How Bastille Won February

I’m not even going to pretend like this was close.

Yes, we know ScHoolboy Q dropped the second dopest album to come out of Compton since the turn of the decade (all bow to King Kendrick) and Kid Cudi, channeling his inner single lady, surprise dropped Satellite Flight earlier this month. But, if all you had was an album release in February, unless you actually are Beyonce, it would be near impossible to compare trajectories with Bastille. They officially murdered February, so we’re sending them a medal…via WordPress.

What a month for this rag tag band of red-coats. It couldn’t have been six months ago that we still had to type in “Bastille band” to google to get the alt group’s wiki to even show up. Your fight was valiant, Bastille Day, but even Google knows that the French seldom win when it comes to direct conflict. February has essentially been the cherry on top of the metaphoric jet fuel powered banana split that Bastilles has ridden during their meteoric rise to fame. The band truly peaked when an internet pseudo-study dubbed Bastille the great state of Nebraska’s most distinctive band…by not being the states most distinctive band. What does that even mean?!   If being the best at something without actually being the best at something isn’t “Making it” then we don’t know what is.

In terms of some things that actually are things, Bastille continued to annihilate February. They were nominated for four Brit Awards, winning Best Breakthrough Act. Their song “Pompeii,” a ridiculously morbid song about two people candidly discussing their imminent death by fiery ash courtesy of Mt. Vesuvius, busted into the top 10 of the UK top singles chart and has spent 3 weeks on top of the US alternative singles chart. All of this is, of course, secondary to the fact that Pompeii hit no.1 overall in both Ireland and Scotland.  Judging from their websites, those charts might be a night-school HTML class project created by an old Gaelic woman who listens to the radio through a hearing aid, but, whatever, it still counts.

So where to now for the british based bass bumping band of brothers? (I’m pretty proud of that one.) The band is currently touring the UK with Angela Haze, an American rapper who hails from Detroit. Together, they have been performing a new collaboration, Weapon, and it is just an absolute atom bomb of a song.

Haze’s viscous flow in the verses and Dan Smith’s silky vocals on chorus go together better than Forest and Jenny. Lay that thick slice of melodious Turkey breast over a sandwich bed of shred-tastic drum beats and thumpy bass and you begin talking about some really volatile stuff. Given Dan Smith’s history in electronic music and production chops, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bastille took their next album to Mars by way of Compton, adding some bassier beats and more hip-hop and rap styled lyrics.