I’ve written a lot of reviews over the years. This is the home of pretty much all of them since about 2003.
It is remarkable to think that I first heard Empathy Test for myself just five years ago. That first time was back at S.O.S. #2 at Electrowerkz, the second instance of a small-scale indoor festival that followed the Alt-Fest debacle – part of a groundswell of support that was inspired by Alt-Fest’s great promises and […]
I have to admit that it has been a while since I had last thought about Brainclaw before 2020. They have jolted back into my view thanks to the sad news that former member Tara Lessard passed away over Christmas, and that appeared to, finally, spur David Giuffre into finishing the long-promised album that I […]
For me at least, there are a number of links between Katatonia and Paradise Lost.
Promenade Cinema rather burst out of their native Sheffield a couple of years ago, with a handful of striking, elegant singles and a sensational debut album LIVING GHOSTS, that this site saw fit to award Album of the Year on /Countdown/Albums/2018. I still love that album, too, and did have a little fear in the […]
As I noted recently in my chat with the promoter on /Talk Show Host/058, Chaos Theory Music have reached their tenth anniversary by being a fearlessly uncompromising promoter, doing things in different ways and indeed bringing diverse, interesting music to an increasingly open-minded crowd. Which meant that their tenth-anniversary celebration at The Dome and Boston […]
My gigging in 2020 has perhaps started slower than usual – I didn’t see a single show in January – but this might be down to the fact that by all accounts, there wasn’t a lot going on in January in our part of the music world. It was almost as if after a traumatic […]
For the last couple of years, one Saturday around this time of year has seen me head to Electrowerkz for the latest London edition of the BEAT:CANCER shows – and indeed take photos of the bands, and write about them too.
The seemingly inexhaustible jukebox that is my brain has a regular supply of new music added to it, by account of my voracious appetite for new songs and new artists to excite me. But amid the constant playlist updates are some releases that have been there for what seems like forever.
We are very much in the time of new bands, new styles, and a distinct dearth of live venues in London. This has resulted in a few things: gigs that sell out quickly as there aren’t the available venues to upgrade to, venues we’ve not been to in a while as promoters appear to be […]
Somehow, despite the feeling I was just getting started, I’m already home, (mostly) unpacked and finishing this write-up of another great edition of Infest. It has long since become far more than just a music festival that I attend because I want to see a few bands – it’s an extended family.
A word of warning: in the future, if you see that I’m attending a show in June next year, just know that for the past three or four years now, I’ve been unlucky enough to be gig-bound on the hottest day of that month. Gigging indoors in the heat is never fun, of course – […]
Nearly halfway through 2019, and the gigs keep on coming. After a week off (I was away in Greece), there were three shows back-to-back as we entered the second week of June. Two of those shows were relatively big, high-profile events – the return of Bikini Kill at Brixton on Monday, and then the return […]
Syd.31 are not your average punks. For a start they are punks by way of electronic music and industrial. But also they are punks by way of a political-based higher education (as explained three years ago when I talked to them on /Talk Show Host/027), and exposure to the music growing up far away from […]
I’ve long felt Katatonia to belong to the lineage of underappreciated bands in metal. They are a band that have been around for a remarkably long time – they initially formed in 1991 – and shed their early death-doom roots early on. Indeed it could be said that Jonas Renkse’s move to clean vocals for […]
The career of Randolph & Mortimer has been a strange one thus far. While Sheffield-based, his earliest work slipped out unnoticed over here in the UK, and was picked up first by the European industrial media. amodelofcontrol.com first talked to them on Talk Show Host: 005 in summer 2013 (!), but had actually covered early […]
In one of those weird quirks that seem to happen more often than they should, two industrial bands from Vancouver (one featuring a previous member of the other) are releasing new albums within a couple of weeks of each other. One is decades into it’s career – and frankly don’t really have anything left to […]
Back in the mists of time, there used to be a steady stream of all-day “festival” events in the London goth/industrial scene. There was Gotham, there was Black Celebration, and probably a few more that I’ve rather forgotten about. They often had a good mix of bands, to appeal to the widest group possible, and […]
I don’t often go to Goth Festivals for music. There, I said it. Whitby, for me, long since became a social holiday, where I catch up with old friends and play football – I only occasionally see bands there. Most of the rest of the festivals I attend, of course, are broadly industrial or electronic […]
About this time last year, I attended my first BEAT:CANCER show, which was something of a voyage of discovery in what felt like a parallel scene, with a good number of people I rarely saw at other shows I attended, and a number of artists that I’d never come across before.
Twenty years of a festival existing is nothing to be sniffed at. Sure, bigger festivals have existed much longer (Reading dates back into the sixties, while Glastonbury is a few years younger), but in the current crowded festival environment, a smaller festival lasting twenty years is an extraordinary achievement. Particularly when the twentieth edition is […]
