I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
The dawn of a new year, and once again a few posts have appeared from both musical and so-called clickbait sources noting the albums that are turning twenty years old during 2015. For many of my friends and I, this is starting to hit hard – many of these are the albums that we were […]
In the annals of crazy plans by me, this one was up there with Festival Kinetik 4.0 in 2011, where my friend Tim and I headed to Ottawa and then Montreal for a heavy, heavy week of music, drinking and sightseeing. Doing Cold Waves III came up from similar origins – a lineup too good […]
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 […]
A sign I’m clearly getting old – this was my fourteenth Infest. God, time flies. This year was perhaps a bit special for a number of reasons, though, at least partly down to the fact that this edition very nearly didn’t happen, and in the event it is a damned good thing that it did […]
A first for me, in attending Bloodstock for the first time, and a first time in fifteen years camping at a festival (I last did so in 1999 for Reading – you know, back when they still booked bands worth seeing). It wasn’t my first festival where the rain was torrential, though, but even so […]
Heroic. Ballsy. The Greatest Band of All Time. The six-strong band known as Arnocorps are not short on confidence, that’s for sure.
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.
Christ, 2014 is passing by in a flash. With Easter so late this year, it has resulted too in Resistanz and Whitby being on back-to-back weekends, which has left a number of us fearing for our livers during April, never mind an attempt to get any sleep. As I write this, the first of those […]
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 […]
After a bit of a slow start to the year gig-wise, into February and all of a sudden there is a short spell of a number of gigs. Time constraints and other distractions have meant I've struggled to finish full reviews, so here is a roundup of the gigs I attended during February.
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.
My fellow partners in crime in this music blogging lark over at I Die: You Die have mentioned recently about the origins of their website name, so here is my tilt on the same idea, as my domain nears its tenth birthday (early in February). Theirs comes from Gary Numan, mine comes from…Dark Star.
Every year I seem to be starting my live gig attendance that little bit later. Last year I began with easily the best show of 2013 in mid-January, with a trip to Germany to see Kraftwerk, and this year we are into the last week of January before I attend a show. And this time, […]
After a period with only one gig in a month, this was a return to gigging again, the first of ten shows or so between now and Christmas. And for this one, it was my first ever visit to Alexandra Palace for a gig (somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit), and while well organised – […]
The Lexington is one of those gig venues that I’m seeming to revisit more and more. This is a good thing – a good-sized venue, great acoustics, good booze, and it’s easy to get to. Not to mention a habit of putting on great bands time and again. Although judging on the few questions I […]
For this night, back to the Buffalo Bar for Guided Missile's latest presentation, with some familiar music and one band new to me, and offering proof once again that the North London live music scene could be seen as in rude health.
What happened in the nineties – a feeding frenzy involving major labels the world over, trying to find the next big thing from a seething mass of disparate Alternative bands – from industrial rock, to metal, to thrash, to grunge, to nu-metal, to EBM (etc, etc) is something that we will never witness again. Of […]
