I swear that as a reviewer, things are getting harder to define. What do I mean? The crossing of genres, the meshing of styles, is becoming so common as to make established genre descriptions almost defunct, and this is making the job of those of us that still write about music very much more difficult.
The cliché of the second album. It gets raised every single time, by just about everyone, but is it really a thing? I guess it depends on what happens with your first. If your first album isn’t great, though, will you have a chance to make a second? This second album expectation only really comes […]
How artists can change entirely, embrace a whole new body, as it were, has never ceased to be a fascination to me.
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 […]
Looking back at my various notes and posts about gigs over the years, it’s now the best part of seven years since I first discovered Blindness, thanks to a chance catching of a post by a friend linking to the video for then-single Confessions.
Over the years I’ve had a whole host of releases sent to me for review. Time is often a factor in whether I can cover releases in any detail – please bear in mind that I run this site alone, funded solely by my own income, and I have a full time job.
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 […]
Part three of the round-up of 2016 comes to you from the final week of our honeymoon (from the warm sunshine of the Dominican Republic). Sorry, not sorry.
Covenant are perhaps in a strange position nowadays. Their days at the peak of the Futurepop “movement” – where they were one of the titans of the scene, something made by United States of Mind, and then rammed home by the skyscraping brilliance of Northern Light – are now well over a decade in the […]
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 […]
This week, on part three, I turn my attention to the best albums of the year. I seem to say it every year, but really – 2015 has been an extraordinary year for alternative music, you’ve just got to have been looking in the right places to find some of it. Not all of it […]
The subject of death is a strange one in music. After all, none of us alive have personally experienced it, by the very virtue that we’re still alive. We might have been close to it, or lost loved ones, but we’ve not actually gone through the process ourselves. So perhaps uniquely for a subject used […]
In one of those occasional co-incidences that pop up in the music world, a couple of weeks back saw the release of new albums – comeback albums, if you will – from two bands who were overlooked in their prime and who only really gained critical respect in the years after they disbanded the first […]
I’ve covered the progress of London-based band BLiNDNESS for some time now – in fact, I first did so nearly five years ago, at the tail-end of 2010 when I covered their debut single Confessions on Tuesday Ten: 117, and then the first time I saw them live was the following summer at the Barfly, […]
It’s kinda weird, really. One throwaway Facebook post a few months back resulted in a massive wave of nostalgic recollections from a whole host of my friends, which led to a surprisingly popular Tuesday Ten on the subject of Nu-Metal. It then got distinctly odd when the revival gathered pace, with yet more reformations and […]
Week three of the amodelofcontrol.com roundup of 2014, and this is, I guess, the big one. The albums of the year.
Talk about building anticipation. Jared Louche’s new project Prude – and this album – has been coming for a long, long time. How long? Well, darkroom was on a Glitch Mode compilation back in 2008, and that track appears here. Ok, so the project seemed to have been on hiatus for a while, until last […]
Within a ten year period, Alter der Ruine have released five albums, various EPs, remixes, unleashed a inescapable dancefloor anthem, split up, reformed, and drastically changed their style – without apparently alienating their fanbase along the way. This doesn’t sound like a too difficult thing to do, until you look a little closer at exactly […]
I’m beginning to wonder if the internet age has actually begun to do good things rather than being simply a drain on music (and the money involved). At least in the so called lesser corners, those where sales were less important, perhaps, and where creativity is paramount.
Reviewing music is sometimes an exceptionally difficult task. On some occasions, the words will flow immediately, and the whole review can be completed quickly (something that actually I find easier with bad albums). On others, it might sit on the back burner for a while while I listen again and again trying to find the […]
