Rapids!

Fragments by Rapids!

Rapids! – House Of Sand And Fog by HeistOrHit

And the single ‘Comets’ was made available for your listening pleasure yesterday ; )

Rapids! – Comets by HeistOrHit

Let us know on our Facebook page what you think! www.facebook.com/listentorapids

Listen to Comets below and let us know what you think… it’ll be the first single to be released from our upcoming EP!

Rapids! – Comets by HeistOrHit

Hello, welcome along and hope you enjoy the ride. We have a new EP that is finished finito, ready to go. Will announce more soon! Plus a festival slot to be announce next Tuesday (21st)…

It’s tour time! We’ve already played:

Thurs 21st Oct – NEW SLANG, Kingston
Sat 23rd Oct – 60 Million Postcards, Bournemouth

Which were well good.

This week we’re looking forward to:

Tues 26th Oct – The Deaf Institute, Manchester
FACEBOOK EVENT

Wed 27th Oct – Hoxton Square Bar & Grill, London
FACEBOOK EVENT

Thurs 28th Oct – King Tuts, Glasgow

Fri 29th Oct – Cafe Drummonds, Aberdeen
FACEBOOK EVENT

Come on down!!

We’re releasing our first single on Oct 25th.

The A Side is ‘Fuses’ and it’s being backed by ‘The Elitist’. The single is due to be released on 25th October 2011 but PRE ORDER here now and your order will be sent out approximately one-two weeks before it is in the shops.

Not only that each PRE ORDER will receive a special video of an acoustic version of Fuses and the first 50 PRE ORDERS WILL RECEIVE A sleeve will be signed by the band.

On top of that, the first 20 PRE ORDERS will receive hand written lyrics by vocalist Matt.

Now surely that one beautiful offer and well worth your hard earned pennies.

Strictly limited to 500 copies, the vinyl comes with a free MP3 download of the single.

PRE ORDER from our label’s shop here

How often do us bands rely on the whim of an editor or the diary commitments of a live reviewer. Our destinies interwoven with the very words that the reviewer chooses to write. We’ve been very lucky in having nice reviews from a few of the biguns… It’s a point of fact that as a band, we are judged not necessarily on our musical prowess, but rather the number of stars / A’s / Flys for a review. In fact, upon playing a show with (the brilliant) Errors earlier in the year, one of Steve from Errors first questions to me after mentioning Artrocker was, “…so how many Artrocker A’s did you get for your review?” “Erm”, I replied, “It was a live review and I don’t think you get a rating for that?!”
Anyhow, we thought we’d do a little review of the big three music mags…MY HOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED!

Artrocker

Always a good read. Used to be a lot more about the NEW BANDS than it is these days. I used to be really excited to open my copy of Artrocker Magazine to see what bands they had uncovered that month. Now it seems to be rehashing a lot of the buzz bands that the over publications are all mentioning too. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing and a lot of these bands are awesome. They like a bit of banter on da Twidder too. Reviews are very punctual and regular, with the highlight for me being the singles column every Monday. They also have regular live reviews for which we are very thankful! WELL DONE

NME 4/5

NME is the band that people love to hate. “Oh God you’re soooo NME!” But in fairness they been around along time and there’s good reason for this. The recent revamp/reskin of the magazine front cover and content has improved it no end. The magazine does tend to be tainted by the many commercial arm twistings they probably have to comply with but not to the detriment of the content. They can be transient, loving a band in one issue whilst chasing them down the road trying to hit them with that same issue the week after…but these are the perils of a fast moving industry.

However they are so good for the music scene in this country. NME tours, weekenders, nights, competitions, stages at festivals ALWAYS have some great acts. NME Radio has some awesome DJs playing some good tunes and NME TV can turn up some great new music (espesh Radar) when you least expect it. GOOD WORK

The Fly
plus a half for Twitter funs

If there was an award for ‘Best Use Of Twitter’ then it would go to The Fly. Niall keeps me amused throughout the day with his thinking out louds eg from today:

Saving The Day’ from Ghostbusters is such a tune. So is ‘I Believe It’s Magic’. Soundtracks were better in the 80s, FACT.”

The reviews section is pretty irregular when compared with NME with the last single review being a couple of weeks ago.
The actual magazine is free though. Which is brilliant. So many times have I been sat in a pub/club/venue etc and conversation has been pretty much non existent as we all just sit around the copy of The Fly that we happened to pick up.
I also really love the acoustic courtyard sessions they do too. Recent good ones = The Chapman Family and Everything Everything.

Honourable Mentions

Drowned In Sound – Awesome weekly singles column with Wendy Roby who uses her own language quite brilliantly.
Rocksound – Gave us a nice ol’ review a few months ago and puts together good tours / stages.Gigwise – Always seems to be first to tweet the latest news. and put us through to the last few of their ‘King Of The Mountain’ Snowbombing comp this year.

Erm so that’s end of review the reviewers. Turns out they’re all pretty good so we’ll have to save our vitriol…Next up “Major Labels…”

We just got signed. Which is amazing, it really is. Heist Or Hit Records have taken a punt on us and will be releasing our first single in September time. Awesome.

In these times of austerity and recession, a label investing in a band is a big deal. There isn’t a lot of money flying around any more in this industry and what small bit there is seems to get snapped up by the peripheral but now essential people. Ad agencies, Press agents, radio pluggers, booking agents, managers, promoters, distributors, venue owners, PRS, synch agents… The list goes on, but like I say, you need all of the above to get anywhere. I’m under no illusion that we are anything other than one band out of 20,000 others all thinking they are the NEXT BIG THING. But do we want to be the NEXT BIG THING? Not really. Well, ok it would be good, but all we really want to do is play our songs to as many people as possible and continue making music. Record labels help with this.

Why Heist?

Not wanting to sound like a chump but we did have interest from other muso industry folk prior to Heist but none of it felt right. Heist and in particular Mick at Heist has the best kind of ethos a label can have. They honestly just want to help us and the other artists on their roster (The Answering Machine, The Crookes, LoveLikeFire, Pomegranates be as successful as possible. They’re not in it for the money. Which a good job (see various articles on ze internetz about there being no money in music and even Lady Gaga only making 0.00000000000000003 pence on Spotify plays*.) *Massive exaggeration.

Cheers

So thank you Heist Or Hit for signing us, thank you everyone who bought our last EP so we didn’t loose too much money and thanks anyone who has given us advice or help.

Actually, in particular thanks to Kingsley of The Chapman Family who gave us a sound note of advice early on. I tried to follow to the letter what he told us…and here we are. Well, here we on the bottom rung of a very high, very slippery music industry ladder. You should all buy their album when it comes out. And read his blogs which are good.

Look out for our single in September!

We just got reviewed in Rocksound Magazine. Very kind words indeed considering our favourite bands are… TUBELORD AND FOALS!