There has been so much good music this year – as well as a few stinkers, frankly, but let’s not dwell on those, at least for now – that for the first time ever in a year roundup I’ve stretched this one out to cover 25 songs, and I’ve still had to miss a couple […]
We got there late, and so only caught the second half of Coheed and Cambria‘s set. A band that I’ve never really got into, and having read up since I didn’t realise that all of their albums are concept albums based on sci-fi stories written by one of the band. Well, it explains the prog […]
For this week’s Tuesday Ten, I’m going back to a list I’ve had on the back burner for bloody ages. That is, music on TV in the form of advertising. Always a contentious subject – there are probably just as many artists who flatly refuse to sell their music for use in this way as […]
Rather later than originally intended – I had to push it back a week because of Whitby – here is my usual tracks of the month roundup.
Next time I do an all-dayer in a city 200 miles from where I live, I won’t be going out clubbing until 0300 the previous night.
My first visit to Koko in about eleven years last night saw me head there for the return to London of Swans, of which more in a moment. But as always, I feel it’s notable to mention the organisation. Doors at 1900 – fine, and they opened on time, not to mention being friendly security […]
The use of sampling in music has been around for some time now, and at points the use of it has approached levels of extraordinary musicality and ingenuity. At other points, of course, it’s been used in obvious, unsubtle ways – and as a result frequently becomes something of a monster hook. And why not? […]
This week, my Tuesday Ten is a bit later than usual, but still on a Tuesday. It’s all about bands you probably haven’t heard of. Of course, there are some of you that have. Hence the probably. Then again, if you know me well enough, you might well have heard me carp on about a […]
There are few bands that could justifiably claim that as they pass thirty years of existence as an active and still-recording unit, they remain a source of reference and perhaps reverence to many music-lovers and indeed other artists. One band that certainly can is Einstürzende Neubauten, whose second stop on their “30th Anniversary tour” was […]
A day earlier than usual, here’s my usual roundup of tracks new and old that I really like right now:
A night that seemed to pass by in a flash. Autonomy was good fun, nice and busy despite the awful weather, and DirtyK played an impressive forty-minute set that had the biggest crowd I’ve yet seen for a gig in the venue. I had intended on playing a noise-heavy set, and went broadly that way […]
There has been a steady procession of reformations and/or long-awaited returns in the past couple of years, either bands returning for one last shot at success that perhaps eluded them in the first place, bands simply looking at making some (more) money on the back of previous success and a feeling of nostalgia, and then […]
The sub-sub-subgenre seems to be the desperate way to get a band recognised now, and as comments on a recent facebook post of mine clearly showed, it’s really kinda difficult to work out what is real and what is taking the p1ss. As a now longtime music critic (I’ve been doing this since 1996), using […]
My usual roundup of tracks new and old that I really like right now.
Saturday saw me back in Leicester again for Autonomy, which despite being the weekend after Infest and Reading/Leeds, was surprisingly busy and a whole lot of fun. Next month sees Dirty K playing live and Autonomy will be billed as a “noise special” (i.e. less hard dance and more industrial/noise). Anyway, back to this month:
I think it took until the dawn of this year’s Infest until I realised just how much I missed the festival in its year off last year. All it took was a few minutes of being back in (nearly) familiar surroundings, of which more in a moment, with various familiar faces of friends new and […]
This week, I’m looking at being betrayed. It’s all thanks to one of these songs coming up on my iPod the other day and getting my mind thinking. It wasn’t hard to find ten songs, either.
I seem to have been doing a lot of it this last few weeks – blame it on my birthday, in the main.
Hearing one of these tracks (Nena, since you ask) at, of all places, a friend’s wedding reception, got me thinking about songs about nuclear war or nuclear weapons – and not to mention that the past week saw the 65th anniversary of the only two uses of such weapons in anger (over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, […]
Saturday saw us back in Leicester, for my return to Autonomy after a couple of months off. It was a much busier than expected night, too, and while I felt a little rusty on the DJing front, I hit my stride in the end. Oh, and Concrete Lung’s Recovery Position sounds fucking awesome really, really […]
