News Cloud Boat

Mystery, it seems, is still the best way to whip up a bit of interest in your band. Of all the acts to use the age old technique, Cloud Boat are one of the most oblivious. Others might shroud themselves in mystique, playing games with A&R men who should really know better, but this duo have mainly been too busy getting on with actually being a band to dive into the murky world of online promotion.

Songs have only just popped up online following a steady stream of hype, and it has certainly been worth the wait. The problem is that for all of us stay-at-home music fans, they’ve already been regaled to anyone lucky enough to get a ticket to any number of James Blake shows over the past few months. From that, they’ve bypassed the internet, going straight to the heady heights of Gilles Peterson on Radio 1, which forms the basis of the scraps of tunes we’re being fed through YouTube.

It’s weird these days to have to deal with a band that doesn’t have a soundcloud, that doesn’t constantly update a twitter feed or have a steady stream of uploads through bandcamp that Cloud Boat almost feel like an anachronism – something at odds with their outrageously ‘now’ sound, feeding the post dubstep movement back on itself, ambient and textured. The bloggers and websites might’ve been bypassed, but this is already far above most of the rubbish you’d find hyped on the internet anyway.