Every Monday this year Breaking More Waves will be publishing a new feature entitled The Music That Made Me. 42 songs – 1 each week till November. These pieces are a reaction against the modern world’s dispiriting movement to a more throwaway culture, great songs being quickly forgotten. These blogs are a personal, autobiographical and nostalgic view of music, showing the influences that make up Breaking More Waves and songs that are lovingly remembered.
I was born at the end of the sixties – 30th April 1969 to be precise. Eighty-two days later man walked on the moon for the very first time. On that summer day in the early hours of the morning, my mother, like millions of others in the country, sat in the darkness, her face lit only by the unsteady flickers of her black and white television as it beamed pictures from outer space. It was a moment when the whole world felt hope, yet in many ways this one great step for mankind signalled the end of an era of innocence.
My mother tells me that I was awake at that historic moment – warmly oblivious of the historic significance as I fed a little, far too young for memories.
It’s sad, but I can barely remember the tiny Isle of Wight bungalow where we lived for my first four years. I can recall the cracked white porcelain enamelled steel bath where frogs lived in the narrow garden outside and the swaying hidden tyre swing suspended from a gnarled branch where my dad pushed me back and forwards; it was located in a copse hidden from the view of the house, but that’s about all.
When I travelled back to capture memories in my early 30’s, the place had been demolished – four square characterless one bedroomed flats with UPVC window frames and false factory made chimneys scowled at me instead.
Years later my mother’s stories of the Apollo 11 were dug up like long lost artefacts when I heard this song. It came from a band that I had been smitten with for some time – The Sundays. Their debut single Can’t Be Sure – a softly chiming and jangling piece of ethereal beauty had captured my imagination (here), particularly the soft pattering drum pattern and Harriet Wheeler’s uniquely childlike vocal. When she sang “England my country the home of the free, such miserable weather,” it seemed so perfect, capturing the essence of where I lived at the time and how I felt about life. It came from the bands debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic which was a critical and relatively commercial success. However, it was Monochrome, the final track on their final album Static & Silence, released in 1997 that is my favourite song by The Sundays.
Recalling the moon landing, the song tells the tale of two sisters creeping downstairs “like shadows” to watch the event on their television. “They’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence in a monochrome vision,” Harriet sings. It’s so evocative you can imagine exactly what that excited moment must have been like, families huddled round to catch these incredible pictures. So this song acts as a memory that I don’t have, even although I was there. Thankfully the music will last forever – as proven last year when Kate Walsh recorded a blissfully still piano version of the song that is as gorgeously good as the original.
When producing orchestral pop music the danger is that it is so easy to overdo things; throw in another dramatic string crescendo here and a trumpet blast there and soon the bombastic assault on the ears becomes just a swollen sound of nothingness. It takes both confidence and skill to take classical influence and use them to subtly produce something that is both sensitive but strong. James Wallace aka Wintercoats has managed to perfect this art on his two releases – the Cathedral EP out last May and another track Spend This Day which he uploaded last month, both of which are available for free from the Wintercoats Bandcamp page.
This Australian violinist creates tender, airy pieces of music that are perfect for those quiet introvert moments in the day. His compositions take looped cells of instrumentation and combine them with hazy floaty vocals, the resultant being something light and cotton wool like; these songs may be slight but that’s not a criticism, it’s very much a positive. Wintercoats – rather like James Blake and The XX know that sometimes less is more. Unlike these two acts though, beats are not essential and his songs are more leftfield - you're unlikely to hear Wintercoats cropping up on daytime BBC Radio 1.
In Breaking More Waves home country of the UK very little attention has been paid to Wintercoats yet. We’re hoping that as the months progress this will change, but if it doesn’t then his music can be our little secret, can’t it? Wrap yourselves up in Wintercoats soothing restraint and feel a warm musical glow.
For six years now the superbly intelligent and literate Sweeping The Nation blog has been running the UK Bloggers Album of the Year poll, with each blog submitting (or in some cases Sweeping The Nation filching) their top ten LP’s of the year for some sort of points scoring contest that smooths out any idiosyncrasies of potential and arguable ‘poor taste.' For examplethe Breaking More Waves choice of Ellie Goulding in the top 10 was hardly likely to be replicated by the rest of the blogosphere – mainstream commercial female fronted pop music albums have nearly always received short change in end of year polls from anything outside ‘true pop’ blogs.
The poll gives us a good aggregation of what LP’s have been collectively floating UK bloggers boats over the past 12 months. The list shows some of the differences in UK bloggers tastes to our American cousins over the pond – for example there is very little hip hop on the list – but then maybe that’s because of the sample of blogs chosen to compile the list.
From the Breaking More Waves perspective it’s also interesting to see where we fall in line with our UK music blog peer group and it seems there’s a fair degree of commonality (Ellie Goulding being an exception) with 7 of our 10 albums of the year featuring in the Top 75 and 3 of our 10 being in the Top 10. The full list of 75 albums can be found at Sweeping the Nation – the link is below. We raised a little cheer when we saw that Hurts came above Crystal Castles and Gorillaz in the poll, were a little disappointed to find that Stornoway haven’t picked up the love from bloggers that we hoped they would and are startled to see that Midlake’s preposterous sleep inducing dirge of prog-folk got any votes at all, but that is the beauty of opinion and taste.
Here’s a summary of our top ten which we voted for with links to each individual blog, followed by a couple of tracks from Sweeping The Nation’s own number 1 album of the year (and number 10 in the poll) Romance Is Boring by Los Campesinos!
We said “In a world where 'alternative' often means recording some fuzzy guitar and wailing vocals and doing a blurred photo shoot, by doing something so uncool and opposite to what most music fans expect, Hurts are in an odd way a real alternative.”
Happy New Year. Welcome back to Breaking More Waves 2011 after our short break, or if this is your first visit, hello it’s lovely to meet you. This is the first of two posts today, the other which will appear in a short while concerns the annual UK Blogger Album of the Year poll run by the excellent Sweeping The Nation blog.
New Year is a time for resolutions to be made and changes to be implemented. This includes Breaking More Waves.
2011 will see a number of minor alterations to the blog. This is the all singing all dancing, version 2.0 - slightly leaner and meaner. Yes, just like governments that are hit by recession we're making cuts. Here's our budget announcement.
Reviews of gigs and concerts are to be no more. These are the posts that get the fewest number of hits / readers and although we’ve never wanted or attempted to be a big hit blog, it seems a little pointless spending the limited free time we have writing things when only a handful of people are going to read them. Instead we'll tweet about them so follow us on Twitter.
Next, we’re also stopping album reviews. You may have noticed that we’ve phased these out in the last few months anyway. This is for similar reasons to the live gigs and concerts – although they get more hits, reviewing an album takes significantly more time and usually by the time we publish there’s already hundreds of reviews out there, so the exercise seems a little pointless. Unless we can offer some further fresh new territory or opinion on an album as part of a more discursive piece we won't be reviewing.
So what will we be covering and in what form?
Primarily we will remain a new music blog, but the emphasis will be on individual songs. However where we find a band that we love, we will post as many times as we think necessary, irrespective of if anyone else loves them or not. Where a very new band is featured we will continue the ‘New Waves @ Breaking More Waves’ feature, but the blogs are to be re- titled just ‘New Waves’.
Our summer coverage of UK festivals will continue, as these are some of the highlights of our year, but the coverage will be in a more condensed, readable form, rather than our previous long rambling reviews. More of that from May.
Our occasional discursive articles on the wider issues surrounding music will continue as lots of people have given feedback saying that they enjoy these the most and they are a little different from other blogs. We hope that some of these particular blogs will bring something fresh to the musical conversation.
And finally, as we announced in November of last year we will be introducing a new blog feature published every Monday entitled Music That Made Me. These blogs will be our reaction against what we see as a continued progression to a more throwaway culture, with people’s attention spans decreasing. They will be a very personal and autobiographical trawl through the songs that we have established long term relationships with and wouldn’t dare to throw away. It will be a weekly nostalgia trip and will give context to our tastes and influences.
In essence Breaking More Waves 2011 will be more focussed on its editorial policy. It’s more of an evolution than a revolution. The style of writing and length of article will remain the same - we realise that our posts are significantly longer than many new music blogs, but we've always wanted to appeal to those who want to engage a little more than just downloading the latest buzz track. We want to talk as well as listen. Feel free to join the conversation.
2011 holds the promise of being a mightily spectacular year for music. Let’s hope it delivers. Ready ? For starters here's three bands that could have possibly made our Ones to Watch 2011 list that we published last December if it wasn't for the fact that they were outside of the UK. Enjoy tracks by U.S band Cults, Norway's Mr Little Jeans and a remix from The Naked and Famous from New Zealand. For the rest of this week, to kick off the New Year, with the exception of Music That Made Me we'll be publishing a whole host of other new bands who didn't quite make our Ones To Watch 2011 list, but were given consideration for it and are all very good. Expect some cowbelltastic trance rock, some lo-fi C86 referencing south coast surf indie, some wonderful one man orchestral pop and more. 2011 still Breaking More Waves.
Every Monday this year Breaking More Waves will be publishing a new feature entitled The Music That Made Me. 42 songs – 1 each week till November. These pieces are a reaction against the modern world’s dispiriting movement to a more throwaway culture, great songs being quickly forgotten. These blogs are a personal, autobiographical and nostalgic view of music, showing the influences that make up Breaking More Waves and songs that are lovingly remembered.
