I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
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.
I rather wondered, after the first time I saw Sunn O))) live, whether I could physically stand going a second time. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it, it was just that the after-effects were like nothing I’d ever experienced after a gig.
Over the years I’ve had a whole host of releases sent to me for review. Time is often a factor in whether I can cover releases in any detail – please bear in mind that I run this site alone, funded solely by my own income, and I have a full time job.
Over the last year or two of the nineties, and then a good few years into the new Millenium, the hybrid of industrial and noise took over the club dancefloor in our scene. It was everywhere. Noise clubs sprung up, existing clubs had noise sets or entire noise floors. Even Huddersfield had a noise night […]
Covenant are perhaps in a strange position nowadays. Their days at the peak of the Futurepop “movement” – where they were one of the titans of the scene, something made by United States of Mind, and then rammed home by the skyscraping brilliance of Northern Light – are now well over a decade in the […]
For the third year running – although it was a bit touch-and-go this year with the wedding and everything else, and my wife chose not to come along this time – the last weekend of September meant a trip 3,960 miles to the west of London. To the city of Chicago, to catch up with […]
Over the weekend of this year’s Infest, there was some discussion over the current state of the industrial (and wider) scene. In many other scenes – or indeed in “mainstream” popular music, there is an air of nostalgia as record labels struggling with new sales, are relying heavily on reissues of the old, particularly on […]
Velvet Acid Christ – one of the most divisive acts in industrial? Well, that is what many would have you believe, but I don’t think that they really are. Bryan Erickson’s long-running project, now nearing 25 years of activity, have maybe gone through periods of (comparatively) massive popularity, and indeed the opposite, but that is […]
Lesley Rankine’s career in music now spans a few decades, and more than a few styles. She first came to prominence in the vicious, no-wave influenced punkish-rock of Silverfish, a fixture of the Camden scene in the early 90s and unusual in their strident politics and just how confrontational they were. The band toured with […]
A couple of years ago we were discussing the very evident trend of the time – that a new paradigm in industrial music seemed to be beginning. After some years of dominance of 4/4 rhythms, the same synth presets and a tiresome tirade of macho-bullshit lyrics and posturing, the tide suddenly shifted towards a disparate […]
I’m struggling to think of a single band in “our thing” that has had as much mainstream coverage – as in appearing in the news, not just in the music press – as Laibach did last year when their show in North Korea was announced.
This was one of those gigs that I took a while to make a call on. The Black Queen is a new side-project very, very different from the “parent” band (Greg Puciato, the vocalist of The Dillinger Escape Plan has formed this with Joshua Eustis, a former touring member of Nine Inch Nails and Puscifer, […]
It is easy to forget, but Massive Attack are now very much veterans in the electronic music world. Formed as far back as 1988, they released one of the most perfect debut albums ever (Blue Lines), helped define “trip-hop” in the mid-90s (whether they wanted to or not), and then went a whole lot darker […]
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 […]
It had been hoped-for for an age, and finally someone delivered. 3TEETH on tour in the UK. I made it to the hot, sweaty London show, and even managed to catch all of the bands.
In some respects, it can’t be easy being Andrew Eldritch. But then, is there any other artist who has tried so hard to bury his own legacy? Back in the eighties, they were one of the Gothic Rock titans, releasing three wildly successful albums, having a major label deal and the power to pull in […]
After an epic holiday in Chicago – ostensibly to do Cold Waves and catch up with old friends – last year (review in the box), there wasn’t ever really any question that we wouldn’t make it back to Chicago again – and so a year on, here we were once again, in blazing September sunshine […]
Christ almighty, this year has passed really fucking quickly – we’re already heading back into autumn, which means I’ve enjoyed my fifteenth Infest. While perhaps not a lineup with too many “marquee” names this year, it was certainly one that had some treasures in it, and away from the bands was one of the maddest […]
Time to dig back into my musical past once again, this time for a band that released their third – and what was to be their last – album in twenty years ago in 1995. They had, pretty much, already hit their commercial peak by this point, and as things continued later into the nineties, […]
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 […]
