The first Bandcamp Friday of 2024 makes for a busy week of releases… This post is a roundup of (relevant to this site) new and upcoming music, a nod to upcoming events and livestreams both from this website and others, and also a catchup of what I’ve posted recently. Thanks to everyone who sends me […]
After last week’s songs about being good, here’s the flipside.
The USA has inspired polarisation of opinion for as long as I can remember from the other side of the Atlantic (and elsewhere), as policy decisions made in the USA often affect the rest of the world – for better or worse.
This week, I’m turning my attention to stupidity.
Content warning: this post contains songs with descriptions of violence and assault – in some cases graphic and unflinching – and indeed discussion of those songs. This week, I turn to songs about violence. We seem to be living in turbulent times that all too often erupt in violence, but what is interesting here is […]
For much of my life, I’ve lived in the hillier areas of this country. From my early years in the surprisingly hilly Medway Towns, to the West and South Yorkshire hills, even the hills of North London. Even now, on the Kent Coast, if I want to go any appreciable distance from my now home, […]
Continuing my occasional Lockdown-related series of posts, this week I move onto disobedience. Sadly, amid this pandemic – that just seems to bring bad news by the day, even as vaccinations are now rolling on – there are a whole host of people who seem to want to deny everything, find other reasons (however batshit) […]
Twenty-five years ago yesterday (20-July 1995), I made it to my first proper gig. I headed over to Roundhay Park in the north-eastern edges of Leeds, along with tens of thousands of others, to the first night of the Heineken Festival that year, ostensibly to see Pop Will Eat Itself, but that evening I also […]
Onto week two of /Countdown/2019 on amodelofcontrol.com, and this week I’m looking at the best tracks of the year. These might be the singles, they might be album tracks, they might be one-offs. But all of them are songs I love in one way or another, and they aren’t all necessarily songs that fall within […]
You can file this week under “how have I not covered this subject before?”. Honestly, I rather thought I might have touched upon this subject before, but aside from one about mine and my dad’s relationship through music, I really never have.
Infest 2019 is now already disappearing into the rearview mirror (Full coverage from this site on /Memory of a Festival/033, if you’ve not already seen it), and summer is beginning to vanish with it as the weather starts to cool. So, we’re in September, and here’s this month’s wrap of the best ten tracks I’ve […]
A busy couple of weeks – and the fact that Infest begins tomorrow – means that this week I’m posting a day earlier. This is the usual amodelofcontrol.com round-up, of new music coming your way this week and soon, as well as a look at the events and gigs in the future, and finally nods […]
There is something about the mythical “big city” that despite pretty much all advice to the contrary, keeps on pulling people in. Something of a land of opportunity, where there are jobs, there are things to do, perhaps even somewhere where you can “shed a skin” and be something you might not be able to […]
As many of my friends and readers will know by now, I’m a dedicated music fan. I’ll happily espouse my views on whatever I’m listening to, what’s new, what’s good, what’s not (the latter more often in person than online!), if there’s a discussion about music generally, I’m happy to be involved. Which is why […]
So. Welcome to v12.0 of amodelofcontrol.com.
In a time where far-right sentiment is ever more in the news again – see this disturbing story from Liverpool this week, the sentencing of a fourteen-year-old boy for a racist knife attack on a teacher in Bradford, demonising of immigrants, apparent revisionism over Golden Dawn in Greece, or upvoting of Nazi propaganda on the […]
This year: 170 bands, 57 days worth of gigs. Five festivals, three countries, eight cities/towns. From venues holding thousands to those holding tens. Due to personal issues and, frankly, being too damned busy for much of the year, I didn’t get to write about many of them aside from the festivals, so writing this list […]
2014 has, frankly, been a fairly crap year for me, with bad things outweighing the good and what has felt like a constant battle with depression and my mental health. So, I set out recently to search out positive “alternative” songs, ones that belie the stereotype of us all moping around. And with thanks to […]
This week, my Tuesday Ten series goes in a new direction – as I’ve not written it. A few weeks ago, I posted an innocent post on Facebook asking my friends what they considered their perfect albums…and got an avalanche of suggestions. Over 100 comments and 150 suggested albums later, I thought it might be […]
Maybe I just listen to a lot of angry music, maybe it’s a side of me I prefer to let out in the music I listen to, either way, I’ve written a lot in the Tuesday Ten series about the darker side of human nature (related, previous posts are in the sidebar). So I was […]
