I've found Informatik one of those bands I can't quite work out for a while now. They've been around in one form or another for some time, nowadays as Da5id Din [din fiv] and Tyler Newman [Battery Cage], and their synthpop/futurepop days are long gone, replaced with a electronic/rock-influenced direction that at points is really […]
Six By Seven made one hell of a splash when they first appeared over fifteen years ago, the music press in the UK making them something like the “great white hope” of guitar music of the time. That they never became huge is not a tale of style over substance, but more one of a […]
Another month, a day late following the Resistanz weekend, and it’s time for another ten tracks. Yet again more had to be cut or held over, one of these days I’ll post another catchup to push the rest of this awesome stuff out to my readers.
This weekend saw me back again to my previous home city, to attend the now annual Resistanz Festival, which joins the much longer-running Infest in now offering two major industrial festivals a year for the UK. Last year was broadly enormous fun, with a good mix of new and old bands, and I was looking […]
This show, the first of three that week, was billed as the first time Carcass had played in London in seventeen years. OK, so they weren’t an active band for a fair amount of that period, but it perhaps did strike me as curious that they hadn’t found a reason to play the city since […]
We missed the marvellously named Feed The Rhino, but we did get there in time for The Defiled, and I was left a little confused. Their image is straight out of the Kerrang metalcore styling manual, all crazy hair and grubby-looking (but likely relatively expensive) outfits, and their music is admittedly pretty punishing. Ok, so […]
Despite my adoration of this band in the nineties and since – although let's forget about A New Morning, eh? – much of the reformation activity of Suede has kinda passed me by. I missed the album shows in 2011 by virtue of being 3,500 miles west of London for Festival Kinetik in Montreal, and […]
For my first new interview on amodelofcontrol.com in four years or so – I’ve only ever conducted interviews with bands on an “as and when” basis, if I’m being honest – I’ve thrown a few questions the way of one of London’s brightest prospects right now, Blindness. These were questions e-mailed to the band, and […]
Following on from the release last autumn of their second single, Glamourama, Blindness are now following it up with a new single – and seeing as it is being released in two different formats, I'm going to cover them both here in one review.
Front Line Assembly’s lengthy career has seen them take a number of turns, adapting their own sound and co-opting others as members of the band changed, with varying degrees of success. Their initial industrial sounds evolved enormously as technology progressed, took in all manner of metal influences in the nineties – arguably resulting in their […]
As I’ve noted before, being back in London over the past three years and more has meant that I’ve been able to see, at last, a number of bands I never thought I’d have the chance to see. Needless to say, MBV are one of those bands, having somehow missed the various shows in recent […]
Yeah, so it’s a while into 2013 now, but frankly there were quite a few things I managed not to mention in the various roundups that were great during 2012, and indeed some, or most of these went unmentioned by me last year. So, here are ten that I really need to do justice to…
Ears Always Open. It’s a mantra I’ve kinda tried to stick to when it comes to music, as frankly band recommendations and new things to listen to come to me from all angles sometimes, and also from the most unexpected corners. As in this case. Having returned to Iceland ten years after I first visited, […]
Another month, ten more new songs you should hear. New bands, old bands, returning bands. You can hear eight of the ten songs on the playlists below, but a little frustratingly not all of them appear on one playlist.
You know, I’ve not done a post like this in a while, and frankly I’m in the right mood for it now. It all started with a conversation at work, where I was somewhat castigated for daring to not like Pink Floyd. As if we can’t all have different opinions.
Recent KMFDM albums have followed something of a pattern, and not just in their release dates – i.e. in the Spring, every other year, for ten years now. All these years of "conceptual continuity" have resulted somewhat in a band resting on their laurels a bit, and most criminally re-using the same old ideas time […]
Crikey. Over two years already since the last, breathless Deftones show at Brixton, and here we were again, the Deftones with another exceptional new album to showcase. Unusually for a midweek Brixton show, though, I'd ensured that we got there relatively early, as I wanted to see the first support act, Three Trapped Tigers. Apparently […]
Concluding three gigs within a week of up-and-coming acts, all three of which I’ve been following for a while now, was Bitter Ruin’s return to London for their first show in the city in 2013. 2012 was a good year for the duo, with a new EP (The Rocket Sessions, released late in the year), […]
A new venue on me, this one – I’m not sure if it had previously been under another name? – and heading up York Way for the first time in a while brought home just how quickly the King’s Cross area is changing as regeneration takes hold. What was a grotty, forbidding area with little […]
After a fairly lengthy break from gig-going after a very busy 2012 – aside from the special occasion of Kraftwerk in Germany last month, this show marked my return to attending London gigs, and indeed it is the first of a number in the next few months.
