Sunday, 20 February 2011
53: Blameless, “Breathe (a Little Deeper)” (no.27, 1996)
At the risk of turning this list into the musical equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier… proof that one-hit wonders need not necessarily be novel, iconic, or extraordinary; that they could, simply, be a bloody good song about the joys of getting out of the house from a long-forgotten Sheffield band who split shortly after their only chart hit, and whose expectations for said track were so low they didn’t even make a video for it. In an age where acts are expected to embark upon tireless - and, indeed, often tiresome - self-promotion to sustain their recording career, we should applaud anyone who takes the noble art of self-effacement to such heights: in the end, and to their eternal credit, they weren’t so much Blameless as traceless.
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Weird fact that no-one except me will probably be bothered about: this was amongst the first dozen or so MP3s I ever downloaded or encoded, and I can't even be sure which of those two options it was... both of them were novel enough things that it had an 8.3 filename (BVLILDPR.MP3 or something) and the ID3 tag was VERY necessary...
ReplyDeleteIt was also something like 56kbit, and I never upgraded it, so this is the best quality I've heard it in for the better part of two decades. That its rough-as-sandpaper encoding never bothered me like it did some other tracks surely speaks to it being a quality tune.
Shame they never did anything else. They could have stomped all over the charts if they'd stuck together. Wonder if the band's separate members went on to any greater success elsewhere?
All information is useful information! (And, yes, a quality tune indeed.) The final comment here seems to have a few clues as to their whereabouts - we're clearly not the only ones who've been wondering...: https://sheffieldblog.com/2008/08/15/forgotten-sheffield-bands-blameless/
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