I love music, as I’m sure lots of people do. Because of this, I want to have a series of sorts where I’ll show off relatively unknown bands that I love and want others to love just as much.
My taste for music has changed a lot of the years. In middle school, I really loved punk rock, but now I’m into those really chill sounding alternative rock bands. I can’t even really explain it, as you can see, haha. So today, I want to put the spotlight onto Tahiti 80, a French band (that sings in English, of course) that happens to be one of my favorite bands, and Freelance Whales, a band I found out about recently.
Tahiti 80
As I’ve mentioned, they are French. To be specific, they come from Paris and Rouen and were formed in the mid-90’s. They have released 4 albums and 9 EP’s. Although they’re French, they prefer to sing in English… and they are popular in Japan. For whatever reason.
For these band spotlights, I would like to avoid going on and on about their background and instead focus on the music, since that’s what most people care about anyway. So Tahiti 80’s music. It’s very pop-rock, but I feel that because they’re foreign, there’s a different feel to it. They sing about standard stuff like love and heartbreak, but a lot of the lyrics seem really odd. This isn’t bad though. Things are said differently and in a different way, which I think makes their English songs distinctive from American or English bands.
This is one of their first songs. It’s a bit more pop-y than later songs, but it shows another thing I want to point out. Each of their songs manages to sound different. Even the vocals take on a different sound in each song. Overall, Tahiti 80 manages to sound different from other bands, and even from themselves, ha.
Freelance Whales
They are an indie band from New York. I know what you’re thinking, “There’s enough of those.” But I like these guys. They don’t try to be indie or hipster or anything, they just like collecting different instruments and using them to make songs.
Because of that, their songs are a mish mash of sounds that somehow come together to make a catchy song. And c’mon, they regularly use a banjo, how awesome is that? They can sound techno-y and then shift to sounding old time-y, in the same song. Freelance Whales does manage to be genuinely unique rather than being different for the sake of being different.
…Okay, that video was pretty indie.
But I still like their music. At the moment, however, they only have one album out. But it’s one good album.
not a princess, just an ogre 