The Reading, United Kingdom duo Vienna Ditto may be an under-the-radar act at the moment, but they’re unlikely to stay that way for long given the press they’ve been culling over the past few years. The quote merchants in the media have already begun buzzing about the band’s latest single, “Oh Josephine”: BBC Radio 1’s Huw Stephens calls it “Portishead doing a Tarantino soundtrack.”
Stephens’ description isn’t far off. With frontwoman Hatty Taylor’s alluring vocals and Nigel Firth’s melancholy and darkly romantic guitar chords, “Oh Josephine” becomes something like a would-be Bond theme, a kind of tune that brings to mind inky black silhouettes flowing in and out of an opening credits montage.
The band tells PopMatters about the tune, “‘Oh Josephine’ is the second single from our debut album and was the last we recorded; we’d pretty much burnt ourselves out from spending too long in the studio so we just howled this into a microphone as a form of therapy. I’d been reading the biography of Josephine Baker, the vaudevillian singer/dancer who was decorated for her work with the French Resistance and was offered Martin Luther King’s job after his assassination. But it could have been written by any boy for any girl, in the end.”
Circle is out on 4 May via Ubiquity Project Records.