Favourite Albums of 2017 #1 Lorde - Melodrama

And so there you have it. Lorde’s Melodrama is (by the thinnest of whiskers) my favourite album of the year.

Why? For one really simple reason. When I look back across 2017 it’s the record that has glued itself to me the most. It was undoubtedly the soundtrack to my summer, but in the cold of winter it’s still there. 

Melodrama is a pop record. There’s a school of thought, particularly amongst certain rock fans that all pop music is transient and disposable. But to adopt that view is blinkered; great pop can carry as much emotional and intellectual resonance as any record from so called ‘serious’ genres. And Melodrama carries its weight very well.

For anyone who has been living under a rock in 2017 Melodrama is Lorde’s second album, the follow up to her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, which was ninth on my end of year list.  It’s core themes are the highs and lows of relationships and using hedonism to block out the break-up lows. If that all sounds a bit ‘we kissed then split and I got drunk in da club’ boring then let’s remember that we’re talking about Lorde here and one of the things that makes her so special is her clear strength of character, intelligence and ability to pen fascinating turns of phrase. “Blow all my friendships to sit in hell with you, but we’re the greatest, they’ll hang us in the Louvre, down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre,” she sings in a line that is brilliantly reckless, self-aware and oddly positive on one of my favourite songs The Louvre. Oh, and from the some song: "I over think your punctuation use." I don't even know why I love this line so much, but maybe it's because my own punctuation is pretty appalling at times so what does that say about me?

As a listener and a fan, it’s inevitable that sometimes we have certain expectations of an artist. For example, if you’re a fan of The National you probably wouldn’t expect them to team up with Calvin Harris to produce an album of happy ravey house bangers ready for Ibiza and may well be disappointed if they did. My concern with Lorde after Pure Heroine was that essentially Pure Heroine had just 1 musical idea - a very strong idea – but only one. It was an album painted in the black and white of minimalist electronic pop. If she repeated that idea on album 2 the idea would soon get cold and as a listener I’d be putting on my coat and trudging off home. Melodrama needed more than just 1 USP for me and by gosh, it delivered on those expectations. It nearly went rainbow technicolour.  It had proper all out pop dance bangers like Green Light and Supercut, heartbreaking ballads like Liability: “They say you’re a little too much for me, you’re a liability….so they pull back, make other plans, I understand” but still carried the essence of the debut album on songs like Homemade Dynamite. Melodrama cast Lorde’s net wider and now gives her platform to go in many directions for album three. Even though this is an exceptional pop record it gives you the impression that there could be even better still to come.

Ultimately what has made Lorde’s Melodrama my album of the year is the same thing that has defined past favourites; great songs. Pure and simple. It hooked me in on first listen and hasn’t let go since. 

Lorde - Green Light

Lorde - Perfect Places (Video)

New Music: Lorde - Green Light (Video)

If you have even the most passing interest in pop music you’ll have probably heard Green Light, the new Lorde song, the first from her second (not bloody sophomore if you’re from the UK please) album. But just in case you haven’t or you want to compare your opinion with mine, which often these days is what reviews of well known artists songs are for, this post is especially for you.

First things first. It’s a banger. A big pop banger with proper house pianos that heads directly for the dancefloor. It’s surprisingly mainstream sounding, insofar as whilst Lorde’s first album was hugely popular, it had her own USP lyrically, musically and vocally. This, in theory, could be a song that a whole bunch of pop stars could have sung whereas the likes of Royals could only have been Lorde.

But here’s the important point. If Lorde had just come back with another version of Royals it would have started to get a bit boring. It would have been like hanging around lazily in her back yard all summer and then when autumn came around you were still there; it would still be fun, but not as fun as it was. And a bit colder. If you were still there by winter you’d be grabbing your coat and heading home. You might not be back again. Green Light however is Lorde saying ‘f*ck this, it’s boring, let’s do some shots and go out all night clubbing, right now.’ Which is good, because it takes the relationship in a different direction and keeps things interesting. If you ever want an example of an artist or band just staying in the backyard forever, listen to each Oasis album in order of release and see if you can make it to the end.

So it’s Lorde. But it’s not old Lorde. It’s new Lorde. Which is good Lorde. 

I reckon she'd be a lot of fun to go clubbing with.

Lorde - Green Light (Video)

Lorde vs Complex : Is Blog Positivity A Bad Thing?

This week there have been a number of articles written about Lorde’s recent Tumblr post. Lorde criticised Complex and music journalism in the wider sense, following the publication’s negative review of the Iggy Azalea album The New Classic, on the basis that the magazine has previously given favourable coverage to Azalea.

Lorde stated: “bugs me how publications like complex will profile interesting artists in order to sell copies/get clicks and then shit on their records? it happens to me all the time- pitchfork and that ilk being like “can we interview you?” after totally taking the piss out of me in a review. have a stance on an artist and stick to it. don’t act like you respect them then throw them under the bus.”

Of course no artist enjoys getting a bad review of something they are proud of, but as has been pointed out by Complex themselves and a number of other publications who feature criticism, publications put an artist on the cover of their magazine and interview them because they think the artist is someone their audience is interested in. Giving an artist a bad review is because the individual journalist thinks that someone that the publication’s audience is interested in didn’t make a very good record. It’s pretty simple and we’re not finding much favour with Lorde in this case, as much as we love her music.

We’re not going to repeat the arguments about music criticism at length here though, if you want further reading on this subject this piece over at The 405 (here) is pretty good.

Instead we want to ask a question from our perspective as a blog. It’s this: Is early blog-love / hype helping perpetuate a pop culture of wrapping young artists up in cotton wool too much, giving them a misguided self-perception of themselves and not preparing them for the reality of the world, which is that not everyone likes everything?

Fundamentally there are two types of blog - those that operate in a similar manner to other music publications, posting news, articles and reviews. Those reviews might be positive or they may be negative depending on the author’s opinion. But then there are many blogs like Breaking More Waves that just write about the music that the author(s) love. 

When we started Breaking More Waves we had a go at criticism. But as time passed we decided it wasn’t for us. The reason was Breaking More Waves is unfunded and we didn’t particularly want to spend our time writing negativity. We’re just like any regular music fan, albeit a fan who spends an absurd amount of time listening, thinking (and then writing) about music. We spend more time thinking about music than we do sex (despite what you might believe reading some of our ‘sexier’ posts).  We came to the conclusion fairly early on in the blog's history that we prefer to spend our spare time celebrating the stuff we adore and occasionally being a bit playful and entertaining with it and having conversations about music rather than offering negative opinion.

It’s a personal choice. Other blogs may do it differently, but the vast amount of new music blogs we read tend to do it this way, writing about the music they like, often single songs rather than albums. Criticism is sometimes implied when we don’t feature something (for example we’ve written a number of times about Banks and named her as one to watch for this year, but we haven’t and won’t be featuring her new single Goddess as we found it a little bit disappointing – not bad – just a bit average; it’s a 6.1 from us if we were Pitchfork, which we’re obviously not). However just because we don’t feature something doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t like it – we just don’t have enough time to feature everything of the 200+ submissions we now receive daily.

But as a positive ‘fan’ blog maybe we’re a small part of a problem - helping cultivate a generation of artists like Lorde who think that it’s wrong for a publication to have both positive and negative articles. When Lorde’s material was first released worldwide on line it was the blogs that picked up on her first. Royals was a massive track on the blogs – way before it went to worldwide radio. There was very little criticism at the early stages as most new music bloggers work in a similar way to Breaking More Waves. Then as more than just bloggers picked up on her, and her audience grew, she (and the likes of Iggy Azalea) would find themselves on covers of magazines and the subject of more articles, but at the same time they would be subject to more critical appraisal, much of it by journalists who amongst their roles are employed as critics. Some of those journalists will have a negative opinion, after all music criticism is subjective.

But if Lorde / Iggy Azalea etc have grown up artistically in a world where the likes of music blogs are constantly amplifying the praise, to suddenly get an apparent backlash on the release of an album must be hard to take. “But I thought these people loved me.” Maybe some of them do. But of course a review is just an individual journalist thinking that a particular record isn’t very good. Not a whole publications view. And besides, a publication is allowed to change its opinion as new information and context appears. For example, how do old fans of Gary Glitter or Lost Prophets feel about those acts now? It’s the same for journalists. One single may be great – the album may not be. 

But if as blogs we are building up artists egos too much through our praise should we stop doing it?

No of course not. 

With so much new music out there blog readers like to visit blogs to find new things to listen to that they may not have heard before - they want to hear about the good stuff – and that’s what a lot of blogs try to write about. But it’s important for those around young artists (family, friends, music industry people working for them) to give those artists a sense of realism, keep their feet on the ground and make them understand at an early point that not every person or every publication will like everything they do and to learn to accept that.

Oh, here's a Lorde remix that was released last week by Flume. Guess what, a lot of blogs loved it. So do we. There you are - that's our 'journalism'.

Lorde - Tennis Court (Flume Remix)

12 From '13 - Some Of The Best Songs Featured On Breaking More Waves This Year

We’re geting ready to say goodbye to 2013 as its sun begins to set. Before we do so, here are some 2013 blog related facts then some music:

1. This year we’ve uploaded close to 400 blog posts. 

2. 400 posts is quite a lot of words (the equivalent of a novel) and a lot of music (the equivalent of about 40 albums worth). 

3. If you had read and listened to everything we've posted in 2013, at a guess, it would have taken you about 45 hours of your life - the equivalent of a working week. 

4. Its difficult to quantify, but we reckon we've spent the equivalent of between 7 and 8 working weeks on Breaking More Waves this year (if you include listening to music that we may / may not include on the blog and other blog related activities such as emailing artists / labels and their representatives, a bit of social media stuff, but excluding gigs and festivals). Yet despite being quite time heavy, having to balance it against the day job, family etc, at no stage has it ever felt like work in terms of the pressures and responsibilities that our real day job places upon us. We've enjoyed everything that comes from writing Breaking More Waves, probably more so this year than any year before. 

5. We've seen a fair few well known blogs give up in 2013 due to the usual reasons of lack of motivation (see this post on Chromewaves for one example) or some that were on hiatus then vanished with no real public explanation (what did happen to The Recommender?). Then there were others that moved on to do other exciting things; our favourite girl on the block / in a field / up a mountain Flying With Anna closed down to open a new chapter (and blog) in her life as she set off on her travels. And so after 5 and a half years of Breaking More Waves is also stopping. Till tomorrow that is. We need a break. But 24 hours should be enough. See you at 8.30am on New Years Day?

And that's it. We’re closing our year by featuring 12 of our favourite (and therefore 'best') songs we've featured from 2013, each one in video form. For once, we 're providing no commentary on the individual tracks, we think we've said all we want to say for one year.

This isn’t a definitive list as we’ve chosen 1 song from each month’s worth of posts, meaning that on really good months a number of great songs have had to be sacrificed and some songs that we adore haven’t made the cut as they never had a video.

If you missed any of these gems we highly recommend you press play. The artists who have created these beauties deserve at least that.

We wish you a very happy New Year. We’ll be back tomorrow in 2014.

Twelve from thirteen = the ones.

Thank you for reading. 

January 

Indiana - Bound



February

Public Service Broadcasting - Signal 30



March

Lorde - Royals



April

Lana Del Rey - Young And Beautiful



May

John Newman - Love Me Again



June

Chvrches - Gun



July

London Grammar - Strong



August

Flyte - Over and Out



September

FKA Twigs - Papi Pacify



October

Mononoke - Alice



November

Wolf Alice - Blush



December

Laura Doggett - Sometimes

Albums of the Year 2013 #9 - Lorde - Pure Heroine

2013 has been a good year for pop. Not the bland lowest common denominator pop that the likes of Will.i.am, Olly Murs and their like continue to peddle out, but pop that has a sense of substance, lyrical interest and a hint of thought beyond how to get a-list radio plays and subsequent chart to bargain bin sales.

No one artist has typified good pop more than Lorde. Royals, a song that shrugs off the aspirations of much of modern pop culture (“gold teeth, Grey Goose, tripping in the bathroom” or "Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timpiece, jet planes, islands, tiger's on a gold leash, we don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair") went from free download / blog buzz hype track to worldwide chart topper over the course of about 11 months and has given its young protagonist Ella Yelich-O’Connor the opportunity to experience exactly the things she sang about if she wanted. But Ella appears to be cut from a different cloth. Her album Pure Heroine fights against the standard pop formula of glamour and romance; in a cooly detached voice she sings of being “kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air,” and “it’s a new art form, showing people how little we care.” It’s the type of album that only a bored 16 year old teenager living many miles from New York or London could make.

Despite its disenchanted lyrical approach, musically Pure Heroine is bang on the money. Sticking to a template of near minimalism, this record is all about subtle beats, effects and electronic simplicity with nods to both hip-hop and modern R ‘n’ B. Pure Heroine isn’t packed with variety – there’s one great idea carried through coloured in different shades – but that’s the point; it’s a great idea. 

In a year when the best pop has matched other genres not only in its traditional battleground of the singles chart but with quality albums that deserve to be taken seriously, Lorde’s Pure Heroine has been part of that charge. 

Lorde - Royals (Video)

Lorde - Team (Video)

Lorde’s Royals is undoubtedly one of the songs of 2013 (although perhaps Lorde herself doesn't think so, naming her favourite tracks of the year here, which include Daft Punk's Get Lucky and Jungle's Drops (good choices) ) Only time will tell what Royals longer term position in the halls of pop history will be and if Lorde herself will be just a shared memory of times past or some sort of artistic pop royalty adored by her loyal subjects forever.

For now though we have Team, the video for which gave a large number of fans (including us) all sorts of problems in playing yesterday when it was first uploaded. “I want to see it so badly!!! I've waited like, an eternity of ten minutes!!!” one comment stated on You Tube last night, which probably said everything there is to say about today’s iGeneration speed culture that the internet has created. Did Lorde kill the internet for a while perhaps? 

The video itself is a bit odd, what with what appears to be a man with a sack on his head being taken to a jousting competition with motorbikes instead of horses and Lorde singing amongst a bunch of tropical plants. For those looking for meaning, here’s what Lorde says:

“This video was born from a dream I had a few months ago about teenagers in their own world, a world with hierarchies and initiations, where the boy who was second in command had acne on his face, and so did the girl who was queen. I dreamt about this world being so different to anything anyone had ever seen, a dark world full of tropical plants and ruins and sweat. And of this world, I dreamt about tests that didn't need to be passed in order to be allowed in: sometimes the person who loses is stronger.” Wow - when we were Lorde’s age we were dreaming about sexy times with Louise, Penny or Nicola. It probably explains why we're not an international pop star right now.

As for the song, besides Royals (and Buzzcut Season)  Team is one of our favourites from Pure Heroine; the beats and the minimal synth snatches are just right and the moment when Lorde sings that she’s ‘kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air’, is just so petulantly cool it’s brilliant.

Lorde - Team (Video)

Lorde - Team

Many conservative rock fans sneer at pop music because they think it’s only for teenagers and they have a low view of the taste of teenagers. Yet to dismiss pop music is like dismissing life itself; because the best pop music can be just as important, just as innovative, just as f*cking brilliant as any other genre of music. Of course there’s good pop and there’s bad pop and what is good and what is bad is always going to be a matter of opinion, but that differentiation should never be based upon the age of the listener or the performer. ABC by The Jackson 5 is a great pop song yet Michael Jackson was just 11 years old when he sang it. The Beatles had thousands of screaming teenage fans.

Which brings us neatly to New Zealand’s Lorde. She may only be 16, but even if she was 66 it wouldn’t matter, because she’s doing perfect pop. It’s the sort of pop that irrespective of if you’re 14 or 44 you should open your ears to. We find it difficult to understand how anyone couldn’t like these swaggering synths, beats and casual hooks.Thank god for pop music.

Lorde - Team (Audio Stream)

Lorde - Tennis Court

Cast your mind back to the video of one of the best pop songs of 2013; Royals by New Zealand’s Lorde. It ended with a tennis court and a piece of music that seemed to signal the start of another song.

Well that song has now been released to the world and it’s called Tennis Court. See what she did there?

If, like us, you appreciated, liked, absolutely bloody loved Royals, possibly more than your own boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife / children, then the chances are you’ll feel the same about Tennis Court. To a certain extent Tennis Court sounds like the sister song to Royals with the same style of vocal delivery, unsmothered production and honest, wide-eyed innocent lyrics. “Pretty soon I’ll be on my first plane. I’ll see the veins of my city, like they do in space,” is the line that grabs us, just because it displays how new to the big wide world Lorde still is as she marks out her place as one of those pop stars that makes us want to be a teenager again.

On repeat. On repeat. On repeat. On repeat. On repeat. Lorde is currently making 95% of other new pop music redundant.

(Also check out her new sparse and beautiful treatment of The Replacements Swingin’ Party here)

Lorde - Tennis Court

Lorde - Royals (Video)

Look. Let’s get this straight. If you’re searching for one of the best pop songs of 2013 so far, then this blog post features it. It’s Royals by New Zealand songstress Lorde.

Of course we’ve already featured the song in a New Waves post a few months back and it's been all over the blogosphere, but now there’s a video. So as it’s one of the best songs of 2013 it would be a crime not to feature the film as well.

Yet it seems that quite a few people don’t know what to make of the video because

1. Lorde doesn’t appear very much in it.

2. There’s no sultry dance routine. 

3. Not a lot happens.

There seems to be quite a lot of discussion on the You Tube comments about this. It seems that whilst the song is musically restrained and deals with concepts of living a normal life (“I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”) when it comes to a visual treatment some people find this difficult to deal with. We think this is because ultimately pop for many people is an art form of visual fantasy. It's why the likes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga become our idols; because people want to escape their hum drum, very routine, very beige lives and the colour and unreality of pop music offers an outlet to do this. 

However thankfully someone seems to ‘get it’ with Royals in the You Tube comments. This is what they say:

"(...) a lot of people think teenagers live in this world like ‘skins’ every weekend or whatever, but truth is, half the time we aren’t doing anything cooler than playing with lighters, or waiting at some shitty stop. That’s why this had to be real. And I’m at that particular train station every week. Those boys are my friends.”

So watch, enjoy and accept that sometimes not a lot happening is a beautiful thing.

Plus listen out at the end of the video. Is that a preview of an as yet unreleased track perhaps?

Lorde - Royals (Video)

Lorde - Bravado (FFFRRANNNO Remix)

Some of our favourite tracks that we’ve featured on Breaking More Waves in 2013 so far include the songs from London Grammar’s soulful debut EP, Indiana’s sexy Bound, AlunaGeorge’s groovy Attracting Flies, Violet’s Where The Wild Things Grow, Chvrches’ synthtastic Recover and New Zealand newcomer Lorde and her Love Club EP (from which we featured the majestic Royals).

Let’s turn our attention to another track from that EP. Bravado is the song that opens Lorde's 5 tracker and there’s a certain similarity in parts to the higher elements of the vocal delivery of Marina & The Diamonds. In fact the opening moments of the track sound like a musical-pop cousin to one of our favourites from Electra Heart – Fear and Loathing. You can hear the original by clicking here. However, this remix from FFFRRANNNO who is also from New Zealand (it’s just pronounced Frano – the producer’s real name) does all the things we want a remix to do, in so far as it takes the song to new places (a glitchy electronic sort of place, as if Purity Ring are in the building and grinding up and down hornily in the bedroom) and gets us all hot under the collar. Phew we’re going for a cold shower. Crazy.

Lorde - Bravado (FFFRRANNNO Remix)

Lorde - New Waves

Ok we’ll admit it, we’ve been rather shallow. Youthful New Zealand pop sensation type Lorde has been cropping up left right and centre on blogs over the last few months, creating a stir on the Hype Machine chart and generally being associated with words like buzz, tastemaker-love and one to watch. Even musical queen of the blog buzz Grimes has been tweeting her love of all things Lorde; but we’ve ignored writing about her. Not because of the music, which we haven’t really got round to listening to, but because of the publicity picture above. Yes sorry, we really are that shallow.

Of course as a connoisseur of new music we really shouldn’t make first impression judgements on anything but the songs. But we all do don’t we? If you saw a picture of a band consisting of four surly tattooed males with long dark lank greasy hair, tattoos, leather jackets and an abundance of beards you’ll probably have already developed a preconceived idea of the sort of music they play. (Chances are it's not going to be electropop or hip-hop). If you don’t then congratulations you’re a far better human being than most, having as 80's synth pop wizard Howard Jones once suggested thrown off your mental chains.

Now let’s take a look at that picture again; a slightly weird looking girl who looks like she’s stepped out of one of the deleted scenes from Lord of the Rings holding a rat and a snake. Frankly, things are not looking good. In fact they're looking rather scary. Our filters and blinkers went into blank it out overdrive and we decided not to listen.

Then our flimsy mind was changed in a second as Lorde uploaded another picture on Facebook (below). She didn't look so freaky here - albeit we weren't sure about having the dog there. A bit of Google searching and we found some other pictures of pre-Lorde like this from 2011 (no dog and a keyboard player who looks a bit like what Howard Jones looks like now). In fact it seems there's quite a bit out there on the internet, including acoustic cover versions on You Tube of The Kings of Leon and Pixie Lott. We decided we’d better press play and then reread the rules of pop. That's how shallow we are.

For Lorde (real name Ella) is making great pop. Million Dollar Bills judders like a d-i-y bedroom Sleigh Bells with the guitar noise button switched off, Bravado is 2013’s slightly calmer Marina and the Diamonds, and then there’s the stunning anti-extravagance anthem Royals (streaming below) with its super smooth and confident simplicity that hooks us in on first listen hook line and sinker.

Lesson learnt? Never judge a book (or musician) by its cover (or press publicity picture). Lorde has the potential to become one of our favourite new pop stars of 2013. Our ears and eyes are wide open, even if she brings a whole zoo and dresses as Galadriel, or decides to pronounce her name like those Finnish Eurovision winners.

Lorde - Royals