Back at the end of 2008 we named Lykke Li’s debut album Youth Novels as our seventh favourite of the year. In 2011 the follow up Wounded Rhymes crops up at number nine. Written in LA in early 2010 and recorded at Atlantis Studios in Stockholm, Wounded Rhymes is an album of shadowy pop songs that owes some debt to Phil Spector but never sounds fully retro. Retaining in part the rhythms and percussive beats of her debut, Wounded Rhymes finds Lykke Li heading off into different corners of fantasy and reality, her vocal sounding stronger, full of outwards confidence and yet also more melancholic and vulnerable. From the girl-gang sexy arrogance of Get Some with its chorus of ‘like a shotgun needs an outcome, I’m your prostitute you gonna get some,’ to the Dusty Springfield referencing torch song Sadness is A Blessing, Wounded Rhymes is an album that has at its core ten well-crafted songs filled an abundance of melodic and lyrical dexterity.
Whilst the main subjects of Wounded Rhymes, that of unrequited love, heartbreak and the pain of bruised and broken relationships clutter up the halls of pop music like old ladies queuing at a jumble sale, in 2011 almost nobody took these themes and handled them better than Lykke Li, except that is for one other person - more of that in a few days time.
Whokill by tUnE-yArDs is one of the most eccentric, inventive and bold albums of the year. Formed out of some sort of crazy cartwheeling self-confidence Merrill Garbus yelps, hollers and howls her way through an album that features moments of stomping jungle percussion, stop-start jitters, afro-punk, warped jazz and brutal strikes.
When Garbus performs live she often paints tribal streaks on her face and that tribalism can be heard within Whokill. It’s raw, edgy and full of freaky experimentation, yet it never veers too far away from pop. Whilst not sonically similar, the vision of tUnE-yArDs is similar to Bjork’s in that she is very much creating something completely of her own. Quite simply there are few musical comparisons. In a world where music has reached middle age, where nothing is truly original anymore, Whokill gets about as close as you can get to uniqueness without ever being unlistenable rubbish.
For the next ten days we’ll be running down the Breaking More Waves blog top 10 albums of the year.
What this top 10 list isn’t is a comprehensive analysis and consideration of every album that has been released this year. If you want to see what people who spend all day listening to music and analysing it to decide if it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ think are the ‘best’ albums of 2011 then visit the critics end of year polls. Most of these polls have been decided by a committee of journalists and therefore the eventual outcome smooths out the individual quirks, likes and passions of each individual as the albums with the most votes rise to the top of the pile.
Breaking More Waves is fan journalism. This means those quirks, likes and loves of the author / fan can be displayed brutally (and beautifully) on the internet, warts and all. This list isn’t a ‘best of’ list. It can’t possibly be. We’ve heard only a small handful of the hundreds / thousands of new albums that have been released this year. Our list represents all of our prejudices as a fan, it's formed through our emotional connections not only to the music, but the artists as well. For example a critic might write off Britney Spears latest album immediately because it’s in part flat generic pop music. However if you are a fan the chances are that when halfway through Femme Fatale the quality drops a little (ok, a lot) you’ll forgive her because it’s still Britney and Britney is amazing, full stop.
Of course that’s not to say that this list is simply a list of our ten all-time favourite bands that have released albums this year. As fans we can also be massively disappointed – love isn’t always blind. But the reality is that this is a list of favourite rather than best of albums that we’ve heard this year. We’ll be posting about one album each day until we reach our favourite at number 1.
So how have we chosen our top ten ? We've applied a little bit of musical mathematics. Our top 10 albums have been selected on three criteria. First, and most importantly, the musical quality and emotional connection - the critical judgement part. Second the number of times that we've played an album this year, divided by the number of months it has been since we first heard it. The theory here is that if an album is really a favourite we'll play it a lot. We've got the play counts figures from our Last FM page, which doesn't represent all of our listening, much of it having been done on CD players away from Last FM such as the car, but it gives a reasonable impression. Thirdly the fan factor - as we described with our Britney example. We've gone to extraordinary lengths to apply these three criteria, putting each one into an excel spreadsheet and listing every album we've heard this year that we think is good, then weighting each factor to give a score. So the musical quality is 55%, the number of times played is 30% and the fan factor is 15%. The output is our top 10 albums.
If you’re interested in what’s moved us this year, check back each day for the next ten days.
This year has seen a number of releases by artists that have featured in past favourite albums lists on the blog - from Bon Iver (our favourite album of 2008) to Florence & The Machine (in the top 10 in 2009). How do they fare in 2011 ? And what of some of our Ones to Watch from last year ? Only four of them - Clare Maguire, James Blake, Misty Miller and The Vaccines actually got as far as releasing an album - are any of those in our Top 10? And what of artists we've got excited about on twitter this year ? We've given a lot of love for Nicola Roberts, but her album flopped commercially. Could she make an appearance or was our love for Girls Aloud's finest just a passing one night stand ? To date her album has only cropped up on the Guardians top 50 albums at number 38 but of course pop and dance music very rarely finds goodwill from the critics.
We’re not asking you to agree with our choices, feel free to disagree or comment on them if you want, but never say that that we’re ‘wrong’ because these are the records we’ve connected with. This is personal.
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.
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)
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.
