Oh Wonder Case Study

Oh Wonder

Oh Wonder is a london based duo made up of Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West, they have released one album very recently and are a new group, increasingly gaining a larger following as time goes on and their outreach gets wider. They released their first self titled album 'Oh Wonder' on September 4th 2015 to Soundcloud.

Website and Social Media

They have a very individual modern image that successfully embodies their sound and the genre of music that they belong to. The band uses black, yellow, blue and pink on their website http://ohwondermusic.com to portray this individuality very successfully, it gives them a very slick music artist portrayal. This theme is continued throughout the bands music videos and cd cover to enforce this image.

The band's has numerous social media accounts, including: Soundcloud, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. These accounts have a combined following of over 305k showing their extremely quickly increasing popularity as their music and band gets bigger and bigger.

As shown above their themes are shown throughout all of their promotional tools and social media forms. Their only album recently released has the colours mentioned previously in a very random yet organised almost camo pattern, reflecting the possibly camouflaged meaning of their songs seeing as they are all quite soft and have emotional love connotations.

The typography on the album cover also adds to this with a sleek capital finish. It is very bold and stripped back, again relating to the music, the letters on a white background highlight this whilst also having again the same camouflage effect.

Reviews and Awards

The band being a very recent to the music scene have had various reviews on their album with mixed reception particularly shown in the guardians review below. The guardian writes "Oh Wonder’s breathy synthpop starts to collapse into mind-numbing, mid-tempo fluff about halfway through. Gucht and West make little use of their voices, choosing to harmonise in octaves that add to the album’s monotony"

Virgin media music however on the other hands gives the album a slightly better three stars, commenting on the fact that "Despite the band having never played a gig, each track has reached number one on the Hype Machine chart, and they claim to have notched up 35 million streams on Spotify and Soundcloud." 

The bands awards are as follows but again due to their increase of popularity through online social media music streaming they haven't been present within the music industry for long enough to obtain numerous awards.

Music Videos

It is evident throughout the couples music videos that the same soft RnB vibe runs through, within the colours and settings used Oh Wonder's image is clearly portrayed. On their OhWonderMusicVEVO YouTube channel they have three music videos for their songs; Livewire, Without You and Drive- our chosen music video song. The image of the band is clearly shown in all three videos. 

 Without You

 Drive

 Livewire

Oh Wonder's image is clearly shown within these screen shots of their videos, as seen above the band regularly use soft sunset settings and have similar effects added to their shots during the editing process. Everything in the videos highlights the different sides to love with the couple acting in Drive and Without You. The suburban New York setting of Without you fits with the western desert setting of Drive giving off the appearance that the couple are the 'American Dream'. Their music videos are also in most cases, either shot in extreme close up or extreme long shots. Being edited to have a slow effect makes the videos mirror the music well particularly when the artists sing it gives a floaty moody effect. Having the couple act in their music videos has also helped to strengthen their image as artists because their audience get a stronger view of them seeing them act to a storyline of their own songs.

Influences 

On the website clashmusic.com Oh Wonder gave many answers as to their influences and their reasons. Below I have screen shotted some of these responses. They go through each song and why it has inspired and influenced them to make the songs they produce and be the band they are today.