About BEM
This is the brand new official blog of Bad Elephant Music! You probably got here through one of our social media channels, but, just in case you stumbled across this page by accident and have no idea where you are, we're a UK-based independent music label. We were founded in 2013 and we've put out fifty releases and counting since then.
We strive not to tie ourselves to any particular style or genre of music - in fact, a lot of our artists are those who don't really fit into any particular box, and we're proud of it. Our motto is "independent sounds for independent souls", and we hope to give a voice to musicians whose work is truly different and unique. From the energetic, punk-inflected Under a Banner to the powerful yet precise instrumental rock of The Fierce & The Dead, the classic pop sounds of Valdez, and the spoken-word weirdness of Robert Ramsay, we offer something for everyone.
About The Trunk
Wot's all this, then?
The Trunk is a new venture for us: a place for long-form content that doesn't quite fit our other social media channels. There will be an update every Sunday, and you'll find links to each post on our Facebook and Twitter feeds and on the (also brand new) official Bad Elephant Music subreddit, so hopefully it'll be quite hard to miss!
What can you expect to find here? Well, pretty much anything we like! Important announcements - new signings, preorders, releases, and so on - will stay right where they are, and the Wednesday Track of the Week isn't going anywhere, but this will serve as a bit of a variety hour, offering glimpses of aspects of the label we often don't have time to discuss.
Here's just a sampling of what's on offer:
- Interviews with BEM artists and members of the team. If you’ve ever wondered what our artists really do all day when they’re not slaving away in the Music Pits cranking out more material for us, or how our esteemed CEO David Elliott first came up with the name Bad Elephant, this is the place to find out.
- Retrospectives on some of our earlier releases, for those who didn’t catch them the first time around. (If you feel like exploring, we recently cut the prices of some of our earlier albums in half - why not take a look?)
- Thematic playlists with commentary - collections of BEM tracks connected by a certain theme, style, or mood.
- Opinion pieces, talking points, and other editorial content directly from the team.
In addition to the main feature, you can expect a quick status update on what's going on at BEM this week, and a roundup of reviews, publicity, and other exciting things that are happening with our artists. And, if you're very lucky, you might find the occasional discount code lurking around here, too. Keep your eyes peeled...
Getting in touch
If you have fanmail, hatemail, questions, comments, or anything else you'd like us to see, feel free to speak your mind! As well as the comments, you can talk to us directly by emailing huw@badelephant.co.uk. We're planning on doing a semi-regular mailbag segment on here where we answer reader questions, so, if you give us something interesting to work with, it might just be featured on the blog!
Status Update
In the new releases department, My Tricksy Spirit and Whitewater both have albums ticking closer to release - My Tricksy Spirit's self-titled debut album comes out next Friday, and Whitewater's third album, Universal Medium, two weeks thereafter. Both are available to preorder right now, so grab 'em while they're hot.
With Universal Medium out for preorder yesterday, BEM has reached fifty total releases!
The shelf's getting quite crowded now!
We'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who's released something with us, and everyone who buys them and helps us and the artists keep going. Here's to another fifty!
Review Roundup
Robert Ramsay's Confound and Disturb has generally been met with confused praise from reviewers - James R. Turner at Progradar offers some apocalyptica that we think amounts to a positive review, Background Magazine's Alison Reijman gives it four stars "for the sheer lunacy of it all", and Polish publication MLWZ concludes that it's "definitely worth seeking out".
Nomad, by Sky Architect, has also garnered some positive attention: Tim Fleskes of It Djents gives it an impressive 9/10, describing it as "full of everything a prog snob could ask for". We also have a rare video review from Notes Reviews - it's pretty in-depth and we highly recommend giving it a watch!
That's about it for this week. Make sure you join us next time, when we'll be interviewing David Elliott, the Grand Elephant himself, about the past, present, and future of Bad Elephant Music!
