Emma-Louise - New Waves

Some of the more underground / alt. websites and blogs such as Crack In The Road expressed their dissatisfaction at the end of 2011 that the vast majority of blog Ones to Watch lists contained ‘artists they’ve spent the last twelve months salivating over, rather than attempting to predict whom they will be falling head over heels for in 2012.’ However the difficulty here is nobody knows 100% what's round the corner in terms of new music. How many music sites of any type predicted in 2010 that by the end of 2011 much of the internet would be getting uncontrollably excited (in both a positive and negative way) about Lana Del Rey? Very few if any of course, because quite simply they didn't know at that point in time.

It’s why at Breaking More Waves our Ones to Watch 2012 list is in the main a summary of some of the artists we’ve written about the previous year (or even before that) as they move towards a position of releasing their debut album, interspersed with just a few newbies who we guess may meet the falling in love with 2012 criteria.

If you want to see a preview of our Ones to Watch 2013, then you’ll have to read every blog post we feature this year starting from now, because it’s almost guaranteed that during the year some of the new acts we write about will end up on our December list. Others of course, we’ll never write about again. 95% of our posts go up at 8.30 in the morning or 8.30 at night GMT so why not check in each day?

So here’s today’s new act, our first of 2012.We have no idea yet if it’s a long term thing or a short term crush, but certainly Emma-Louise has got our heart racing a little.

This Brisbane based singer has already been named Breakthrough Artist Of The Year at the Jagermeister Independent Music Awards in her home country of Australia, seen her signature tune Jungle (streaming below) nominated for Triple J’s Hottest 100 songs of the year in Australia and has had the same song placed on TV show Grey's Anatomy.  Her debut EP Full Hearts and Empty Rooms topped the Australian independent music charts for weeks and we pretty much guarantee when you listen to the track you’ll see why.

In mood Jungle is a blissful come down pop song, but unlike much of its genre it has real soul and emotion without ever having to resort to any bellowing vocal gymnastics. Emma-Louise sings of the complexities, hurt, pain and confusion of love with a restraint and tension that ebbs and flows perfectly, making the song more real, more substantial than your typical off-the-peg studio based effort. Yet let’s not pigeon hole Emma-Louise as just some sort of cool but sensitive pop princess, because the rest of her output, which you can see and hear in the form of DIY videos on You Tube, display the signs of a much developed acoustic contemporary singer songwriter, not that dissimilar to Breaking More Waves favourite Lucy Rose.

With such a sweet vocal talent and ability to write affecting songs, we’re hoping, almost willing ourselves to fall even further head over heels with Emma-Louise in 2012. Maybe you will as well. 

Emma Louise - Jungle

Emma Louise - Bones

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

UK Blogger Albums of 2011

At the start of every year one of the UK’s longest serving and most under-rated music blogs Sweeping the Nation publishes the results of the UK Bloggers Album of the Year Poll. Each music blog that is involved (which includes our own) submits its 10 favourite albums of the year and through some sort of calculation wizardry Simon from Sweeping the Nation computes the results. You can see Breaking More Waves chosen 10 using this link and from that post there are links to articles on each album itself.

End of year lists from the likes of critics, journalists and music bloggers often tend to not reflect what the mainstream public has been buying. This year PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake won the Mercury Music prize and cropped up on so many year-end lists that we began to wonder if the list writers were actually the same person. Unsurprisingly it tops the UK bloggers poll as well. Yet the masses were largely ambivalent – the album only reached no.8 in the album chart and nose-dived quickly after that.

If the writers are ‘right’ then why is it that so often the public ignore them? After all isn’t one of the roles of a critic to help sieve out the good, the bad and the ugly to help enable the record buying public make informed choices? Isn’t their job to bring the underground to the mainstream? And to kick the dull and average into touch? Well if it is, they’re not doing a particularly effective job. For example, Jessie J’s album is 2011’s biggest selling debut album in the UK despite the critical panning it got.

Maybe these days the role of the critic is dead, as even if they do highlight the good they don’t have the authoritative voice they had in the past. These days everyone’s a critic. Set up your own website (we did), post a comment on someone’s review, ‘like’ something on Facebook, text a radio station and tell them that the new song they’re playing is amazing – all of this mass interaction dissolves the power of the professional critic to nothing but a vague limp cloud hovering somewhere in the distance.

So this is the UK music bloggers list of their favourite albums. What ‘influence’ it has we  guess would be close to zero. More likely anyone reading it or seeing it will criticise it one way or another. It will either be seen as ‘a good list’ because it represents your own tastes or a ‘bad list’ because some of the records chosen you haven’t heard or don’t like.

This is how music criticism works these days – through blinkered prejudice with everyone as a participant.

The Top 5 (in reverse order) are

5 RADIOHEAD - The King of Limbs

4 WILD BEASTS - Smother

3 tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

2 BON IVER - Bon Iver

1 PJ HARVEY - Let England Shake

You can see the full list at Sweeping The Nation using this link, together with the blogs that voted.

So here’s our criticism, or rather our analysis of its relevance to ourselves, because it seems that’s what criticism is these days – it’s become very inward rather than outward looking. Of the 75 records chosen, 8 of Breaking More Waves favourite 10 made the list (with a neat spread throughout the top 75) indicating that by and large our tastes bear some similarity to our peer group. The only omissions of our chosen 10 were Florence & the Machine’s Ceremonials and our number 1 album of the year Last by The Unthanks, however we strongly suspect we were the only blog to vote for Last and that a high proportion of the bloggers haven’t even heard it.

Whilst PJ Harvey achieving number 1 placement is no surprise, there are a couple of records in the top 10 that may raise eyebrows.

 First is Radiohead’s high placing at number 5. The King of Limbs has been widely discussed on the internet this year, but the overall consensus was that it was far from their best. Radiohead however have always been massively revered by UK bloggers, so we suspect the fan factor crept in here giving bias towards their position. From our perspective we remain huge Radiohead fans; In Rainbows, Kid A and OK Computer are some of our most treasured recordings that we own, but with the exception of Codex and Lotus Flower, The King of Limbs left us cold.

A second surprise comes with the high placing of Noah and the Whale’s Last Night On Earth at no.8, which is a record that seems to have slipped off the radar a little and not been particularly well featured in the end of year lists, even though it’s a very solid album. So, it’s nice to see an element of the UK blogging community giving that record some recognition.

A further point of note is the lack of influence US hip-hop has on the UK bloggers poll. In fact the highest placed rap record is Ghostpoet (our own no.4 album) at number 20, but this is an unreservedly British sounding record.

Other albums that we would have expected to appear on the list include M83, Yuck and Rustie, but none of these make an appearance.

Finally, a small cheer for our favourite member of Girls Aloud - Nicola Roberts - and her album Cinderella’s Eyes. If you’ve followed us on twitter or have seen our own end of year list, you’ll know we’ve been big fans of Miss Roberts in 2011 and it’s pleasing to see that her album has managed to sneak onto the list at 58.  It shows that some UK bloggers know a superb honest pure-pop album when they hear one.

So overall, a good list in so far as it neatly summarises what UK blogs have been getting excited about this year. 

Thanks to Simon from Sweeping The Nation for his work in compiling it. Here’s the link again to the full run down at Sweeping The Nation.

Tomorrow we’ll be bringing another blog compiled list –  the results and winner of the Blog Sound of 2012– UK bloggers alternative to the BBC Sound of 2012. For now, here’s the winner of the 2011 UK Blogger Album poll.

PJ Harvey - The Words That Maketh Murder

Breaking More Waves 2012

Welcome to 2012 and another year of Breaking More Waves. Happy New Year to you. Last year we made a few changes to the blog, namely dropping album and gig reviews and becoming more focussed on new music. We also ran a new nostalgic feature every Monday called Music That Made Me.

This year it’s really more of the same without Music That Made Me - that came to its logical planned conclusion. 

One thing that readers say they like about Breaking More Waves is the more discursive articles so this year we’ll be running a series of these called In Defence Of. Expect us to attempt to support some pretty undefendable arguments. Feel free to tell us why we’re horrendously wrong with our justifications in the comments section. We’ve got thick skin and don’t take offence – whatever you say.

We’ll still be bringing some debate and opinion into the regular new music posts as well though. We hope that readers get a sense of our personality through our words. We certainly don’t want to be one of those blogs that just writes three abstract sentences of drivel that actually say diddly squat – we’ll leave that to the pro or wannabe pro music journalists. What we’re doing here is fan journalism. It’s different. It’s more honest (we’re not being paid or edited) and it doesn’t have to justify itself in any way to the cool kids, the music industry or anyone else. It also doesn't have to be seen to be influential or hit readership targets. As we subscribe very much to the concept of 'it's ok to like any style of music' it also means that we'll continue to post whatever songs and artists we like, whatever genre they come from irrespective of they are major label, indie label or unsigned, commercial or alternative. The chances are you won't see much metal, reggae, hip-hop or jazz here, but we also reserve the right to contradict that statement if we find something we like in any of those genres.

There is however one small change to the blog this year, which you can see below. We thought New Year would be a nice time to start using the sexy new HTML 5 player from Soundcloud.It looks good and has no flash so it should play on mobile devices as well, which the previous Soundcloud didn't easily. 

Just over 7 months ago when we first featured Lana Del Rey on the blog we had no idea of the commotion on the internet she was about to create. 'We're not quite sure where her songs will fit in today's pop landscape, but we're looking forward to hearing more,' we said, before the buzz kicked in. It seems that for now that Lana and her music belong to this moment, albeit in some ways she's still very much an enigma. How 2012 will pan out for her only time will tell. So let's enjoy the here and now with this incredibly stylish video packed full of artistic vision, a pretty first-class remix and as some wise old pop star once said, the future will take care of itself somehow.

Happy New Year !

Lana Del Rey - Born To Die (Gemini Remix)

Lana Del Rey - Born To Die