Did somebody state that guitar bands were dead? The indie vs pop debate raged around over the last three or four years as guitar-based music became massively out-sold by the more electronic trend of modern pop. A mostly female-fronted youth market saw the girls defiantly climb on top with a sequence of talents that arrived around 2008/9, including the likes of Florence & The Machine , La Roux , Little Boots , Marina & The Diamonds , Ellie Goulding , and you can take the continued run of success right up to the more recent [...]
As the British intellectual, Stephen Fry, once said, " it is the useless things that ultimately make life worth living, and that make life dangerous, too. Wine, love, art, beauty, music ", the list goes on. It is with this thought in mind that we turn to today's recommendation. At the heart of every musician you should locate a creative of the useless. They should simply be a spout pouring music all over our experiences. An outlet for their imagination, a resourceful talent for their inspired artistry. Why most artists stick to one genre, or one band for that matter, [...]
Is it possible to balance the fact that we adore the Brighton band Mirrors whilst utterly despising the Manchester band Hurts ? Yes. Yes it is. That's the exact position The Recommender finds itself in. Is it a geographical thing, seeing as we too are based in Brighton, as we are more inclined to value and support local talent? No. No it isn't. The two bands are by no means identical, but they do share a percentage of familiar elements, all of which could find favour with the same fans - big synth chords, dramatic songs with [...]
BBC 6MUSIC BLOG AWARDS 2012 This month BBC 6 Music has asked a handful of established music websites from the UK to select and host a category for their inaugural BBC 6 Music Blog Awards . The Recommender has been asked, (alongside The Quietus , Drowned in Sound , One For the People , Never Enough Notes , For Folk’s Sake , Some Kind Of Awesome , The 405 and Data Transmission ), to select a category and ask it's followers to [...]
THE BBC 6MUSIC BLOG AWARDS 2012 You don't just have to be a reader of The Recommender these days, you can also listen to us discussing music on the radio. Over the last couple of years our editor, Mike, has been welcomed into a range of studios to commentate on new music, including the likes of Juice FM , Hype Machine Radio , BBC South , a number of podcasts and on America's National Public Radio, but one station that's had us regularly on air is BBC 6Music . As [...]
The world of new music is a very impatient place to hang out. It's like the London Underground at rush hour, or the taxi rank at the end of a Saturday evening's bar crawl. Everyone is keen to be first, or at the very minimum not to be last, please anything but last. There's a clamour to cover artists when a hot new track appears on the horizon, especially when it's as hot as today's. Just look here at The Guardian's refusal to wait for a second track, or our UK blog bros, My Bands Better Than Your [...]
Some music suits a certain mood. It just does. When you correctly match your mood to the music it can envelope you like a cloud of silk. However, some music is so atmospheric and so effective, painting a perfect tone, that it drags your mood into it's picture whether you want it to or not. It's design is so attractive that it's impossible to resist. Today we are recommending a new artist who manages that trick like a master. Although her movements are subtle and patient, she will have you hypnotized under her spell before you know it. This is [...]
Just like lots of other folks in the blog world, we get sent lots of material that is still at the demo stage. It's to be expected seeing as we tend to operate among the bottom layers of the underground music scene, so we expect a broad range of finishes to the work received. However, some is surprisingly polished and it just goes to show how much effort goes into new bands from the outset - something that's required to get noticed, particularly by record labels, if you want any chance of being signed in a very competitive environment, where [...]
Like every other blogger we get plenty of emails. Well, when we say plenty, we figured out we get one every 11 minutes, all day, every day. It's somewhat boring to go on about it, but our point is that there's a whole stack of music waiting in our inbox every time we fire up our Gmail. Naturally, we don't like to miss out on any exciting artists, so we do our best to wade through when we get time, although it's more like using a thimble to bail out The Titanic. Sometimes this means that we have to rush [...]
You could learn to play the piano, we could learn to play the piano, we could all be pianists if we really, really wanted to. If any of us spent a few months or years having drumming lessons then we may end up happy to take to the sticks in a band. However, not everyone can sing. Sure, you can have lessons, we can have lessons, but without any actual original talent to start with it's pretty hard to get anywhere, especially professionally. You either have it or you don't. Well, here's a new artist that's stepping out from the [...]
Ahh, good old computers. Aren't they just great? These days it's so much easier to get to stage one of your career as an ambitious musician by tip-tapping away at your desk. Do-it-yourself is a phrase that's been taken away from the out-of-town hardware stores and bestowed upon a new breed of bedroom producers. It's now possible to use a computer to lay down a multitude of ideas in a song. You can produce it right there on your laptop, even adjusting for any lack of real skill, and record it with some pretty smart equipment, at least to a [...]
The blog world is one of the noisiest environments you can imagine. With everyone shouting all at once, it's like trying to get noticed across the room in an Ibizan super club - no easy thing. One method for bands to get to the front of the queue is to get referred to us by a fellow music blogger. We don't just mean by them posting it upon their respective blogs, we mean real referrals, where they actually approach us and directly suggest we listen to a band they've uncovered. It's something we've experienced a few times and it's always [...]
Does the actual language that a song is sung in actually matter when assessing whether you like a piece of music or not? How would Bob Dylan seem if you didn't speak English and couldn't follow his beautifully twisted tales of the world? Would it miss a major part of what makes it so magic? What if Conor Oberst's stories were just noise to a non-English-speaking listener, or is that his melodies are still powerful enough? The issue of language occurred to us recently, when our attention was brought upon this Danish quartet who sing in their native [...]
Perhaps we should start by discussing a few time-honoured cliches, such as " you can't teach an old dog new tricks ", or " if at first you don't succeed ", or " a rose by any other name ", as this quartet from Denmark used to make up half of an older group, Le Fiasko . However, this new reformation has released a set of rather masterful tunes, making their previous incarnation seem something more akin to a prelude to the new, improved outfit. We don't have anything against their previous incarnation, but listen to this new set [...]
Usually when an artist describes themselves as " ambient shoegaze " it would act more like a repellent for this blog, causing us to quickly immerse ourselves in something ass-kickingly rocking, like Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times , or Slayer's Raining Blood , or we'd rush off to swag around with a turned-up-to-eleven blast of Ante Up , or any other musical equivalent to receiving a bucket of water facially. It's not that we're particularly against that style or genre of music, but most [...]
When you're discovering new music is there one over-riding element that makes you fall in love with it? Is it the melody? Is it the style? Is it the beat? Is it the vocals? Does it have to make you cry? Does it have to make you want to dance? What do you look for? For us it's often a whole host of different elements to the music that allows us to connect to it - in truth we imagine it's perhaps the same for you - but time and time again there's one particular feature that gets our internal [...]
Only last week we were ranting on about a northern band, called Citi Petts , that in parts reminded us of The Gossip , with oversized guitar riffs and lots of punched-with-a-run-up beats. Today we are fishing in the same pond, as we've recently had contact from another northern band who's new single can have it's genetics traced back to that same American band, giving us a case of blog ditto inside of just a few days, (Ed - perhaps that should be Beth Ditto ). If you like your guitar music to drive like Ryan [...]
A recent brief debate cropped up in a comment thread on our recent post about the band IO. You can see that post here and all it's reader's musings, but the main complaint was the lack of a distinct chorus within the tracks. Now for our tuppence worth we suggested that music doesn't actually need a chorus, no more than every film needs a twist, but amongst certain genres or types of music it is perhaps expected, and particularly if you are discussing the brand of indie that IO create. Personally we didn't think the lack of a [...]
Just like Lawrence Tierney's character, Joe Cabot, in the final scene in Reservoir Dogs, we fear that there's a danger of regret as soon as we upload this post. Once that 'publish' button is clicked we're committed to our article and to be honest for the first time in nearly four years of posting, we're going ahead when we're not 100% sure about the band. The reason is that with today's recommendation there's a mixed feeling in Camp Recommender. On the one hand, this band have a striking brilliance that hooks you early on, but once you inspect [...]
We cannot for the life of us recall who it was that tipped us off in a past conversation about the band Money . It was some time last year. We were managing a gig involving the band Binary and discussing prospects for 2012, (perhaps it was with their manager?), so the tip was kindly passed to us and once we got a few spare minutes when back at home we set about searching the band out. We've written plenty about the issue of SEO and terribly unhelpful band names at length, ( particularly on this post [...]
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