The wonders of the internet mean that it is now possible to discover bands from afar, and talk and enthuse about said bands without (always) having to spend considerable sums of money travelling to see them or purchase their music. Now, things are much easier, but there is perhaps more to sift through first.
So. Welcome to v12.0 of amodelofcontrol.com.
Back, then, with part six of my 1996 roundup. As a reminder, I’m marking twenty years of writing about music (my writing long pre-dates this website going live) across this year with a monthly look at ten releases from 1996, where possible in chronological order.
A warning: this week’s Tuesday Ten features adult and sexual themes. Still here? Thought you might be.
These are turbulent times in the UK at least at the moment – with the prospect of choppy waters elsewhere too in 2016 – and it has rather been sapping my will to write, among other things.
Part five of my monthly rundown, across this year, of tracks from 1996 that broadly, I still love now.
For the latest interview on amodelofcontrol.com, Athan Maroulis – nowadays performing under the NOIR name – kindly gave up his time to discuss his current project and his musical past.
Watching Frank Turner perform all of his (exceptional) album England Keep My Bones the other week – with a packed, young crowd bellowing along to every word – got me thinking. Who else is actually writing songs about being proud to be English (or in some cases, British?)? Was there anyone else?
Playlists: Spotify YouTube SoundCloud 2016 in Review: 257: Tracks (Apr) 254: Tracks (Mar) 251: Tracks (Feb) 248: Tracks (Jan) Nearly half way through the year, and the great new music keeps coming thick and fast. Indeed, various announcements of new material this past week suggest the rest of the year should continue to be very […]
Part four of my monthly rundown this year of tracks from 1996 that broadly, I still love now.
I have no idea how this one came up. A particular song was mentioned in the pub on the Monday night of Whitby last month, and all of a sudden five or six of us were coming up with a long, long list of songs along the same lines.
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 for another interview on amodelofcontrol.com, and this time I’m talking to a band who’ve somewhat unexpectedly reformed. There have been an awful lot of reunions of late, particularly of bands from the nineties, and frankly some have not been particularly worthwhile returning.
For a country with a population of 330,000 – and a total area of 102,000km2 (in comparison, England has a total area of 130,000km2 and a population of 54 million) – Iceland has a remarkable musical heritage. Obviously it goes back a long way, Iceland having a well-recorded history going back into the first millenium […]
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 […]
For the second of the double-bill today, back to the normal programming with the best tracks of the past month.
Already, we’re onto the third month of this run-down of 1996, and the avalanche of great new music that appeared that year.
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.
Brant Showers is a busy man right now. Touring with one band, working on new material for his main act, and just this week putting out a debut album under his solo moniker.
