An occasional series where I look back in detail at albums, or artists, that have meant a lot to me over time. Usually, these are in more detail than my (often already wordy) reviews.
The title of this section comes from a track on Pearl Jam’s album Vs..
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
A new section where I look back at albums in my past. They may be great albums, they may be albums that haven't stood the test of time. But these are albums I bought and loved at one point, and maybe haven't listened to much in the meantime. More importantly, this is a way of […]
