New Music: London Grammar - Rooting For You

On the video for Rooting For You from London Grammar, there’s a bold confidence on display. For the first two minutes Hannah Reid sings a haunting questioning hymn of love acappella: “I'd love to always love you, but I'm scared of loneliness, when I'm, when I'm alone with you.”

But the confidence doesn’t end with just the solitary vocal. Because after that the beautiful strings, piano and guitar sweep in to create a song that is far a typical pop song. It’s a statement of intent that says that London Grammar aren’t cynically aiming for chart positions here. This is music that carries a graceful serenity in its delivery. 

My only disappointment is that the single edit itself doesn’t feature the acappella – I’d have liked to have seen the band really risk it and present it to radio in that form. 

If their new material is all going to be like this then let's hope they're playing grandiose concert halls rather than regular rock gig venues. Mind you, pop music is a funny old thing. Maybe next they'll release a club banger collaboration with Major Lazer and Calvin Harris and then we can all just bloody well give up hope in everything.

Rooting For You is the trio's first release since the If You Wait album and accompanying singles in 2013.

London Grammar - Rooting For You

My Favourite Albums of 2016 - The Full List In Summary

Yesterday I published 25 posts, one an hour from midnight. Each one detailed one of my favourite 25 albums of 2016, the final one being revealed exactly as the year ended.

Feel free to go back and read them all, but for those of you who just want the data in one simple list, here it is:

Breaking More Waves Favourite Albums of 2016

1. Clare Maguire – Stranger Things Have Happened
2. Bon Iver – 22, A Million
3. Survive – RR7349
4. Julia Jacklin – Don’t Let the Kids Win
5. Michael Kiwanuka – Love & Hate
6. Kate Tempest – Let Them Eat Chaos
7. Shura – Nothing’s Real
8. Emma Pollock – In Search of Harperfield
9. Cliff Martinez – Neon Demon OST
10. Misty Miller – The Whole Family Is Worried
11. The Orb – COW / Chill Out World
12. David Bowie – Blackstar
13. Billie Marten – Writing of Blues and Yellows
14. Vaults – Caught in Still Life
15. Various Artists – Space Echo: The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound Of Cabo Verde
16. Honeyblood – Babes Never Die
17. Steve Moore – The Mind’s Eye OST
18. Kate Bush – Before the Dawn
19. Daughter – Not to Disappear
20. Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein – Stranger Things OST Volume One
21. Petite Meller – Lil Empire
22. James – Girl at The End of The World
23. Let’s Eat Grandma – I, Gemini
24. Låpsley – Long Way Home
25. Ian William Craig - Centres

You can listen to a track from each album (except Kate Bush as it isn't on Spotify) for the next month on the monthly Breaking More Waves playlist by clicking this link.

Breaking More Waves 2017 And The Slow Death Of (Some) Music Blogs

Welcome to the 2017 edition of Breaking More Waves – essentially more of the same old bollocks as last year, namely me (I’m Robin, hi thanks for visiting) waffling about music is a fairly non-journalistic way. I basically write the way I speak – in fact (here’s a little secret for you), a number of my posts aren’t really written at all, they’re just dictated verbally and then I tidy them up on a laptop afterwards. There are lots of great blogs out there who write beautifully, but personally I prefer to do things this way. It’s simpler, quicker and hopefully conveys the messages I want to put out in an easy to digest form.

As I have done for the last few years, I start with a few words about what lies ahead, informed by what has happened in the past, before we get to the music. 

2016 was a pretty tough year for a lot of music blogs. There’s been a spectacular fall in the numbers of them operating. Between 2014 and the end of 2016 Hype Machine saw a drop off of approximately 20% of the blogs it lists. The noisy buzz that getting your song featured on the Hype Machine chart is a lot quieter than it used to be. New music discovery has shifted away from blogs to other ‘tastemaker’ areas such as Spotify’s Discover Weekly and New Music Friday playlists. It’s not so easy now to start a blog that then leads to other opportunities within the music industry. Some of the old-stager bloggers are finding less joy in new music than they used to. Others are struggling to balance their blogs with the demands of paying the mortgage / rent or raising young families. The overloaded in box of new submissions becomes a pain not a pleasure. Some blogs that have been financed by external sources are finding that funding dropping away or are finding that music blogging isn’t a sustainable way to earn a living.

However, from my perspective the drop off of blogs is a good thing. Those that are left are the ones who really want to do it. Enthusiasm is key to an exciting and creative music blog that’s worth reading.

And as we go into 2017, I still have a lot of enthusiasm for this. Over the course of the 8 and a half years (bloody hell is it really that long?)  I’ve been doing this there has been the occasional challenge. I’ve been through periods where the enthusiasm has drained, where the day job has left very little spare time, where family matters have had to take priority – for example last year my partner was diagnosed with cancer and is still being treated for that, so I reduced my output on Breaking More Waves a bit as I give extra time to support her.

But I still love writing Breaking More Waves and will still continue doing it.  I saw a couple of bloggers tweet last year that writing a music blog was hard. That’s bollocks. It isn’t. It’s the other bits of life that are hard. Breaking More Waves is for me, a hell of a lot of fun. I hope that sometimes you get that feeling as well. Maybe you discovered a new artist that you enjoyed here? Or considered and thought about an argument or point of view that I wrote about? Or maybe you just giggled at my waffle?

Last year at Glastonbury I went to see Adele at the Pyramid stage. I don’t particularly like the Pyramid Stage. It’s too big. It feels impersonal and distant. It’s nothing like it’s portrayed on the TV. The last time I saw her was in a 90 capacity pub in Brighton. I wasn’t expecting that much at Glastonbury. Yet that show, from the moment the opening chords of Hello burst out, was my favourite gig of the year. I haven’t felt such emotion at a show for years. It just got me. Everywhere around me people were crying. I cried a bit too. When Adele got everyone to take their phones out and shine their lights – the most clichéd and tacky thing an artist can do in my opinion – it seemed the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

What that Glastonbury gig taught me was that, sometimes, especially at this time, when the world is so full of negativity, division and hatred, music possesses incredible and powerful properties that can join people together and make them feel  something better. That thing is called love.

It’s that feeling – one of love and the power of music - that continue to spur me on in writing Breaking More Waves. Let’s see what 2017 brings. Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year.

Robin

My Favourite Albums of 2016: #1 Clare Maguire - Stranger Things Have Happened

If you’ve read all of the 24 posts that have preceded this one, counting down my favourite albums of the year, you’ll have noticed a couple of key points running through the writing. 

First, that for artists, sometimes it takes a little time to get it right. So even when maybe they don’t live up to the initial hype that often attaches itself to musicians just breaking through, we shouldn’t necessarily write them off. If there is genuine talent there, that will, if given space and more than a few minutes in the limelight, come good. Unfortunately, often record labels don’t see it that way; there’s way too much short term thinking in the music industry. 

Second that 2016 has been the year of things titled Stranger Things; the TV show, the soundtrack, the band that made the soundtrack and now this – an album called Stranger Things Have Happened.

Yes, Clare Maguire, an artist who first appeared on this blog way back in January 2009 and was featured on the BBC Sound of 2011 really delivered the goods in 2016. 

Ironically, in that first post back in 2009 I mentioned a song Clare had recorded called Strangest Thing, suggesting it was exuberant, modern and commanding. That song doesn’t appear on this album, but instead we get twelve pieces of musical gold, flecked with painful emotional honesty. They may not be particularly modern sounding, but they’re all the better for it.

Whereas Clare’s debut Light After Dark was largely an over produced beast that picked up some pretty scathing reviews (Laura Snapes writing for the NME described it as containing ‘songs that’d sound a bit sexless at a WI Christmas party’ – ouch) Stranger Things Have Happened strips everything back, allows the songs to breathe and gives Maguire the chance to really let her vocal shine. 

That shine doesn’t mean just big ballsy belters though (although she gives Adele a run for her money on Elizabeth Taylor and out souls most soul singers on Here I Am) but, subtle, nuanced beauties. Faded, with its jazzy piano, strings and brushed drums sounds like something you might find a band like Tindersticks playing in a dimly lit, velvet lined coffee bar. Swimming finds Maguire vocals adopting a sultry warble as she coos of what appears to be a dark enslaving relationship. “Whatever makes you bad, makes me want you,” she starts, before swiping out with a startling compulsive obsessiveness: “Fuck it now, life can wait, give me adrenaline when I wake. I’m bored as hell, and you’re my closest heaven, and there’s the clue, there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do, if you needed me when I needed you.”

One of the criticisms of Light After Dark was that it felt like all of Maguire’s personality and experience had been sucked out of it. That Clare had become a pawn in the record label machine. That certainly isn’t the case here. Throughout Stranger Things Have Happened there’s a deep intimacy, both lyrically, musically and in the way that Clare sings the words. Take the title track, a fairytale quiet song reminiscent of 50’s movies and Portishead without the beats. It finds Clare cooing almost creepily (in a good way) at a range higher than we’ve ever heard before: “Walking off the sapphire blues, carrying my shoes, drinking in those drunken stares, unprepared, I don’t care.” It’s superb goosebump raising stuff.

That Maguire has had to go through a tough old time to get to this point (she’s been through alcohol addiction and some depression) makes this album even the more extraordinary. It’s a collection of songs that adopts a variety of different styles, but still sounds like a full, deep and cohesive body of work.

Rather like my favourite album of last year (Oh Wonder’s debut) this isn’t an album that you’ll find on many end of year critics lists. I don’t know why. But all I do know is that this is the most beautiful and affecting body of work I’ve heard all year. My album of 2016. No contest.

Clare Maguire - Whenever You Want It

Clare Maguire - Here I Am (Video)