Top 5 Tracks of 2011 (Final Post of 2011)

This is the final post on Breaking More Waves for 2011. It’s time to close down, get the mulled wine hot and wafting vapour through the house, put Phil Spector’s cracking A Christmas Gift for You on and forget about the world of new music for a while.

Thank you very much if you’ve visited, read what we’ve written and listened to the music that has been featured on the blog in 2011. We’ve had a great time curating and creating it. Just the other day someone said to us that “Breaking More Waves is like going down the pub for a chat and a laugh with your best music-obsessed friend,” and for us that is the biggest compliment. This blog may not be the biggest, the coolest, the classiest or even have the best ‘taste’ ( the worlds sneering self-appointed realmusic (yes it's one word now) fans must have the best taste, because according to their book My Taste Is Better Than Your Taste Because I Said So, they said so and therefore must be right). But we’re proud of what we’ve created. Our success is just finding time to post 435 times this year (that’s the equivalent of a medium sized 400 page novel) against a background of a life that primarily revolves around family, children, full time employment many miles away from music or writing and a busy and active social life.

Our next post will be on 1st January 2012 and then on the 2nd we’ll be revealing the Top 5 artists in the Blog Sound of 2012 poll. Then for the next few days after that we’ll be introducing you to a whole bunch of new bands and artists in our New Waves feature, a number of which have had little or any UK based blog coverage. As January rolls on we’ll also be getting argumentative in a new feature, one that we’ve already sneakily started (here) called In Defence Of. It will be our regular ‘down the pub having a good old debate with friends about a musical issue’ post. We might even try and defend some pretty non-defendable subjects, like why Matt Cardle deserved to win the Guardian Readers album of the year poll. (Basically in summary, he deserved to because most people voted for him and that is what a poll is about. It doesn't mean it's 'the best' album, just that more people voted. That's democracy dear Guardian, so don't get all snobbish and claim as you have that PJ Harvey was 'the moral victor' because you invented the rules for the poll and a bunch of people felt passionate enough about Cardle (or joined in the fun for other reasons) to follow those rules and make him win. There was nothing immoral about that.

Incidentally, the Breaking More Waves album of 2011 was Last by The Unthanks but no one else seems to think so according to the polls - but it's still 'the best' to us. That's taste for you Guardian, we're all different, there's no right or wrong and those who are congratulated for having excellent taste are normally only congratulated by those with similar tastes.

More of that in 2012, but for now it’s time to press pause. Have a really happy Christmas and a brilliant New Year. We’ll be back on Jan 1st, but if you really can’t wait till then why not follow us on Twitter, right here or see what we're listening to on Last Fm here?

We’ll leave you with 5 songs that we’ve featured on Breaking More Waves that you could loosely term our tracks of the year. In choosing them we have made no attempt to look back at what we have featured on the blog in case we missed something, but just chosen the songs that have stayed with us all year, and that we'll remember as being very much part of our 2011. We're not saying they're the best, just the ones that made our own personal 2011 a little special.

Lana Del Rey – Video Games

It wasn’t just about hype. The hype wouldn’t have existed if the song wasn’t utterly affecting.

Lana Del Rey - Video Games

Rizzle Kicks – Down With The Trumpets

Our ‘told you so’ track of the year.

Down With The Trumpets by Rizzle Kicks

Alice Jemima – Red Coat

Holed away somewhere in Devon a virtually unknown young singer songwriter created this effortlessly sweet summery sounding pop song. It was love on first listen.

Alice Jemima - Red Coat (new version)

Nicola Roberts – Beat Of My Drum

In our game of good pop bad pop, this was very very good.

The Milk – All I Wanted Was (Danger)

“Get ready. Press play. Get your dancing shoes on. Brilliant.” That’s what we said of The Milk then. We couldn’t agree more now.

See you in 2012. Over and out.

Albums of the Year 2011 - #3 Nicola Roberts - Cinderella's Eyes

Cinderella’s Eyes is the best pop album of the year by a country mile. After the artistically redundant failures of Cheryl Cole and the wasting-floor-space-of-Tesco middle of the road rubbish that was Nadine Coyle’s record, it was left to the ginger princess to demonstrate that sometimes a solo effort can produce something as good, if not better than the group together. Cinderella’s Eyes may have been a commercial flop but it’s an intriguing, confident and quirkily engaging album.

From the word go Cinderella’s Eyes sets out its stall with Beat of my Drum. Dealing with how at the age of 16 Nicola Roberts went from being just a normal kid from Halton Brook estate in Runcorn to being in one of Britain’s biggest girl bands via the TV show Popstars: The Rivals and how uncomfortable, unprepared and out of place she was. “Once upon a time I press rewind, two left feet I had no beat, baby in the corner learning quickly, keep up, keep up,” she sings explaining the steep learning curve she experienced. From that moment on we’re allowed a fascinating, voyeuristic and often upsetting look into her life with Girls Aloud. “Too young to by my own bottle of vodka, so I’d beg the driver please I need another, funny that I was too young for many things, yet you thought I’d cope with being told I’m ugly,” she pipes on Sticks & Stones. “Never been wrapped up in the way I look, so when I got down to London, had the press on my case, coz I didn’t walk round with a smile on my face, called me a rude ginger bitch and say I bought bigger tits, they’re gonna eat all their words, their talking absolute shit,” she spits on Take A Bite. This is Nicola Roberts 2011; defiant, a little analytical, brilliantly angry and having come through the process, a pop outsider ready to take on the world – bang to the beat of her drum indeed.

Whilst this insight into Roberts world may be fascinating, without the songs, you’re hardly likely to come back. This is what sets Cinderella’s Eyes apart. In a world full of beige and LOLpop this is pop at its best – it’s often brilliantly oddball and fearless in its attempts to not mimic the likes of Katy Perry, Rihanna and the like. Whether she’s grappling with Diplo, Metronomy or The Invisible Men, the songs are full of vocal hooks, exuberant classy synths and grab your balls beats and lots of weird ‘where did that come from’ moments of sound that make you want to go back and investigate again. Witty, catchy and just a little edgy Cinderella's Eyes shows how good pop music can be if it dares to jump off a cliff into the depths now and then.

Music That Made Me #42 - Nicola Roberts - Beat Of My Drum

Over the last 42 weeks I’ve featured blog posts written in the first person that nostalgically remind me of some of the past musical glories from my life. Some of the songs I chose haven’t been played or even thought about for years, it was only when writing this series and exploring the dim cobweb filled corridors of my brain that the songs were remembered. Some of them I will probably never choose to play again. They stood for a moment, a memory, a person, a place, or a feeling and then they were gone. Some however will stick around like lasting friends.

So what have I learnt through writing these posts? Apart from realising that I have woeful taste in music sometimes, (like ex-partners, the songs seemed outrageously good at the time) I’ve also learnt that looking back at the past is fun once in a while, but it doesn’t excite me in the same way that the present or future does. Like a relationship, what keeps me alive, what raises the spirits, is not resting on the past. The past forms a foundation, but for the relationship to grow and develop it has to evolve, change and offer up new possibilities and passions. Otherwise it becomes stale and tired, lacking the zest and the sparkle that is out there.

There are 42 posts in this series. The reason for this? I am 42 years old. Yet, even now, when I hear a new piece of music that moves me I get a rush of excitement just the same as when I was still 16. It’s why I write this blog – to share some of the music that gives me that rush.

This series may be called Music That Made Me, but what is really important to me is the music that is making me, right here right now.

It’s why this final post features a song from this year. It's a song that isn't cool, isn't critically acclaimed, but it fits perfectly with my world. There’s a place for nostalgia and many my age trade on it. However, after 42 posts of Music That Made Me, I’ve had enough of it. Let’s learn from the past, but let’s move forward as well, with quite simply, my favourite pop song of 2011. L.O.V.E it.

A full list of all the songs (good and bad) featured in this series and links to the blog posts will be posted later today.

Nicola Roberts - Disco Blisters & A Comedown

If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll probably know that our favourite member of Girls Aloud by a country mile is Nicola Roberts. We’ve always had a soft spot for the manufactured Popstars the Rivals TV show 5-piece. Somewhere on the internet you’ll even find something we wrote proclaiming Chemistry to be one of the greatest albums of the last decade. This is not a jokey semi-ironic hipster claim but a 100% honest statement about our love of giddying pop music.

Yet with the possible exception of Fight For Your Love which if we were the Pitchfork of pop we’d give 7.2 out of 10, none of the solo material from Girls Aloud has impressed. That is until Nicola Roberts arrived.

Beat of My Drum is the Breaking More Waves pop single of the year so far. It’s both gleefully cool with its reference points (Justice, Diplo) yet unashamedly cheesy at the same time (Daphne & Celeste) and the video is perfect. On one hand it looks cheap, tacky and girls-and-boys-out-at-H&M’s-sale yet on the other Nicola, the permanently dejected and sour-faced looking member of Girls Aloud, has a huge smile on her face and wiggles her arse like she’s Beyonce or Rihanna. Everything about Beat of My Drum is brilliantly contradictory and confusing but is held together by a hooky as hell dance-pop banger.

Now things get even better. There is a B side.

B sides are usually (and when we say usually we mean 99% of the time) rubbish.

Disco, Blisters & A Comedown occupies the space taken up by the other 1%.

The marketing campaign for Nicola’s single may have for the moment been a huge failure, her record companies attempt at ‘On air, on sale’ missing one vital and simple point; the song wasn’t on air. Radio stations hadn’t yet been convinced to play it and there were no TV appearances to back it up but that doesn’t stop Beat of My Drum being a huge pop delight. If you’ve ever bought a bag of liquorice allsorts you’ve probably left the ‘bobbly ones’ till last, but with time you realise they’re actually the best sweet in the bag. This is a bit like Nicola and this single.

We wouldn’t normally post about a B side. But when it’s this good – a mixture of Girls Aloud pop thrill matched with Lily Allen out-on-the-town attitude and boozy Britain comedown hangover memories, plus some of our favourite lyrics of the year that name check John Prescott, Top Shop, and Kebab shops – it deserves as much attention as we can give it.

Nicola Roberts. 100% amazing.

In Defence of Pop

Last week we started tweeting with gushing excitement about Nicola Roberts - you know her - the pale, skinny ginger one from Girls Aloud. It was all because of her debut solo single Beat Of My Drum, a song that we claimed in a previous blog posting was an edgy and choppy mix of Daphne & Celeste, Diplo and CSS (there was a big slab of Justice in there as well). We’ve been playing it virtually non-stop all week. It’s that good. No, it’s that A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.

Since we started hyperventilating our praises we’ve lost a number of followers on twitter (which may of course be unrelated and be more to do with a number of porn / hot lady 'bots' that seemed to have decided to follow us for a few days and then unfollowed when we didn't respond to their hot lovin' come-ons) and also received a couple of emails /comments from so called ‘music fans’ who infer that by loving Beat Of My Drum we’ve somehow sold our sold to the devil and lost any credibility we once possessed – that somehow as a music blogger you’re not allowed to like pop music because it shows an inherent lack of taste and intelligence. That somehow pop is evil. Of course, we disagree. Just because we may have different taste to those who don’t like Nicola’s beat laden boomer, doesn’t make our taste better or worse – good and bad music is after all a matter of subjective opinion.

The arguments that haters put forward are often that pop music is ‘not real music’ and those who make it are false, untalented and doing it for ‘the wrong reasons’. Generally when people mean ‘the wrong reasons’ they mean ‘not the same reasons as what I believe are the right reasons’, yet as far as we are aware there is no rulebook for music. If there was then everything would sound the same, everything would look the same and life would be utterly boring – like having sex with the same partner, in the same place, at the same time in the same position once a week for the rest of your life. That might be fine for some, but we suspect that the majority of people want far more than that.

It’s the ethos of the indie elite – they construct in their heads a set of rules about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways that music should be presented, played and performed and judge all other music within these constructs. What is ‘cool’ and what isn’t become over important. We’ve been (and no doubt at some point will be again) guilty of this way of thinking ourselves – we suspect everyone is from time to time, but ultimately this intellectual prejudice puts up barriers to the most important aspect of enjoying music – emotion.

It’s emotion – the way a song grabs you and makes you want to dance, sing, laugh, cry or f*ck that is the biggest power punch that music can provide. Every time we hear Beat of My Drum it makes us feel stupidly happy. We don’t need to over analyse it, decide if it sits on any barometer of cool or not or visit a musical psychiatrist – we just accept the emotion and celebrate it. Yes of course it’s ‘manufactured’, of course it was all made on a computer, of course Nicola’s role in the song may not have been quite as involved as when the likes of the Fleet Foxes got in a studio together – but that’s not going to stop us enjoying this brilliant, edgy, unadultered pop song.

As we said in a previous post – deal with it.

The Saturday Surf #6

In a week when, depending on your perspective, you either stifled a big yawn or shed an excited tear over the fact that both Coldplay and the Kaiser Chiefs both aired new material, the musical event that got Breaking More Waves most excited, for at least 2 minutes anyway, was the first play of Nicola Roberts new single. Only 2 minutes? Well, the internet is a fast moving place and we all know that bloggers hump and dump tunes as if they were shafting easy whores. We’re basically the attention deficit disorder sufferers of the music scene aren’t we? Don’t answer that, we’ve already turned off and are thinking about something else.

For now though we’ve 100% signed up to Team Ginge, members of whom were thoroughly wetting their pants as Nicola’s debut single Beat Of My Drum got its first airplay last Thursday and revealed itself to be a slightly edgy and choppy mix of Daphne & Celeste, Diplo, CSS and Justice. We always knew that Nicola was the best member of Girls Aloud and this song 100% proves it. Those who frequent Breaking More Waves for cooler than thou indie, soothing organic folk or leftfield electro will despair of our love for pop music like this, but the world be a boring place if we were all gang banging LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire and whatever lo-fi buzz band the likes of Gorilla vs Bear and Transparent were kicking out this week. Beat Of My Drum is stupidly unadulterated, insanely fun pop music. Deal with it.

Watch the whole thing by clicking here.

Elsewhere this week, when we weren’t listening to Nicola Roberts, which to be honest wasn't a lot of the time, these tracks nearly but not quite got a full blog post. They form our weekly round-up that goes by the name of the Saturday Surf.

First up D/R/U/G/S is an act that we’ve been championing for a while now, putting the name in our 10 Ones to Watch for 2011. This remix of Love Lust by Family takes the original and subtly blasts it with scraps of white noise, roughing the track up like sandpaper. Nice.

D/R/U/G/S - Love Lust (FAMILY Remix)

Next is something from the other end of the musical spectrum. Last Sunday Bestival head-honcho Rob Da Bank ran a competition to win 2 tickets for his (nearly now sold out) musical extravaganza in September through twitter. The idea was simple; he posted the title of a song and anyone who wanted to enter then had 7 hours to write, record and post a tune with that title back to him. Devon based singer songwriter Alice Jemima, who we've been charmed with a number of times already took up the challenge of writing something called There's A Bee In My Lemonade. She ended up as runner up, but this simple little beauty has a sense of intimacy and charisma that should have rightfully put her in first place. Extra marks as well for incorporating bee and lemonade sounds at the start of the piece. Keep an eye out on the Da Bank twitter for another 'Song In 7 Hours' this Sunday - and your chance to grab some tickets for one of the best times of your life. (Hint - There really weren't many entries last week so you stand a good chance.)

Theres a bee in my lemonade by Alice Jemima

Finally for this surf, we've always longed to hear Ex Lightspeed Champion and Test Icicles man Dev Haynes rumoured unreleased album of Killers cover versions, but this Prince influenced jam, produced under his new name of Blood Orange is good enough to make us forget about that. It’s that attention deficit disorder again.

Blood Orange - Dinner