Woo!worths | THE RECOMMENDER | Brighton's essential new music blog

For those long term Recommender followers, you will have seen how this blog has improved and grown, step by step, into the beautiful monster it is today. Well, to all of you, here’s our biggest leap of evolution yet!

The Recommender will now be throwing monthly blog parties at a venue in the centre of the city in which this blog was born, Brighton, UK. As one of England’s youngest and most forward thinking cities, it seems the perfect home. We will be showcasing the excellent music that we’ve been critiquing on the blog over recent years, so expect cutting edge cool, each and every month.

RECOMMENDER MIXTAPE # 1

Alongside the two live performances from our hand-picked bands, we will have a few additional, unique, regular features. As Seth Godin once proclaimed, “be remarkable”, “be that purple cow”, so we are taking a fresh approach, throwing proper parties, with ingredients that people have never experienced before…

How will we do this? Well, these extra features include one of our cities rising stars in the world of fashion photography, Eleni Mettyear, who will be setting up her monthly ‘Photoboosh‘. An area all her own where she will be capturing portraits of all you beautiful people, so bring your best face. All subsequent shots will appear for your review on it’s own section on The Recommender.

Additionally, we’ve recruited Brighton’s talented designers of couture lingerie, the Ophelia Fancy girls. They will be joining us, dressed, (or should that be undressed), in their unbelievably gorgeous outfits handing out goodies to all who attend.

The items being given out at the end of each and every party will include The Recommender’s Gift Bags. Among lots of other exciting bits, these will always include Recommender badges, stickers and the soon to be legendary Recommender Mixtapes, (see above), which will be a mix of the music we have blogged. Each one will be unique to that night’s party.

As for our launch event, we will have Woo!worths hitting the stage first, an amazing local band, who blast out hook-filled electro pop. It will be the ideal party-starter and we couldn’t be more pleased to be a part of their rapid ascendancy.

Headlining the night will be Plugs, one of the most upbeat and enjoyable indie dance acts of recent years. This is the new project from Morgan Quaintance, formerly with Does It Offend You, Yeah?. If anyone knows how to whip the crowd into a creamy froth then it’s this masterful group of performers.

Every night we will also have the magical Battery Powered DJs, a pair of proper Brighton scenesters. There’s a reason they appear at every cool event in town, because they know how to own the dancefloor. They’ve agreed to play selections that are purely from The Recommender’s awesome archives.

Tickets are available from Ape, Resident and Rounder Records. If you can’t get to the shops in person, simply phone them and ask them to put a ticket on the door for you and they’ve agreed to help. It’s only £3 advance and £4 on the door, as we seriously don’t want anyone missing out on the action.

This is the future of partying. Welcome to the purple cow evolution…
(MB)

NEDRY

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)

Find them here: Myspace

Hear them here: NEDRY – A42 ysi

THE WOO! WORTHS

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)

Find them here: Myspace

Hear them here: THE WOO! WORTHS – PLASTICINE ysi

THE SWEET SERENADES

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)