First impressions are hard aren’t they? I’d go so far as to say thunderously difficult, tricky to quantify, easy to overanalyse.
Not so for this band. They’ve written a song about a person making a shatteringly good first impression and have in turn done the exact same thing themselves with this, their debut single.
They are The Deep Blue, a trio of angelic voices comprising Georgia Gage, Niamh Feeney and Katie Emmanual.
Their home base of Manchester, with its occasionally claustrophobic cityscape, has done nothing to fence in the boundless, wandering feel of their music, as shown by the broad open spaces and flowering beauty of ‘Jealous Sea’.
We get soft fuzzy drums and heavenly harmonies right off the bat. The women’s voices becoming one unconquerable mass. It calls to mind the vocal-soaked stylings of HAIM and FLYTE.
As you may have gathered from the title, the track is about being green with envy. The spiralling self-doubt caused by seeing someone imminently more glorious than yourself. ‘She’s got the money / She’s got the pretty clothes / And they love her / Worship from head to toe / I’m sick of keeping my head above the jealous sea’.
In a way, it’s also a song about first impressions, of being floored, of being stripped of confidence. But it in of itself is so oozing with confidence that you might not even notice the delicate insecurity of its subject matter.
The song is mixed to emphasize the band’s greatest asset: their voices. And rightly so. There’s no doubt that we are dealing with three powerhouse vocalists here.
We get nice little guitar lines peaking in, and the rhythm section does the heavy lifting, but the voices are the star of the show. And they’re left largely unadorned, free of effects outside of a touch of reverb to expand the choruses.
Released by Liverpool label Snide Records, whom the band signed to in late 2020,
‘Jealous Sea’ is a fabulous opening gambit for The Deep Blue. You’re an idiot if you don’t like this.
Words by Jay Plent