We’re getting ready to say goodbye to another year and here at Breaking More Waves it’s been a very successful one.
How do we define this success? In three simple ways:
1. We’re still doing what we do. That might not sound a particularly impressive statement, but to continue to keep Breaking More Waves running, this year posting nearly 50 more times than any previous year and hitting over 500 posts in total, against the pressures of a demanding full time job and family is success in itself.
2. To still get huge pleasure and enjoyment out of doing what we do.
3. Having cheekily asked on Twitter if anyone would be prepared to pay to read our blog posts and getting a few positive answers, in January of this year, alongside another music blogger Adam from Alphabet Bands we put this to the test and participated in a non-stop 24 hour Blogathon to raise money for Cancer Research asking readers (as well as friends and family) to sponsor us. We were stunned by the reaction from readers and their generosity, eventually raising just over £1,500 between the 2 blogs in the 24 hour period. Receiving £50 donations from complete strangers who were reading our posts was an incredibly humbling experience and without doubt the best and most valueable thing we have ever done in Breaking More Waves 6 and a half year history.
Goodbye 2014.
We’re closing our year by featuring 12 of our favourite songs we've featured this year, each one in video form. For once, we 're providing no commentary on the individual tracks, we think we've said all we want to say for one year.
This isn’t a definitive list as we’ve chosen 1 song from each month, meaning that on really good months a number of great songs have had to be sacrificed and some songs that we adore haven’t made the cut as they never had a video. We've also chosen 12 different artists.
See you in 2015.
January
Låpsley - Station
February
Indiana - Solo Dancing
March
Jungle - Busy Earnin'
April
Zella Day - Sweet Ophelia
May
La Roux - Let Me Down Gently
June
Broods - Mother & Father
July
Laura Doggett - Phoenix
August
Charli XCX - Break The Rules
September
Seinabo Sey - Pistols At Dawn
October
Clarence Clarity - Those Who Can't Cheat
November
IYES - Glow
December
Young Fathers - Get Up
“This year’s Mercury Prize list was pretty good all in all wasn’t it?”
Those were the words that we opened our run down of our favourite / most played albums of 2014 and those are the words that we’ll also finish with, as we name Dead by Scottish group Young Fathers as our most played and favourite album of 2014. It’s the fourth record from the Mercury Prize list in our top 15 records of the year, and if we extended these posts to 20 a fifth would have appeared.
Of course Dead didn’t just get on the Mercury Prize long list, it won it, bringing the record to a wider public consciousness than the relatively underground following it had before; Dead reportedly had the second lowest sales figures of the nominated records before the Mercury, with just a few thousand copies sold.
Likewise Dead wasn’t a record that was immediately on this music blogger’s radar. In fact the first time we heard of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham Hastings was in November 2013 when compiling the Blog Sound of 2014 poll votes and another blog Music Like Dirt, put forward their name as one of the blog's votes as a favourite emerging artist. Then come March 2014 we put out a tweet asking our followers what records they’d most enjoyed in the first quarter of the year and a number of people answered back stating Young Fathers. It was time to investigate further. One listen and we were immediately drawn in by the album's raw soulful inventiveness.
Dead is a record that defies genres. There’s elements of hip-hop, trip-hop, electronica, world music,and soul that clash headlong with weird rhythms, clattering percussion, chanting and disorientating drones. Yet accompanying all of the oddity there’s a surprising number of pop hooks. Get Up even sounds like a party pop hit in the making. If we were going to draw one comparison it would probably be with Massive Attack, but a Massive Attack that weren’t afraid to throw anything and everything into the cooking pot.
As we said, this year’s Mercury Prize list was pretty good all in all wasn’t it? But the winner was even better. Dead by Young Fathers is our album of the year. It's dead good.
Young Fathers - Get Up (Video)
Young Fathers - War
Young Fathers may have won the Mercury Prize but it seems there isn’t universal acclaim for their LP Dead - it’s been a noticeable absence from quite a few of the end of year lists that have been published so far, which we find rather surprising, being as inventive, raw and absorbing as it is.
Here at Breaking More Waves we’re very much in the thumbs up for Dead school, having first discovered the LP earlier this year when we asked our Twitter followers in Spring what albums they’d been enjoying so far in 2014 and one that got a number of shouts was Dead. It seems our Twitter followers have excellent taste. Young Fathers is also a fascinating live band; their show we saw this year at Glastonbury was one of the most intense performances we've seen for some time.
Now the Scottish three piece have released a new track to the world. According to the band’s label Some Come Soon was formed when they got together “for a wild night in a studio ran by a man called Daddy Kev. Under the influence of surf, skunk and earthquakes they got choral, and so the end of the world became a pop song.” It could quite easily fit on Dead, but is a stand-alone single on its own right due for release on the 1st December.
Young Fathers - Some Come Soon
