I’ve been writing album/EP reviews for what seems like forever, but actually goes back to 1996, on my days writing for ROAR. This archive, like others, goes back as far as 2003. I don’t write as many album reviews as I used to, but they still get posted from time-to-time.
The title of this section comes from a track on The Afghan Whigs’ first album Big Top Halloween.
The subject of death is a strange one in music. After all, none of us alive have personally experienced it, by the very virtue that we’re still alive. We might have been close to it, or lost loved ones, but we’ve not actually gone through the process ourselves. So perhaps uniquely for a subject used […]
In one of those occasional co-incidences that pop up in the music world, a couple of weeks back saw the release of new albums – comeback albums, if you will – from two bands who were overlooked in their prime and who only really gained critical respect in the years after they disbanded the first […]
I’ve covered the progress of London-based band BLiNDNESS for some time now – in fact, I first did so nearly five years ago, at the tail-end of 2010 when I covered their debut single Confessions on Tuesday Ten: 117, and then the first time I saw them live was the following summer at the Barfly, […]
It’s kinda weird, really. One throwaway Facebook post a few months back resulted in a massive wave of nostalgic recollections from a whole host of my friends, which led to a surprisingly popular Tuesday Ten on the subject of Nu-Metal. It then got distinctly odd when the revival gathered pace, with yet more reformations and […]
Talk about building anticipation. Jared Louche’s new project Prude – and this album – has been coming for a long, long time. How long? Well, darkroom was on a Glitch Mode compilation back in 2008, and that track appears here. Ok, so the project seemed to have been on hiatus for a while, until last […]
Within a ten year period, Alter der Ruine have released five albums, various EPs, remixes, unleashed a inescapable dancefloor anthem, split up, reformed, and drastically changed their style – without apparently alienating their fanbase along the way. This doesn’t sound like a too difficult thing to do, until you look a little closer at exactly […]
I’m beginning to wonder if the internet age has actually begun to do good things rather than being simply a drain on music (and the money involved). At least in the so called lesser corners, those where sales were less important, perhaps, and where creativity is paramount.
Reviewing music is sometimes an exceptionally difficult task. On some occasions, the words will flow immediately, and the whole review can be completed quickly (something that actually I find easier with bad albums). On others, it might sit on the back burner for a while while I listen again and again trying to find the […]
Whatever your opinion on Laibach, it is perhaps hard to disagree that even after over thirty years active, anything they release is at least worth talking about. Over their career they have cast their critical eye over mainstream pop music, covering fixtures in the pop canon with, er, surprising results, uncovered hitherto unnoticed totalitarian leanings […]
Of all of the top echelon of industrial bands, none perhaps gain such polarised views as Skinny Puppy. Right from their early days in the eighties, they’ve pushed boundaries with their sound, avoiding the obvious routes of dancefloor approval, creating nightmarish musical visions densely packed with samples and a visual image almost as impressive. This […]
I've been a big fan of Armalyte's output for some time, with a whole string of great bands to get excited about (Je$us Loves Amerika, Concrete Lung, i!, Paresis, not to mention Interlock once upon a time), so it's always good when I get contacted by them with another promo to check out.
September 2013 has seen two debut albums released from bands on opposite sides of the Atlantic, that perhaps have more in common than might first be thought. Both are industrial-influenced bands, that have come from outside the “scene”, or at least that’s the way it appears (and, not to mention, both albums are self-titled, oddly […]
Of the industrial scene’s great survivors (FLA, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, KMFDM), all four have now been active for over 25 years, and aside from 242 (who seem happy with revisiting their past with admittedly amazing live shows, which is no problem for me – I’ve seen them five times in the last five years […]
It's always interesting when a new artist jumps out to popular attention. Séamus Bradd's The .Invalid has been the latest project to do this just recently, with a fair amount of ecstatic comment online from "the scene" once the album – apparently two years in the works – finally saw the light of day in […]
Usually, I guess, when you emigrate to the other side of the world, and start a new life 10,500 miles from your home city, continuing your existing band/musical project may not be high on the list of priorities as you settle down. But Ed Oxime has had other ideas after doing exactly that, with a […]
Nearly ten years since comeback album The Greater Wrong of the Right, and thirteen years since their return from the hiatus/collapse with the legendary Doomsday show, Skinny Puppy are back with their fourth album since the reformation, and after a string of ultimately disappointing albums that have seen them, at best treading water or even […]
I've found Informatik one of those bands I can't quite work out for a while now. They've been around in one form or another for some time, nowadays as Da5id Din [din fiv] and Tyler Newman [Battery Cage], and their synthpop/futurepop days are long gone, replaced with a electronic/rock-influenced direction that at points is really […]
Following on from the release last autumn of their second single, Glamourama, Blindness are now following it up with a new single – and seeing as it is being released in two different formats, I'm going to cover them both here in one review.
Front Line Assembly’s lengthy career has seen them take a number of turns, adapting their own sound and co-opting others as members of the band changed, with varying degrees of success. Their initial industrial sounds evolved enormously as technology progressed, took in all manner of metal influences in the nineties – arguably resulting in their […]
Recent KMFDM albums have followed something of a pattern, and not just in their release dates – i.e. in the Spring, every other year, for ten years now. All these years of "conceptual continuity" have resulted somewhat in a band resting on their laurels a bit, and most criminally re-using the same old ideas time […]
