Ones To Watch: Foxes

Recent years have seen two trends take over pop music, and, consequently, the charts: electronic music and female vocals, oftentimes together. 2010 saw the UK introduce, among many others, obviously, two young faces that were great exponents of the cross between electronics and female vocals: Marina and the Diamonds and Ellie Goulding. Now, there’s a new bright young face to introduce: Foxes.

Foxes, born Louisa Rose Allen, is a 22-year old based in London, and, like the two artists mentioned before manages to balance passionate female vocals over electronic soundscapes. So far, she’s only got two songs to her name, “Youth” and “Home”, which share a physical release on a 7″ via Neon Gold Records, but it’s enough of an introduction to just how good she is, and how big she can be.

In it’s just over 4 minutes, “Youth” manages to display some of Foxes‘ many facets, all executed practically flawlessly. In fact, if someone were to play the first and last minute separately, they’d have a hard time guessing that it was the same song. What begins as a moody vocal over a deep bass synth line ends as a monstrous beat driven track with vocoded vocals that’s perfect for the dance floor. In between, though, there’s two more sides: a foreshadow of the end that is to come, and a relatively clean segment in which it’s just vocals and piano. Throughout the whole song Foxes demonstrates a good schooling in modern pop music (particularly in the pop-diva styles of Marina, Ellie and even Robyn), with powerful vocals and catchy melodies, both vocally and electronically that are pure earcandy.

From a purely sonic perspective (let me have my geek moment), the track is commendable for not having a key flaw in modern pop music: over-compression. Just by looking at the waveform (thanks Soundcloud!), it’s easy to see that the track has a relatively big dynamic range, something less and less common in modern music, but that let’s the builds have a much greater effect, and that allows the track to breathe. So props to her sound engineers for that.

The flip side to the 7″ is “Home”, which starts of with a hushed xylophone (I think) and seemingly effect-stripped vocals before being met with (you guessed it) a monstrous electronic beat. It’s easy to have done that in an distasteful way, but the track manages to not lose its sense of style or direction. The languid verses are contrasted with the much more frail chorus, in which the much more subtle electronics and drum rhythm serve as the medium for Foxes to let it be know that “[she's] not coming home”.

With just over 8 minutes of material to her name, Foxes has made a brave introduction into a rather saturated field. But by being so damn good at what she does, she bound to have more staying power. And though she’s still relatively unknown her songs have enough appeal for her to be huge in time.

Be sure to listen to ”Youth” and “Home” below, and if you want a copy of the 7″, cop it from the Neon Gold Shop before it’s gone.

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