Elton John once sang that Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, but we can assure you it’s not –wherever you are. It’s for loving – musical loving. Right now as this blog posts to the internet at 8.30 on Saturday morning we’re driving north to Sheffield. Why ? Follow us on twitter and we’ll reveal all later today. But whatever it is please don’t Hold It Against Me.
Oops! I Did It Again dropping another clue as to what a Lucky weekend this plans to be. Anyway, this blog is all about musical love, after all we were Born To Make You Happy.
So this is The Saturday Surf, the bit at the end of the week where we pick up the tracks that we would have dedicated a full post to if it wasn’t for the fact that we were too lazy / busy / unable to and bung it all in some sort of musical set menu. This week it’s a 3 course set meal featuring some synth pop for starters, some downbeat piano /electronic post-dubstep for mains and delicate acoustic folkish beauty to finish. It'll keep you dancing Till The World Ends
Black Light Dinner Party – Gold Chain
For hors d’oeuvres there’s Black Light Dinner Party. They’re a slow cooked delicacy, having only released three tracks to the internet since March, and each one has made it onto Breaking More Waves. Gold Chain is coated with a big slice of cheddar flavoured keyboard sounds and a spoon full of sugary lyrics. Consider our tastebuds and earbuds brought to life.
Like Black Light Dinner Party, Paper Crows are no strangers to Breaking More Waves. Gone is the B-Side to the bands single When Friends Survive; a doped-up come-down of minimalistic piano and blissful ambient shimmers, it will leaves you feeling just a little bit tender around the edges. Delicious.
For desert here’s something simple, sweet and mellow. Welcome to the quiet revolution. Greta Isaac is an unsigned singer songwriter who writes soothing, richly sensual songs built out of unhurried grace and calm. There’s a definite similarity to acoustic chanteuse Kate Walsh both vocally and in terms of composition. Really quite lovely.
One of our special secrets at Breaking More Waves is Alice Jemima. There’s something graciously pretty about her voice and the simple arrangements of her songs that gets us every time. Here’s a new one from her, but this one is a cover. Heard It On The Radio was the lone original on Interpreting The Masters Vol 1: A Tribute To Daryl Hall And John Oates by The Bird & The Bee, although in the context of the original album it’s quite easy to imagine that it was a cover of the yacht rock maestro’s themselves as it contained all the right pinpoints towards the big hair / big moustache / big hair duo.
So now in a twist to the tale Alice turns Heard It On The Radio into a cover, stripping the song right back and ditching her trademark vintage guitar sounds for beats and gentle warm synth sounds. What was that saying? Ah yes, simple, but effective.
Having played summer shows at Knee Deep Festival and Wychwood Festival we’re hoping for some winter gigs from Alice to put a little light and warmth into the cold dark nights.
This is such a desperately beautiful piece of music. The stand out track from the second EP from Daughter, Medicine is so touching that to even write words about it seems wrong. Instead you should just listen.
Listen to the gentle piano, the spacious spectral noise of background ambience, every little pulse of musical heartbeat, every whisper of emotion from Elena Tonra’s voice as she hints of a second chance. “You could still be what you want to, what you said you were when I met you, you’ve got a warm heart, you’ve got a beautiful brain, but it’s disintegrating from all the medicine,” the words spill out softly, and the world seems at once both a wonderful but also incredibly sad place.
Daughter play UK three headline shows billed as 'Daughter & Friends' in early December. Dates are 6th Dec @ Bristol, Cube Cinema, 7th Dec @ London, St Giles In The Fields, 8th Dec @ Manchester, Deaf Institute. The Wild Youth EP is released on the 21st November.
A few days ago we found out via the fast moving feed that is Twitter that Breaking More Waves had been longlisted in the Best Blog category in the 2011 Record of the Day awards. Blogs are still very much an underground part of the music industry in the UK, so it is nice to see one organisation recognising their value and celebrating it.
The word longlist is no exaggeration; there are over 70 blogs on the list. Record of the Day’s website states “Please take time to look online at this fantastic selection of blogs we have been monitoring this year. As you may know, some of these outlets are attracting readerships bigger than ever before, so which one do you regularly check out? When voting, think about consistency of bands blogged about, other music content featured during the past 12 months and also the style, look and feel of the blog. This award is only for UK based blogs.”
In our view Record of the Day has simply listed every blog they have heard of. There’s little evidence to suggest that they have been monitoring the blogs named. For example some of the blogs are not UK based at all and it would only take a quick view of their front page to establish this. There are also some blogs that have posted very irregularly and infrequently this year. Tim from The Daily Growl (an excellent but not recently particularly active blog) tweeted his embarrassment at being on the list this time. If Tim won, it would be rather like when Annie Lennox won Best British Female at the Brits, even though she hadn’t released an album that year.
Irrespective of these inconsistencies in the longlist, ultimately the ‘best blog’ will be chosen by the voting public and the record industry. This method of ‘winning’ is unfortunately nothing to do with what is best but rather whoever is able to galvanise the most people to vote for them. The outcome is therefore an X-Factor style result – a popularity contest and not a true poll of the best. Popular and the best do not always correlate – the evidence of the likes of Joe McElderry, Matt Cardle and Leon Jackson show that.
However if we sound somewhat critical of Record of the Day we should also praise them for featuring blogs in their awards at all. In email correspondence to Breaking More Waves (when we questioned some of the issues raised in this post about the longlist with the organisers) Record of the Day stated “We want to give blogs the exposure within the industry they deserve and draw attention to the great work being done every day by bloggers and want to reward them and draw attention to their great work at the awards each year.” For this we salute them and it’s for this reason that we ask you as reader of this blog to vote in the Record of the Day awards. Despite the discrepancies in the longlist and the use of a public vote rather than a panel of independent experts, the awards bring important exposure for the winning blog.
However before casting your vote, we’d like you to consider the outcome.
The winning blog will get a variety of benefits, including:
*Recognition within the music industry and a stamp on the blogger’s CV. This is useful if the author is planning a career in the industry or another job that is related. We’re not.
*More traffic driven towards the winning blog. This is useful if the blog carries advertising as it can make more money for your blog. We don’t.
*Ego inflating and bragging rights for the winner if they’re the sort of person that requires that kind of validation. We don’t – our ego is already big enough thank you.
*Increased traffic to the blog means more listens to the artists the blog features and therefore potentially more fans (and eventually sales) for those artists. This is the sole reason why winning would be good for Breaking More Waves, because our aim is to bring attention to the music we're passionate about.
However if you think another blog could benefit better from the outcome of winning then we recommend that you vote for them. The 2010 winner for example was Ollie Russian who writes My Band Is Better Than Your Band. Ollie was working as an A&R man for Atlantic Records and then got made redundant. He started his blog to keep himself ‘in the loop’ with the music industry and winning the award no doubt raised his profile for potential employment. Was his blog ‘the best’? That’s irrelevant – it was the exposure that benefitted him.
That is why, it may sound a strange thing to say, but unless you think the music we cover deserves more listeners, don’t vote for us. There are bloggers who could do with the exposure far more than we could.
In the meantime, we’ll keep plugging the great new music we hear. Like this band - Coastal Cities, a young 5 piece who hail from Buckinghamshire. They create a jerky, yelping package of indie disco struts that lurches drunkenly onto the dancefloor with the likes of Foals, The Wombats and The Drums in its pocket. Keep an eye out for a single some time in December.
You can vote for Breaking More Waves or any other blog in the Record of the Day awards by using this link. You have to supply a name and email address once you’ve clicked on the vote now section. (You can just put n/a for the other sections) Use your vote wisely.
