Although posts will be a little more sporadic over this festive period, we will still do our best to bring you a handful of musical gifts.
As we edge towards the end of 2009, which has turned out to be a truly wonderful year for The Recommender, we thought we would provide you with a quick thank you. We list below two tracks that have popped up on the blog radars in recent weeks, together with two outstanding videos.
These two tunes are of the kind that get many repeats and it’s rare to have a matching video that is as equally addictive. Enjoy..
There’s going to be some huge and rather lovely things coming out of this blog in the new year. 2010 will not only see our facelift completed, but it will also be the year in which The Recommender blog will launch it’s monthly parties in Brighton. Look out world, you have been warned!!! In the mean time, HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!!
Phew! We are a little out of breath here at Recommender Towers. Mainly because we’ve just had it whipped from us upon hitting play on Nedry’s songs. We call them songs, but that’s a little misleading, they’re really life-changing experiences! The kind of experiences you get when dipping your LCD-fuelled head into a bucket of jelly, whilst someone rams a mains electricity cable up your ass! It’s not for the flimsy music fan out there. It’s for the intellectual, for the strong silent types, for those wanting to know what fresh air really tastes like. The kind of fresh air Nedry supply drifted down from the top of some mystical Japanese mountain and it washes over you like a baptism of fuzzy lusciousness. Upon listening to their track A42, (mp3 listed below), you will hear it’s analogue drum roll beginning, with it’s distortion and drifting keys. It’s simplicity defined, but once you get past this initial stage we suggest you tuck your head between your knees, plane-crash-bracing-stylee, as the tune drops it’s warped bassline and booming beats. It’s dark and moving stuff, but it’s Ayu Okakita’s lifting vocals that truly blow you away. She joined Chris and Matt from her native Japan earlier in 2009 to begin realising their sound and what has developed hasn’t been heard, or even attempted, since the likes of Bjork or Portishead. It’s bravery is astonishing, its beauty impossible to resist. Thankfully this has been noticed and picked up by Huw Stephens of Radio One and additionally earned them a tour supporting 65 Days Of Static in 2010. Their debut, Condors, is officially released in Spring next year. (MB)
OK let’s get the name out of the way. It’s not good. That’s a given. It’s a small hurdle obstructing our enjoyment of The Woo!Worths, but it certainly was a hurdle worth leaping because we’ve landed in a world of brilliantly bright sunshine pop. Playful electro synthesisers and grooving disco rhythms dance around us whilst we float away on Jo’s delightful Belgian-tinged ah-ooos, harmonised with Rich’s distinctive gentleman’s club vocals. Meanwhile, Steve’s guitar manages to keep us from feeling like we’re being taken for another ride to the bank by yet another chart-assailing, soulless collection of electro-poppers. He drags us back down to the ground with jagged stabs and squealing solos. They make the kind of music Daft Punk would have created had they entered the sweet shop just as it exploded, rather than indulging in their usual studio mushroom clouds. It’s a much more organic experience and live they manage to achieve the rarest of things; Namely, a band that makes the crowd dance; not nod, skank, mosh or rock out, but actually dance. Having already won ‘Rankin Live’, being chosen from the final line-up by legendary photographer Rankin himself, this trio have a lot to look forward to next year including an appearance at one of The Recommender’s shows. With them being a Brighton-based band it couldn’t work out any better. We can’t wait. Neither should you. (MA)
Some music changes your life, some music moves you to tears, some music shuts you up, some music thunders right through your rib cage, and some music plays your heart like an instrument. Well, to be honest, this ain’t that type of music. However, this is music that makes the edges of your mouth curl upwards and lifts your mood out from it’s Monday blues into the kind of fiery red that Friday gives you. There will always, always be a place for music like this. Boyhood friends Martin and Mathias, from Stockholm in Sweden, have been shifting music our way for many years, with one single, one EP and finally with their debut album, Balcony Cigarettes, released on Leon Records. The album is awash with enjoyable tunery as it shuffles through it’s ten consistently neat tracks. This is music made for the fans of rattling indie rock that Kings Of Leon mastered, and the kind of speedy, light guitar flickering that The Strokes play, with the kind of sunny indie that The Magic Numbers surfed into town on. On some tracks you could probably add some Neil Young references in there too, but that would perhaps be one comparison too far. Um, whoops! OK, so it’s more life-affirming, as opposed to life-changing, but if the wheel kept getting re-invented we’d end up with something square and unusable wouldn’t we!?! Let them fill those indie folk gaps in your life, sit back with a tin of your finest beer and smoke along. (MB)
