Blog Sound of 2012 - Results

The votes are in, counted and verified and today Brooklyn's girl-fronted indiefunk-pop kids Friends are named as the winners of the very first UK blog 'tips' poll - the Blog Sound of 2012.

The Blog Sound of 2012 canvassed a group of UK music bloggers to see what artists they would like to see being successful this year. The idea had originally been discussed in 2010 by the authors of this very blog, The Von Pip Musical Express and Sweeping the Nation and was rolled out for the first time at the end of 2011. The intention was to provide an alternative to the high profile BBC Sound of list, but not to compete with it. Consider it if you will as a complimentary dish on the menu. The BBC Sound of list may be the main course but the Blog Sound of 2012 is a side dish with a few different musical flavours that flesh out the taste palette.

The Blog Sound of 2012 list was always seen as an experiment as it could never be guaranteed to provide a full alternative to the BBC list – voting took place at the same time as the BBC’s – there was a strong possibility that some artists may crop up on both. The end result was just so, with 2 acts (Lianne La Havas and eventual winners Friends) duplicating on each. For the full list of the 15 nominated acts chosen by the 30+ bloggers involved and links to the bloggers sites look here.

It’s no surprise to see Friends winning the Blog Sound of 2012.They are after all a band that has been the subject of an online frenzy during the later part of 2011. Of the 800+ worldwide blogs listed on Hype Machine over 50 of them have featured the group's song I’m His Girl and nearly as many have posted the track Friends Crush, which for a new band is a massive number. Music bloggers are often accused of jumping on the same bandwagon and in the case of Friends they would be guilty as charged. Winning the first ever Blog Sound of 2012 poll seems highly appropriate.

However let’s not take jumping on the bandwagon as a criticism. The vast majority of music bloggers write their blogs because they are passionate and excited about new music. When they hear a track that moves them, they want tell the world about it. That’s why sometimes ‘blog buzz’ occurs, because the song has excited the musical taste buds of lots of bloggers listening and writing. ‘Blog buzz’ is seen by cynics as something false and lacking in long term depth, but hell, if you’re a lover of music you’ll know that sometimes not everything can be carefully considered with a view to the long term. The very essence of pop music as an art form requires people to fall in (and out) of love with it, often over quick timespans.

So Friends are popular with music bloggers. The tracks they’ve put out so far create a neat bridge between pop, r ‘n’b and indie. Their percussive jams have a clattering dance floor sassiness with funky disco grooves merging creamily with big cool pop overtones. Imagine Friendly Fires and Lisa Lisa And The Cult Jam getting down in some sort of hip club - that is the sound of Friends.

They might end up blowing up and being one of the most exciting bands of 2012 or we may all wonder ‘just what were those bloggers thinking’? More often than not blog buzz doesn't translate into mainstream popularity. That is the beauty of pop music. Nobody is actually an expert, some of us just think we are.

This is the run down of the Top 5 most voted for artists on the Blog Sound of 2012. If you missed it, you can see the our own Ones to Watch 2012 using that link, from which our 5 nominations for the Blog Sound List were chosen.

1.Friends

Brooklyn’s coolest new kids on the block.  The winners of the UK Blog Sound of 2012. The big question is do they have a bucket or thimble full of pop hooks and grooves to keep us satisfied after the buzz dies?

2.Theme Park

Runners up in the Blog Sound 2012 are this twin brother fronted London band that first featured on Breaking More Waves in May. Their Talking Heads / Orange Juice flavoured blend of indie rock has recently been picked up by a number of US bloggers after initially being covered by UK blogs. Rather like Friends, the question remains have they got more than a couple of decent starters to keep us satisfied until dessert and coffee?

3.Beth Jeans Houghton

Showing that blogs are not all just about ‘buzz’, Beth Jeans Houghton may surprise some with a high third place positioning having been around for some time now. In fact she was first featured on this blog way back in 2009 but will finally release her album in 2012. We’re looking forward towards hearing how her warped folk pop translates into a full record.

4.French Wives

We suspect that for the Blog Sound poll Glasgow based French Wives received a number of votes from Scottish blogs, but deservedly so. Creating rollicking, powerful, passionate indie rock songs that fans of the likes of Arcade Fire and Broken Records will enjoy immensely, French Wives trajectory can surely only be upwards as more people discover them, particularly when they play live. An album is also forthcoming.

5.Daughter

Elena Tonra and her band create sparse, frosted, haunting songs full of space and texture. There’s a flat-out sadness to what Daughter are creating – it’s music that’s very still, yet very emotional. With a couple of well received EP’s under the belt in 2011, 2012 holds much promise for Daughter

The Blog Sound of 2012

Over the last 15 days Breaking More Waves has been publishing its very own selection of artists, musicians and bands that it believes are Ones to Watch for 2012.

New act tip lists seem to get more numerous every year and none is more ubiquitous than the BBC Sound of list, which we will be posting our thoughts on separately in a few weeks, after our traditional run down of our favourite ten albums of 2011.

Back at the end of 2010 a small bunch of independent music bloggers, including Breaking More Waves discussed the idea of collating the combined thoughts, knowledge and passions of the UK blogging community to create the Blog Sound of 2012. The idea was in no way intended as a platform to criticise the BBC’s Sound of List, which Breaking More Waves has previously been involved in and continues to support. The BBC’s list acts as an invaluable tool to help new artists gain strong media publicity for their music in a time when it’s becoming increasingly difficult for such acts to establish themselves. The Blog Sound of 2012 is more an experiment to decide if a pool of UK music bloggers can come up with some interesting alternatives.

33 music blogs were involved in the voting process, with each one nominating 5 acts for the list.The participating blogs were A Tidal Wave Of Indifference ,Breaking More Waves, God Is In the TV, Sweeping The Nation, The Von Pip Musical Express, The Recommender, Faded Glamour, Drunken Werewolf, Flying With Anna, Not Many Experts, Underclassed Idle Ideas, Sonic Masala, Mudkiss, The Ring Master, Both Bars On, Music From A Green Window, Dots And Dashes, The Daily Growl, And Everyone's A DJ, Kowolskiy, Just Music That I Like, Cruel Rhythm, The Blue Walrus, Music Fans Mic, Seventeen Seconds, Eaten By Monsters, Seven Sevens, Unpeeled, New Rave Brain Wave, Peenko, Music Liberation, My Bands Better Than Your Band and Song By Toad.

From these blogs suggestions a most voted for long list of 15 artists has been collated, of which a top 5 will be published in a few weeks, with an eventual winner being announced. Because of the selection of blogs that voted, the final list has a fairly strong bias towards indie / rock and folk / acoustic music but there's still much variety within.

And here, in no particular order are the 15 artists that have been chosen as the Blog Sound of 2012.

Houdini Dax – Brit-Pop influenced rough n ready psychedelic indie rock (Link to Facebook)

Lianne La Havas – Soft acoustic songwriter with soul and jazz tinges (Link to website)

Theme Park – Indie band recalling Talking Heads with danceable tropical pop (Link to Facebook)

French Wives – Glasgow based jubilant indie (Link to Facebook)

The Good Natured – Female fronted trio with dark pop undercurrents. (Link to website)

Alt J – Loose sounding, quirky, organic groove based band from Leeds. (Link to Facebook)

The Jezabels – Surging indie rock from Sydney with strong female vocals (Link to website)

Lucy Rose – Sweet, pure, honey voiced gentle acoustic singer songwriter. (Link to website)

Bastille – Easily accessible, catchy, Hype Machine soaring pop. (Link to website)

Washington - Dramatic confident pop from adopted Oz girl born in Papa New Guinea (Link to Myspace)

Friends – Rhythmic girl fronted band with a hint of Tom-Tom Club and R ‘n’ B references. (Link to Myspace)

Meursault –Tagged as folktronica in some quarters, with 2 LP’s already behind them. (Link to Facebook)

Daughter – Sparse experimental female fronted folk (Link to Facebook)

Beth Jeans Houghton – Leftfield alt folk with all sorts thrown in (Link to Facebook)

Outfit – Layered sounding indie group that have been compared to Wild Beasts. (Link to Facebook)

Of the 15 acts chosen 3 of them also appear on the Breaking More Waves Ones to Watch list ( Lucy Rose, Lianne La Havas and Outfit) with one of them (Beth Jeans Houghton) appearing on our own Ones To Watch list back in 2009. 8 of the 15 have appeared in some form or other on the blog this year, suggesting that the tastes of Breaking More Waves are not always that far removed from our blogging peer group.

As always with anything that we feature on the blog, we recommend that you listen to all of the artists above – maybe you’ll discover something that you haven’t heard before and love, which is ultimately the point of music blogs.

Keep a look out for the top 5 and winner of the Blog Sound of 2012, coming soon – in the meantime here are a couple of tracks of two of the nominated acts that we've never featured on Breaking More Waves before - The Jezabels and Friends.

The Jezabels - Endless Summer

Friends - Friend Crush

Theme Park - Wax (Halls Remix)

Ambient. A genre of music has evolved through the decades from high-brow studio experimentation to d-i-y bedroom electronica, but the fundamentals remain the same; low-budget, minimalistic sounds, with the emphasis on synths, samples, loops and lightweight beats. It’s more concerned with atmospherics than songs or melody. At its best the laptop wonder kids that are its architects assemble moving soundscapes far removed from the bedsits they create them in. Yet with its more recent blogospheric rebirth come numerous potential protagonists, too many of them being imitators rather than innovators, with music that’s too languid, too pale, too inconsequential, too washed out for anyone but the underground to embrace. Even one of the genre’s main modern sub-groups – chill wave - has found one of its prime leaders releasing a long player that is akin to a limp wrist slapping you with a wet blanket – this review by Paul Lester writing for the BBC says everything we would want to say about Within and Without.

Yet despite the genre firing more blanks than it does real hitters, there are a few who whilst not stepping outside of the boundaries of their predecessors, do what they do very well. One such artist is Halls (previously featured here and here) who nuzzled our ears with his druggy, ghostly beauty on tracks such as Solace and Chakra Drums. Now he’s turned his remixing skills to a band that a number of blogs including ourselves are getting cautiously excited about – Theme Park (pictured above). We’ve already described their song Wax as 'classy very English sounding pop', now Halls turns it into the musical equivalent of a gentle beat-laden haunted house.

Wax (Halls Remix) by Theme Park

The Saturday Surf #12

To quote Jarvis Cocker, we’re currently ‘somewhere in a field in Hampshire,’ at The Good Weekend, a new independent festival. So this is a somewhat shortened Saturday Surf, rounding up some of the best new tracks that have appeared on line this week that we haven’t managed to dedicate a full blog post to.

Here are just three songs that we think your ears deserve.

Theme Park – Wax

Talking Heads. It was the obvious reference point that everyone jumped on when they first heard Milk by Theme Park and we were no different. However Wax, one of the two tracks that will feature on their debut single is utterly different. Released through ParadYse, (yes that capital Y in the middle is not a mistake) an imprint under Transgressive Records, Wax is a classy, very English sounding pop song with an infectiously mellow vibe and deliciously smooth vocals. It’s time to open the drawer marked Ones to Watch again.

Wax by Theme Park

Deep Cut – About Face

Deepcut in Surrey is probably best known for its army barracks where four trainees died between 1995 and 2002, arousing significant media interest. Luckily Deep Cut the band has no association with the place, their affiliations being musical ones. We first mentioned them in a New Waves feature back in June and since then the group have played the BBC Introducing Stage at Glastonbury and are readying a single Something’s Got To Give for release. In the meantime this new track About Face has cropped up on line – a propulsive piece of old school indie for fans of bands such as The Joy Formidable, The Primitives and Lush.

Deep Cut - About Face

Metronomy – The Bay (Clock Opera Remix)

Fresh from their Mercury Prize nomination, Metronomy get all shaken up by Clock Opera, a group that have become virtually Breaking More Waves residents since they first appeared here in July 2009. With an album from Clock Opera finally due to make its appearance later this year, we’re already wondering is there a chance of them appearing on the Mercury 2012 list?

Short and sweet, that's this weeks Saturday Surf.

Metronomy - The Bay (Clock Opera Remix)

The Saturday Surf #2

It’s been a good week for music. Rumours spread that the KLF are back together performing ambient folk under the name FLK (we do love a KLF rumour, no matter what it is - have a look here and here) plus more information about our favourite member of Girls Aloud - Nicola Roberts – LP began to emerge (here). Now we’re going to make it even better with our nearly new feature called The Saturday Surf, where we round up a number of tracks that didn’t quite make it onto Breaking More Waves with their own individual post, but all get our approval.

Whilst we’re waiting for Nicola’s arrival, new Spice Girls colliding with Bananarama girl-pop duo Oh My! shoved out a remix of their debut track Run This Town which we first featured back in March. With jaggy synths and we’ve got attitude hooks this is worth clicking on the arrow to download for free. Oh My! have been following classic pop traditions and rather than slogging their way round toilet venues playing live shows to twenty people for credibility, they are out there doing PA’s at schools – giving the kids what they want, what they really really want.

Oh My! - Run This Town [TMS remix]

Brighton’s Rizzle Kicks have already been given the Breaking More Waves treatment a number of times and here they are again with their new track Prophet (Better Watch It). It continues their cheeky, innovative and playful blend of rap / pop with soulful vocals that’s not a million miles away from the wonderful De La Soul. Rizzle Kicks will be one of the acts playing this years Great Escape Festival launch party in Brighton next week before they head up north to feature on the BBC Introducing Stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Carlisle.

Prophet (Better Watch It) by Rizzle Kicks

Next up is a new band that a small number of blogs have picked up on. Theme Park is nothing to do with Alton Towers, Disney World or Legoland and everything to do with making music that sounds very much like Talking Heads with a slightly tropical twist. The band consists of two brothers and three friends from London. Milk is their suitably groovy introduction.

Milk by Theme Park

For those who like soft feminine vocals and acoustic tenderness you could do no wrong by wrapping your ears around the songs of Alice Jemima. Having introduced you to her with two tracks Ain’t It Funny and Won’t Take You For Granted, here’s another tune – The Woman. With its gorgeously calm melody and understated charm it’s a little diamond of a song.

The Woman - Live @ Toybox Studios, with bass & violin by Alice Jemima

Finally ex Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man and ex Les Incompetents dude Fred Macpherson returns with a new project – Spector. Their debut single Never Fade Away is a crooning pop extravaganza, immaculately produced with just a drop of nostalgia – it’s the kind of classic tune that your mum would like – and if she does then your mum has damn fine taste. Probably the finest work to date from a man whose twitter strapline states “I like music. Maybe more than music likes me.”

Spector - Never Fade Away