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
Look, we know all the arguments about how Sound of and Ones To Watch lists at the end of the year are not good music and they aren’t the way art should be treated, but the fact is that here at Breaking More Waves we obsess over these things – irrespective of the subjective right or wrongs. As far as we're concerned in a full on self-centred way, these lists gives us pleasure and therefore we're going to embrace them - after all they're not illegal.
It’s why we currently have a piece of paper pinned to our wall with Ones to Watch 2015 written on it. Currently there are 57 names on that list and over the next month we’ll be narrowing that down to 10 or 15 that we will publish on the blog in late November. Then after that there will be the likes of the BBC Sound of 2015 list and the Blog Sound of 2015 poll both of which are revealed at the very end of November / start of December.
If you read the blog regularly you may have already seen a few hints of some of the artists we’re considering for our own list (and may be voting for with our vote on the Blog Sound poll) and here’s another.
We’ve already featured Zella Day and her Lana Del Rey like pop a number of times before and now we’re doing it again. Hypnotic is even more Lana than Lana (minus any putting on or taking off red dresses that Miss Del Rey likes to sing about), so if you’re not a fan of that sort of music, stop now. If you are then press play because this is a very good tune indeed, full of twangy guitars, beats that could have been taken from a hip-hop record and Zella singing a chorus about how ‘you do it to me so well.’ It’s taken from her 4 track EP on iTunes which features the equally good Sweet Ophelia, Compass and East Of Eden. It’s the best thing you can do with £1.99 today. If you’re not feeling that flush it’s also iTunes single of the week which means you can grab it for free. Why would you not want to do that? Alternatively you can just stream it from below.
Zella Day - Hypnotic
If you follow us on Twitter or have read every single blog post we’ve written over the last few months (thank you!) you might have noticed that whilst we were huge fans of Lana Del Rey’s debut record her latest album hasn’t really hit the spot for us, although interestingly it seems to have been much better received by American writers this time round than the first.
What we’d have liked from Lana would have been an album of gorgeously composed piano ballads / torch songs, with just the gentlest undercoating of orchestration and percussion, followed by some theatre residencies with Lana dressed in a black sequinned dress singing her heart out under a spotlight.
Whilst we hold on to that fantasy, Zella Day makes at least part of it real, only she’s Zella not Lana. We should shut up and let the music do the talking really rather than indulge you in our musical imagining shouldn't we? This one’s a beauty though.
Compass is available on Zella Day’s forthcoming EP which is released digitally and on 10” vinyl. If you store your vinyl in alphabetical order and by first name the ‘Z’ section could be about to become a lot more exciting.
Zella Day - Compass
Whilst 1965, the b-side to Zella Day’s debut single, trumps the a-side (listen here) let’s not forget that Sweet Ophelia is still a damn fine pop song. To remind us of that fact today Zella has released a video for it. Keeping things simple we get plenty of her face, a flower opening, some writhing around in the back seat of a car (no not like that), a bit of gentle dancing and of course, being a pop song, an earworm of a chorus. There’s no high art concept here, but that’s fine with us – plenty of time for big budget videos as Zella’s star rises.
Zella Day - Sweet Ophelia (Video)
Once upon a time the SXSW festival was known as the place to discover new music. These days of course, for those with the time and inclination you don’t need to get on a plane and fly to Austin, Texas to carry out that discovery, you can do it just as easily from the comfort of your own home as long as you have an internet enabled device. Of course nothing beats the visceral thrill of seeing a band up close and in the flesh at a sweaty club gig, but there are plenty of cheaper alternatives to achieve that than Austin’s big festival. So here’s one of our discoveries of this years event; we found her whilst staring at a laptop on our dining room table and drinking tea. Her name is Zella Day.
The SXSW website tells us some facts about Zella that you may or may not find interesting whilst you are consuming her tunes. For a start during her childhood her family owned the only coffee house in the town where she lived that had live music. At least we assume it was live music, SXSW tells us it was ‘life music’ which sounds pretty weighty and deep, but we have no idea what that it is. It also tells us that she now resides in Los Angeles and incorporates her simplistic roots and blends them with the eclectic sounds of the West Coast. You can hear that on her cover version of The White Stripes Seven Nation Army on her Soundcloud, but her other two songs, Sweet Ophelia and 1965, (both released on her debut single on April 7th via B3SCI Records) have a bigger pop nous. 1965 is actually the b-side of the record but is our favourite of the two - a swoon worthy epic with wild west twangs and touches of Lana Del Rey all over the shop. It's a crushingly beautiful pop ballad.
Zella Day - 1965
