I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
It is easy to forget, sometimes, that what we call “our scene” in the industrial world is not one homogenous entity. While bands that reach wider popularity will naturally appear on DJ playlists just about everywhere, there are a whole load of bands – either new or that have been around for a while – […]
I have been following Amanda Palmer – and her original band The Dresden Dolls – for a great deal longer than I thought. I remember stumbling across the latter band at a party we were hosting back in 2004, when a friend played me Coin-Operated Boy, and I was curious enough to go and get […]
The longer that I’ve written about music – it has now ticked past twenty-one years, some way more than half my life – the more difficult it seems to be able to comprehend how long listening to some bands has been part of my life.
Initially this year, I was left rather nonplussed by much of the music being released. I mean, much of it was good, but there was little that was really grabbing me. Things have changed, though, at least, and the problem in the second half of this year has been that great music has been coming […]
I looked at the concept of my musical Bucket List in Tuesday Ten: 178 in 2013, and of those artists, there is pretty much only Radiohead within the list that I have a realistic chance of seeing one day (Slayer’s current line-up, with the death of Jeff Hanneman, is not really one I’m too interested […]
Sometimes writing album reviews, in particular, can be extraordinarily difficult. Interestingly, it is rarely bad or disappointing albums that fall into this category – those are much, much easier, as flaws are often self-evident and easy to pick out. No, it’s the really good albums that are the tough ones. How on earth do I […]
The past few weeks have, in one of those odd quirks of scheduling, seen three of the big names in industrial and goth music all come through London in a short space of time. All three are in different places.
Since Front Line Assembly returned to the live arena a bit over a decade ago – and indeed their first UK show in ten years when they played Infest 2006 – I’ve seen the band live a lot. I’ve seen them three times in North America (Ottawa, Montreal and Chicago), and in Manchester, and four […]
Shoegaze, while it has had something of a critical renaissance in recent years, didn’t half fall off the map quickly initially. Aside from the sheer technical prowess, sonic violence and beauty of My Bloody Valentine, most bands came and went, with sneering jibes in the press about them in the following years.
All it took was arriving in Bradford on Friday, and I knew that I still loved this festival. There was that familiar buzz of anticipation as we stepped off the platform, looking forward to the fun to come, however this year was tinged of course with a bittersweet sadness over what was going to be […]
Perhaps this title is a little unfair. But in recent times, British industrial acts have, rather like European acts to a point, played second fiddle to a burst of creativity and style from North American acts, who seem to be dominating stages and DJ sets everywhere. As is often the way, these things happen in […]
Thirty-three years, twenty albums, countless singles, a few live albums, various re-issues. Various record labels (most notably associated with WaxTrax! and then later Metropolis (North America) and Dependent (Europe)). And, broadly, one instantly recognisable sound, the Ultra Heavy Beat that blusters in on industrial beats and rock guitars, but somehow sounds like no-one else.
I swear that as a reviewer, things are getting harder to define. What do I mean? The crossing of genres, the meshing of styles, is becoming so common as to make established genre descriptions almost defunct, and this is making the job of those of us that still write about music very much more difficult.
For many, gigs in the heat of summer evenings are a tough sell, particularly in small venues (outdoor, festival shows of course are a different matter entirely). However, the summer is paradoxically a busy time for indoor shows, and two came up this week on consecutive evenings, and they were very different.
The cliché of the second album. It gets raised every single time, by just about everyone, but is it really a thing? I guess it depends on what happens with your first. If your first album isn’t great, though, will you have a chance to make a second? This second album expectation only really comes […]
The announcement of a European Skinny Puppy tour earlier in the year (“Down the Sociopath Too Euro 2017“) was, I have to say, a bit of a surprise. It has been seven years since their last UK appearances at least, and in the meantime they’ve released the excellent Weapon – but that was four years […]
How artists can change entirely, embrace a whole new body, as it were, has never ceased to be a fascination to me.
One of the must-see shows in the calendar for the past few months finally arrived over the weekend.
I can’t remember whatsoever when I first heard Cubanate. It was in my early teens, and was either Body Burn or Oxyacetalene first. And then lots more Oxyacetalene, as it was everywhere for a time. I do remember picking up the single for Joy in the rather awesome Badlands record shop in Huddersfield, though. You […]
Looking back at my various notes and posts about gigs over the years, it’s now the best part of seven years since I first discovered Blindness, thanks to a chance catching of a post by a friend linking to the video for then-single Confessions.
