Banoffee – Ninja
You might have seen this one crop up on Me And All My Friends, Who The Hell, Mess + Noise maybe, Indieshuffle, which is to say almost ever blog ever. Time now to have it covered by the uglier little brother though, the blog with a set of braces and a bad case of pigeon toes. It’s me guys! I’m here now! Are we all going to hang out? It’s no real surprise that it’s been covered so comprehensively because, to borrow the words of the Cottees marketing team, ‘we can tell a good Jam’. This particular blend comes equipped with a boxercise video for good measure too, so if you woke up this morning devastated that you’d missed your Thursday morning PT session then I’ve got you doubly covered. Structurally it presents a delightful progression that neither races ahead of itself or stagnates but slowly unfolds layer on layer of vocal padding before eventually extricating the main vocal melody from all around it in a strong final showing. Also, I think [at least in Australia] we’re a little gung ho with our R&B references. I know there’s a huge onslaught of future R&B and nu-soul coming to the fore but not everything is necessarily R&B. There’s hints of it at the beat end but all in all it’s a stretch, not to take anything away from the quality of the song. Beautiful vocals in the realm of Feist or Austra (or even Bree Tranter for that matter) but what I like about it over most else in its weight class is that it doesn’t give itself over to that light and easy whispiness that seems to be the curse of the female feature vocalist and now sees many lady-artists dropping their vocals low in the mix on THEIR OWN TRACKS. I’ve been lucky enough to hear another slice of Banoffee recently and it needs to be said that there’s a high place held in reserve for her next coming. Fingers crossed we don’t have to wait to long/
[...] Tom (not an actual thing, probably) and drops about a hundred extra of those pitch shifted Banoffee ‘oh’s (you heard it first) across the course of the new mix. The two are no stranger [...]