Cloud are bringing a new sound to the music world with mishmash of many influences as the Norwegian born band give a new slant of their very own to pop-rock. Their latest single Break Replace is a prime example of their style, cutting together early Foals, We Were Promised Jetpacks and many more influences you wouldn’t have ever thought of.
Cloud are originally from Norway and met in September 2011 at Trøndertun Folkehøgskole, the band consists of Oscar Vladau – Vocals, Daniel Abboud – Guitar/backing vocals, Eirik Hansen – Guiar/backing vocals, Thomas Bottolfsen – Bass/backing vocals and Viljar Losnegård on drums. The guys have sighted Radiohead, 22, Muse, Pink Floyd as influences also pop, jazz and mental music too. Cloud have now relocated to Liverpool to do BA degrees in Music. The guys started out as four friends on a music course, creating their own project which eventually became Cloud. Break Replace is the latest single from the band, released near to the end of ‘Cloud Week’, which saw Cloud celebrate their second birthday and upload oodles of brand new videos their Facebook.
The track starts out with crude sounding drums but then drops into a shinny indie guitar stomp including little thrills where you wouldn’t expect them to be. The second guitar brings Foals like flicks, as we’re dropped into the verse that Yannis himself would be proud of. Vladau’s vocals are a little strange for this track, not due to the fact that he isn’t singing in his mother tongue, it’s just the range he uses and where their placed in the sound is a bit odd. In the chorus he goes from gruff, change smoking rocker too Everything Everything’s Jonathon Higgs high falsetto in one single sentence, it’s very hard to get your head around for the first couple of listens.
The wispy breakdown half way through “Break Replace” shows off the bands harmonies and their soft, dreamier side. This builds into a mediocre outro of big symbol crashes and crooning from the rest of Cloud as Vladau belts out “it’s an effort, just to make it by”.
In the end Break Replace is uninteresting track by a band that has potential but are middle of the indie road at the moment. Vladua sums it up nicely, “it’s an effort, just to make it by”, this is defiantly no break out track from Cloud.
2.5/5
