to see what would It would throw at me.

Aside:
For those of you who don't know, you can create (for free) a station on Pandora that is suited to your tastest and desires. It will play songs based on your feed back (thumbs up or down) of the songs it has already played. It will give you reason it decided to play each song like "strong melody" or "synchopated rythm" or some other nonsense. You can skip up to 6 songs an hour. It takes a while for your station to truly take shape and if you are being really picky it will throw a lot of the same tunes at you again and again.

Right now I've got my "Addelle" station so it plays almost nothing but British solo female tracks... But that's what I'm onto right now.

Through this station I have discovered many artists that were totally new to me including several that fit the description of the old school R&B I described earlier. It's like finding lost treasure. Artists like Alice Smith, Feist, Regina Spektor, Madeline Peyroux that I would have almost definitely not come into contact with in the normal course of things are delivered straight to my phone. I was a big fan of Yahoo Launchcast for the same reasons. I can't remember how many artists I was introduced to by listening to Launchcast. These types of music services are really good tools for finding new music that you have overlooked for whatever reason.

I'm done writing now.