Breaking More Waves’ favourite record of 2015 is the debut record by Oh Wonder. If you scan the end of year lists there are certain records you’ll probably see the critics picking time and time again; Sufjan Stevens, Julia Holter, Jamie XX. But you probably won't see Oh Wonder that often, if at all. The only time we've seen their name so far is on big American blog Hillydilly at number 9. Does that mean it isn’t ‘good’? Does that mean that our taste is ‘poor’? Well that’s for you to decide. Taste is about judgement and each person makes judgements about another’s taste based on their own preferences, often informed by their own personal culture. But we haven’t selected Oh Wonder as our favourite record of the year just because we think it’s good (although of course we firmly believe it’s a truly wonderful collection of songs). We’ve chosen it because, it’s by far and away our most played record of the year. The important thing here is to understand the reasons why it’s our most played. Here’s the answer: 2015 has been a pretty tough time in places for us, particularly from around late September when this record came out. There have been some incredibly good times as well, but parts of it have been a real slog, emotionally, physically and mentally. We haven’t told many of our friends or family this, instead battling on, trying to carry out the multiple roles we have (partner, father, boss, friend) as best we can. It’s what people expect. It’s come as a bit of a shock to some when we’ve told them that not everything is right in our world. We’ve always been pretty good at being emotionally sturdy and dependable. Oh Wonder’s record has carried us through that time. It’s a record with a sense of hope and beauty and romance and love and tenderness that we’ve needed as a crutch when everything hasn’t seemed so good. There’s something about the words that Josephine and Anthony sing on this album that have resonated with us more than anything else we’ve heard this year. “I know you’re sad and tired, you’ve got nothing left to give, but you’ll find another life to live, I know you’ll get over it,” might not be the greatest poetry you’ve ever heard, but those words, from the song Landslide have lifted our heavy heart many times in the last few months. We’ve referred to their tune Heart Hope as being ‘a wonderfully positive hug of a song’ on the blog before, and that’s exactly what it is. It’s the one reason that, for us, Oh Wonder stands out head and shoulders over any other album of 2015. It’s also the reason why, we believe, many other people around the world, probably the sort of people who don’t write music blogs and end of year lists, love this record. This is of course ironic, when you consider that Oh Wonder first found their music getting exposure through websites and blogs. Oh Wonder’s album is one that as human beings, who all experience the ups, the downs, the trials, the tribulation and the weird emotions of life, we can all relate to. It’s a very compassionate record – a record that stands for living a better life rather than the narcissistic iGeneration attitude that modern pop seems to foster these days. There’s not many bands, who on their debut, can write a song about the thought of needing immunity from disease, sadness, hopelessness or fear, using the idea of white blood cells as a metaphor for love and support after meeting a fan who had undergone an operation to remove a cancerous brain tumour. Oh and seeing as we’ve got this far, we’d better mention the music as well. It’s lovely. Of course, it’s not for everyone (what record is – even Adele has her critics), but if like us you’re a fan of boy-girl synchronised singing over tastefully classic mid-tempo songwriting formed from piano and soft electronics, then you’ll probably find an awful lot to love from Oh Wonder. We fully realise that Oh Wonder’s album will never be considered a ‘classic’ by the rock journalist type. The reviews it received from critics were on the whole very average. But nothing, absolutely nothing, can take away how we feel about this record and the journey we’ve been on with it in 2015. That’s why Oh Wonder is our album of 2015. Oh Wonder - Livewire (Video)
If there’s one theme running through Breaking More Waves’ albums of 2015 list it’s that many of these artists have already featured either on past album of the year lists or Ones to Watch lists. With their second album Watford’s finest singing sister trio The Staves deliver on the prediction we made back in 2011 when we named them as One to Watch for 2012. “If that album sounds anything like the beautiful Mexico ….. it wouldn’t be a surprise if it finds itself on quite a few end of year lists come next December.” OK, that prediction may have been made of their first record Dead & Born & Grown which ultimately was decent but not outstanding, but it actually comes good on their second. For If I Was is an immaculate collection of songs that finds the band growing broader and bolder with their sound. Whilst the delicate wispy harmonies are ever present (and ever more beautiful) and the music is sometimes as gentle as a patient lovers touch, this record is also full of ambitious sonic dynamics. Yes, in places The Staves even ROCK! The arrangements of every tune on this album are absolutely perfect, irrespective of if they contain crashing drums, horns, strings or just simple plucked guitars. Much has been made of Bon Iver’s involvement in this record and it seems that he has pushed The Staves beyond what we could have ever imagined they could do when we first came across them in 2011. It’s one of those rare long players where we don’t have a favourite song, because every single one is almost too perfect. Back in January we published a post called Albums of 2015 – Our End of Year List. On it we listed newly released albums that we’d listened to that month and questioned if any of them would make it through to the end of the year as favourites. At the time, Charli XCX’s record Sucker was our most played. The Staves was our third. By the end of the year it’s just those two that made the final cut. If I Was finishes way above Charli, in second place overall, indicating just how many times we’ve played this wonderful body of work in 2015. The Staves - Black & White (Video)
Here are the 5 essential things you need to know about Public Service Broadcasting’s Race For Space album, our third favourite record of 2015. 1. It’s a concept album and the concept is the US-Soviet space race of the late 50’s to early 70’s. 2. Thematically there are links to the ideas presented on the bands tune Everest – that of human endeavour and man’s desire to attain that which has been unattainable. 3. If you haven’t yet heard what Public Broadcasting do, this is a fine introduction. The band mix archive vocal samples, this time taken from the astronauts themselves in space as well as the control desk on earth, together with music. It’s a very visual album. There are no traditional songs as such, the closest you get to that is some ethereal atmospheric warbling from The Smoke Fairies as guest vocalists on one track, but it bears a closer relationship to film soundtracks. 4. The music fits the ambience of space perfectly – from the suspenseful The Other Side where Apollo 8 orbits the moon and loses radio contact through to the controlled hyperactivity of the control room on Go! 5. It’s bloody marvellous, weirdly emotional and as far as 2015 releases go, unique. Public Service Broadcasting - Go!
East India Youth’s second album, Culture of Volume, starts with one of the most incredible pieces of electronic music we’ve heard this year; The Juddering. It falls somewhere between the sound of a helicopter landing and a computerised version of the longest, most intense, orgasm you’ve ever had. Bursts of static whir around your ears as William Doyle piles on layers of skittering distorted sound and if you’re pummelling the track loudly enough through a set of headphones you’ll almost certainly shit yourself in a glorious ‘WTF’ moment. It sounds as if Doyle has come to destroy music forever. He hasn’t, far from it, but it’s a powerful opening that makes you wonder how intense this record is going to be. The answer isn’t what you think. From that point Culture of Volume heads off into a world of giddying pop music, informed by the Pet Shop Boys, Vangelis, OMD, Pink Floyd and techno (the speed laden loops of Hearts That Never remind us a lot of Underworld as does the insanely full on aggression of Entirety). This is a record that seems weirdly out of place with pretty much everything around it right now; it’s probably all the better for it. Yet at its heart (after The Juddering, which is brilliantly misleading to a certain extent) once you’ve stripped away the savage electronic pulses, distorted beats, melancholy washes of synths and computerisations, what you’re left with is Doyle’s top-notch songwriting. It’s that that underpins everything. Another victory for leftfield pop music. East India Youth - Beaming White
Yet another artist who has previously topped a past Breaking More Waves album of the year list returned in 2015 with a new record that once again sees her sitting pretty in our top 10. Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die was our favourite release of 2012, but 2014’s follow up Ultraviolence found us a tad underwhelmed. Honeymoon however hits all the right spots. If anything it’s less commercial than her preceding work, but it also feels that this is where Lana is most at home. She’s created her most cohesive body of music to date, full of gauzy, highly sophisticated 60’s-styled ballads, mainly soundtracked by languid orchestral strings and horns. Don’t expect any bangers on this one; the songs on Honeymoon make Video Games seem like a happy-clappy-dancefloor-anthem. This is a record that if played live would best suit a residency in a theatre or a showcase at London’s Royal Albert Hall. In concept (rather than its sonics) it’s very similar to the Grimes record Art Angels, insofar as it’s still very much a pop record, but it’s far removed from the standard knock ‘em out by numbers mainstream electronic club anthems that the vast majority of our modern pop stars are churning out. When Lana Del Rey first arrived on the scene the internet got caught up in the ridiculous argument of authenticity, somehow spending as much time discussing Lana’s lips, as the music. Thankfully time has moved on and now people are beginning to understand what Lana Del Rey is and what Lana Del Rey does. Some of that is to provide characterisation through her lyrics, which sometimes hint at being the real Lizzy Grant, and at other times don’t. “We both know it’s not fashionable to love me,” she sings on the album’s opening lyric, is that Lana singing or Lizzy? Frankly we don’t care who it is and if it’s fashionable or not. This is a wonderfully focussed record for which the word ‘timeless’ was invented. Let it smoulder its way into your life. Lana Del Rey - High By The Beach (Video)
Another album by another act that has featured on previous Breaking More Waves’ Album Of The Year lists, showing that in 2015 some of our favourite artists didn’t let us down. Art Angels is a self sufficient record that finds her steering away from the much rumoured mainstream top 10 pop album to something more innovative, more out there, and as a result, a far more exciting listening experience. Art Angels isn’t just a repeat of her last release which was very synthetic and electronic in sound. This time it’s a manic multi-instrumental piece that takes influences from absolutely all over the place. There’s J-Pop, indie, banging techno, cheerleader chanting, screaming and that's just the start of it. At times she crams in so many ideas into one song that it feels almost overwhelming. But if you stick with it, a few listens in you realise that it’s one of those enticing pop records that you need to keep going back to. It’s pop but not as we know it and that’s what makes it such a thrilling listen. Grimes - Flesh Without Blood / Life In The Vivid Dream
The seventh record on our Albums of 2015 list is Mount The Air by The Unthanks. They’re another act (like Chvrches and Charli XCX - already featured on this list) who have had other long-players on past Breaking More Waves Albums of the Year lists, and like Chvrches have also topped it with the breathtaking Last in 2011. Mount The Air is another remarkable body of work – and the emphasis is on the words body of work. For this is a weighty collection of songs, clocking in at over an hour, that finds the band expanding their repertoire way beyond their original folk roots to encompass jazz and orchestral sounds; it is dare we say it a progressive album. Brought together in The Unthanks’ own studio this record contains the band’s most ambitious and uncompromising song ever - the title track - which is an extraordinary thing of power and beauty that takes an arrow from the bow of the band Elbow and fires it high and soaring way beyond anything else they’ve done. It’s worth buying the record for that track itself. It’s not all grand and sweeping though, elsewhere there’s ghostly piano balladry (which sometimes harks back to a sound found on their third record, the Mercury nominated The Bairns, recorded as Rachel Unthank & The Winterset) vocal eerie minimalism (on the spectral Magpie), waltzes (The Poor Stranger) and tasteful twilight cinematic folk ambience on songs such as Last Lullaby. Mount The Air adds to The Unthanks ever growing ever impressive back catalogue and suggests that with their next recording they really could go anywhere. The Unthanks - Mount The Air (Short Single Version)
Two years ago Chvrches topped our albums of the year list with their debut record, The Bones of What You Believe. In 2015 their second album might not feature quite so highly in our list, but it was nonetheless a sterling effort, confirming their reputation as the UK’s finest synth pop band. If Every Open Eye played safe, then it at least it consolidated and expanded their fan base, something which (arguably) comparable electronic acts such as Hurts and Little Boots failed to do (although here at Breaking More Waves we very much liked the second Little Boots album). Yet whilst the template was more of the same, this record held its own by featuring a crop of songs that had punch and remained easily accessible, with just enough experimentation and oddness to ensure that their version of pop music didn’t become the homogenic paint by numbers blandness that litters up the majority of the charts. The songs on Every Open Eye still have something a little deeper to them, a little soul and bite, something that sadly another blog favourite, Ellie Goulding’s latest record lacked. If the criticism of this album is that it doesn’t go far enough away from the first record, let’s remember this is only LP number two. Sure, if the band don’t slowly evolve and develop on future work there’s a likelihood we’ll all get bored, but frankly right here right now, when you’ve got songs as deliciously foot stomping and air punching as Clearest Blue or the delicious soft focus high energy disco pop of Empty Threat and banger after banger after banger, (when comedown track Afterglow arrives it feels really needed – a moment for rest and reflection ) you’d be churlish to complain. “We will take the best parts of ourselves and make them gold,” Lauren Mayberry sings on fourth song Make Them Gold, and that is exactly what they have achieved on Every Open Eye. Chvrches - Empty Threat (Video)
The album at number 9 on the Breaking More Waves end of year LP list is probably one of two that may come as a surprise to our regular readers (or our followers on Twitter) as until now we haven’t mentioned soulful gospel post punk post-apocalyptic three piece Algiers at all except for one early morning tweet. Now is the time to change that though, for this debut is a record of some staggering intent. In a year when we struggled to be truly inspired by many rock records, this one manages it. If the rest of our top 10 albums seem relatively light listening to your ears (and we make no apology for that - this is our list, not yours), this one is the intense antidote. Algiers isn’t always an easy listen. Despite the gospel reference it isn’t a record of uplifting praises to the heavens. In fact much of Algiers sounds black and oppressive, the sound of history struggling against itself. It’s not a record that you’ll be able to easily consume; for there are so many flavours to devour. From Franklin James Fisher’s bluesy political holler to the near gothic soundtrack that floods much of its layers to the electro beats on Irony. Utility. Pretext that sound as if they’ve been sampled off an old Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five track or maybe even the Pet Shop Boys. Algiers sound like churches, whisky, blood and fear mixed into a cocktail of nightmares. If that sounds like a load of pretentious bollocks, take just one listen to this album and then you’ll understand exactly what we mean. Imagine Nick Cave, Rag ‘N’ Bone Man, TV On The Radio and MC5 slamming their fists and instruments into the ground over and over again and you might be getting somewhere near this powerful piece of work. Algiers - Blood
We start our top 10 run down with a record that in some parts of the world was released in 2014, but with an odd non-internet savvy strategy, Charli XCX’s label decided that here in the UK we had to wait until 2015 to hear the follow up to True Romance. Charli’s previous album, our 6th favourite of 2013, had under-performed commercially, not getting anywhere near the UK top 40. The new LP did better, hitting number 15 thanks to Miss Aitchison finally getting some hit singles in the form of Boom Clap (no.6), Break The Rules (no.35) and Doing It (no.8), all of which featured on the record. But whilst True Romance was a blog friendly album of savvy electronic pop songs, Sucker took a different direction. It maintained the trashiness of its predecessor, but was in places bigger, bolder, brasher and more aggressive. There were some guitars, some swearing, lots of hooks and plenty of attitude, including songs about masturbation (Body Of My Own), getting wrecked (Break The Rules) and going out late and crashing a party (Famous). With Sucker Charli XCX put her name alongside a lineage of 90’s bands like Shampoo and Kenickie; female vocal pop bands with a bubblegum punk sensibility about them, but it also hinted in places at Britney Spears or the Spice Girls (who we first mentioned in connection with Charli when we first posted about her way back in 2009 here) with a slightly scissor sharpened edge. Sucker probably isn’t an album that will find its way on to anyone’s album of the decade list in 2019, it understands well enough that pop songs can sometimes be brilliant but ultimately throwaway, but certainly it’s formed a big part of our soundtrack to 2015. Which is why it finds itself at #10 on our end of year list. Charli XCX - London Queen
Welcome to the bit of the blog that always happens in December where we write about our favourite albums of the year. For the last few years we’ve listed 15 records that we’ve enjoyed from the previous 12 months but this year we’re cutting it down to 10. Why? Because the longer the list, the less it says about the records at the bottom. Would you really be interested in hearing someone’s 49th favourite record or their 87th of the year? We wouldn’t. What does it say about a record at number 50 in a top 50 list if the listener has only heard 60 newly released albums that year? Not a lot. We’ve listened to just over 80 albums released this year, so 10 from that amount seems reasonable to us. Of course some people object to putting albums in a numerical order, as they feel uncomfortable with the idea of turning music into some sort of competitive sport. We have no problem in doing this because every year there are certain records that we prefer over other ones and so a numerical order is a simple way to express that. Doing the 'here's a bunch of albums we enjoyed but we're not going to rank them' is a bit limp really isn't it? (Just don't ask us to name our favourite album of all time, because then we become a bit pathetic and mutter something about being impossible to choose / too much good music in a lifetime etc) Our difficulty has always been defining what constitutes and defines a favourite. Is it just a gut instinct? If it is, then don’t gut instincts change over time? So an album of the year list based purely on instinct is only relevant on the day it was written. Or is a favourite record one you play a lot over the course of a defined time, possibly more than any other? Last year we calculated our ‘favourite’ by tallying the number of times we played the album and then adjusted the play count for the number of months since we first heard it. We played Dead by Young Fathers, Evergreen by Broods and the debut album by Honeyblood way more than any other record released in 2014 and so they topped our list. This year we’ve calculated our favourite again (if we’re going to make a numbered list, then let’s use numbers to calculate the list as well) based on number of plays, but then we’ve also adjusted the output figures by a gut instinct / emotional connection factor as well. It actually didn’t change the position of the top 3 records, but further down the list, some that have been played less often than others found themselves higher up the list, because sometimes these records only suit a particular time, place, mood or atmosphere and hence get played less even although they’re brilliant. So tomorrow we start posting our 10 favourite records of 2015, two a day at 8.30am and 13.00pm GMT for the next 5 days. Of the records on our list, only 2 are debuts, 7 are UK based acts, 6 of the acts have featured on our previous albums of the year lists and 4 were on previous Breaking More Waves Ones to Watch lists. Here’s a recap of our previous number 1s. 2014 - Young Fathers - Dead 2013 - Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe 2012 - Lana Del Rey - Born To Die 2011 - The Unthanks - Last 2010 - The National - High Violet 2009 - Blue Roses - Blue Roses 2008 - Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
A short explanation of this post. As we’re almost halfway through the year we thought we’d publish our 9 most played albums of the year so far (most played takes into account the number of weeks the record has been released). ‘Most played’ can often be quite subjective but in this case it’s deadly accurate – we’ve been recording every play and part play on a spreadsheet. (We're geeky like that) Questions and answers Why isn’t such and such an album on the list? Because we haven’t played it much as these in the past 6 months. We might have not even played it all. This top 9 is taken from the 33 albums released in 2015 that we’ve listened to fully through at least once. If they’re your most played are they also your favourites? That depends on how you define favourite. By and large the answer to this is yes, they’re our favourites over the last 6 months. Why 9 – seems a funny number? Because by a strange mathematical turn, it turns out that there are 7 further records tying in 10th place at this moment in time. If we had played any one of those records just once they would have formed the 10th place on their own. Will you be doing your usual end of year write ups of your favourite records of the year? Yes, and we’d expect at least 4 or 5 in this list to feature, plus maybe one or two more that 'grow' on us as the year continues. The records are (in no particular order): Public Service Broadcasting – The Race For Space Purity Ring – Another Eternity Jamie XX – In Colour Curxes – Verxes The Staves – If I Was Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly Charli XCX – Sucker The Shires – Brave East India Youth – Culture Of Volume You can listen to 1 track from each album on the playlist below.
Towards the end of 2014, like every blog / website / music fan that likes to make sense of the musical year and document things for future reference, we published our end of year album list. It’s what Bob Stanley in his epic tome The History of Modern Pop would describe as ‘competition, excitement in league table form, pop music as a sport’. As Bob suggests, charts are very British thing, ‘fuel for a nation obsessed with train numbers and cricket statistics’. However, our end of year list wasn’t just one short rushed blog post decided on the spur of the moment but a reasonably weighty series of posts (see here). The positions of each album was simply but carefully calculated based on the number of times we’d played the album that year, the results being modified to account for the number of months since the album first reached our ears. The idea was simple - our favourite must be the one we had played the most. Yes, we were sad and geeky enough to record our listening history over 365 days, with all the complications that brings; multiple listens to one CD on a car journey and forgetting how many times we played it, part plays of albums etc. We’ll be doing something similar at the end of 2015, but quite clearly our end of year list is an ongoing project. So what does it look like after nearly one month? The graph above shows the results. As you can see we’ve listened to Charli XCX’s Sucker a lot. Full disclosure: Charli’s album isn’t released in the UK yet but we imported it from the U.S via Amazon where it’s already out. Also The Staves and The Shires records are advance copies from their respective labels, they're not due for public consumption for a few more weeks. So there you have it, our Albums of 2015 list (work in progress). Will any of those make it through to December? Time will tell. This is our last post on Breaking More Waves for a week whilst we take a short break. Normal posting will resume sometime around the 9th of February (edit - we'll be coming back a bit earlier on the 7th). We'll still be posting on Twitter (here) though.
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