Blog Sound of 2013 Long List Revealed

3 Dec

We hope you have been enjoying our 2013 Preview feature; we’re in the home stretch now with the final five of our artists to Listen Out For being revealed this week. We’re not the only ones who have been getting excited about what next year may bring. Alongside 48 other UK Blogs, we voted for acts we think will blow up in 2013 in The Blog Sound of 2013 Poll, in fact the five we are revealing this week were our votes.

Below are some details about the poll and the Long List of nominated artists, which was revealed today and includes four of our own long list of bands to Listen Out For. The top five and ultimate winner of the poll will be announced in January.

“The Blog Sound Poll was first published in 2011. The concept of the poll wasn’t to criticise the established BBC Sound of list, but simply an experiment to see if UK music bloggers could come up with its own list of emerging artists that was more representative of their community and give the artists that were nominated some extra publicity. Indeed the idea was to compliment the BBC list in many ways by providing an alternative to compare and contrast.

Last year’s final long list provided some interesting alternatives to the BBC list; most notably it included Alt-J, this year’s Mercury Prize winners, who didn’t feature on the BBC list at all.
The Blog Sound of 2013 poll has expanded with 49 UK blogs nominating their 5 favourite emerging artists. Just over 170 acts received at least 1 vote. The winning act received votes from around 25% of all bloggers.

The long list represents the very best of new music and draws from major labels, indie labels and completely unsigned acts. The likes of Haim may be featuring on a lot of new music tip lists at the moment, but the Blog Sound poll also highlights lesser known bands such as Curxes and Randolph’s Leap, bands that do not have big PR representation, and this is what makes the Blog Sound list fascinating and exciting.

The poll was organised by Robin Seamer (Breaking More Waves) and Andy Von Pip (The Von Pip Express). “Each blog was allowed to vote for five acts and the diversity of the nominations was staggering. Based on the evidence of the spread of votes anyone that says that music bloggers are sheep and are all writing about the same artists has got it wrong. However, the results of the poll show that certain artists do have a lot of support and love from a significant portion of UK bloggers and those artists make up the Blog Sound of 2013 list,” says Robin”.

The Nominated Artists For The Blog Sound Of 2013

In alphabetical order:

AlunaGeorge – Infectious R&B influenced pop from London
“Your Drums, Your Love”

Curxes – Dark industrial-pop electronic duo from Brighton and Portsmouth
“Spectre”

Chvrches – Scottish electro pop trio formed from a variety of other bands
“The Mother We Share”

Daughter – Minimal / ambient sounding folk
“Medicine”

Haim – Classic rock from LA with pop sensibilities
“Don’t Save Me”

Laura Mvula – Jazz / soul singer hailing from Birmingham
“She”

MØ – Hip soulful female vocal electronic pop from Denmark
“Pilgrim”

Palma Violets – Raw and energetic indie rock band
“Best of Friends”

Pins – Edgily cool and raucous all female indie band from Manchester
“Shoot You”

Randolph’s Leap – Glasgow based indie folk pop with a twist of brass
“Hermit”

Rhye – Smooth and blissful pop duo
“The Fall”

Savages – Intense post-punk with female vocals
Savages – Flying To Berlin

Seasfire – Modern rock band from Bristol who mix electronic beats with guitars
“We Will Wake”

The Neighbourhood – Atmospheric Californian 5 piece rock / pop band
“Let It Go”

Tom Odell – Piano based singer songwriter originally from Chichester
“Another Love”