Vanbot
Exciting news everyone: there’s a new Swedish electro-pop diva on the scene! Vanbot is vocally similar to Robyn and Linda Sundblad but musically has a dancier sound, quite busy and 90s-esque. Looks-wise she’s very Swedish too, with Lykke Li and Robyn again being the obvious references in these photos. So far she’s released one rather excellent single, Make Me Break Me, but the album is only a couple of weeks away and you can already hear some very intriguing clips here. It’ll be interesting to see how she carves a niche for herself among the other Swedish electro-poppets, but unlike Fallulah (my Danish discovery from earlier this week), she’s already making music at the same level as her contemporaries so if she continues that way she will undoubtedly win a lot of fans.
Poptasticness: 90% Hit potential: 68%
War of Words
Despite the unfortunate floppery of Mini Viva, the British music industry still seem to be determined to launch a female pop duo. There’s been a lot of interest in Oh My!, the Shampoo-esque group who’ve been working with Example, and the next duo to appear on my girlband radar are War of Words. They’re the brainchild of the bloke from La Roux (yes, there’s a bloke in La Roux – his name is Ben Langmaid), which was exciting news to me as I always thought Bulletproof would make an excellent girlband single. There’s only one song online so far, but I’m extremely impressed – it goes to show what a difference it makes when you remove an unlikeable artist from the equation. Ben’s songwriting talent shines through now that Elly isn’t around to distract from it. Sadly I’m not convinced War of Words are going to be a huge success (they’ll need a serious transformation from the current photos if so) but I hope we will hear much more of Ben’s work with other artists soon.
Poptasticness: 92% Hit potential: 35%
I wish you could hear the whole War of Words song on their MySpace! It sounds REALLY promising from that clip and the idea of Ben from La Roux writing songs for other artists is an intriguing one since Elly's voice didn't work for me most of the time either.
Are you sure it's not the whole song? It's 3:51 mins!
Oh, weird–it would only play thirty seconds of it yesterday and had “sample” written next to it on my screen, but the whole thing is playing today. Maybe the Internet just didn't like me yesterday?
Hmm, how odd! Maybe they decided it was better to keep the whole song up and let people hear it.
Would have loved to hear the whole track, will buy the single