Hosted by a collection of their resident DJs, including the long-standing bastion of new music, Steve Lamacq, BBC Radio 6 Music Recommends is probably one of the best places to listen to the week’s new singles and albums on the airwaves. In addition to giving the latest tracks a good playing, they also give them a good going over with a panel of reviewers to rate each of them critically and to discuss whether or not they’ll be well received, so if you’re looking for some new music this week, you might want to tune in.
There’s a different panel every week, but the show that we listened to in advance of writing our review had the likes of DJ, comedian and writer Danny Wallace, DJ Tom Ravenscroft, Mark Sutherland, James Endicott, Will Reese, Robin Ince, Krissi Murrison, Bernard Butler and (insert exhausted pause for breath) Matt Horne. They had The Mystery Jets’ Dreaming of Another World, Tired Pony’s Dead American Writers, Dizzy Rascal & James Corden’s (terrible, but it’s for charity) Shout for England, Kanye West’s King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man sampled Power, along with a lot of love for MGMT Congratulations, which we’re also big fans of.
The Bluetones’ new album A New Athens got a bit of a slating from Ravenscroft, including scathing one liners like “on the cusp of mundane”, leaving the panel to fall in favour of the Mystery Jets’ Dreaming of Another World, giving it a “fairly acceptable”, but quite low score of 5/10.
With BBC 6 Music saved, it’s all on the up for its presenters and this is definitely one of the show’s that could go on to do big things with regular appearances from Steve Lamacq, Marie Anne Hobbs, Lauren Laverne and Tom Ravenscroft. We don’t think there’s a better place to hear the week’s new music and hear them being picked apart so well with savage cutting lines.
BBC 6 Music Recommends airs daily at midnight between Monday to Friday, so there’s plenty of chances to catch up on the latest new singles and albums to hit the airwaves. This has recently been added to by The New Music Playlist, which airs every Sunday morning at 2am, so you’ll need to be a pretty cool night owl or just coming back from Saturday partying to catch it. However, both shows are available on BBC iPlayer, so you can listen to them whenever with a 30 day expiry window.
BBC 6 Music Recommends review: 4.5/5
