This was one of those gigs that I took a while to make a call on. The Black Queen is a new side-project very, very different from the “parent” band (Greg Puciato, the vocalist of The Dillinger Escape Plan has formed this with Joshua Eustis, a former touring member of Nine Inch Nails and Puscifer, […]
It is easy to forget, but Massive Attack are now very much veterans in the electronic music world. Formed as far back as 1988, they released one of the most perfect debut albums ever (Blue Lines), helped define “trip-hop” in the mid-90s (whether they wanted to or not), and then went a whole lot darker […]
2015 in gigs: 70 days, 165 live sets, 154 unique bands, forty venues, seven cities, four festivals (and each of those festivals in a different town/city), three countries, two continents.
It had been hoped-for for an age, and finally someone delivered. 3TEETH on tour in the UK. I made it to the hot, sweaty London show, and even managed to catch all of the bands.
In some respects, it can’t be easy being Andrew Eldritch. But then, is there any other artist who has tried so hard to bury his own legacy? Back in the eighties, they were one of the Gothic Rock titans, releasing three wildly successful albums, having a major label deal and the power to pull in […]
After an epic holiday in Chicago – ostensibly to do Cold Waves and catch up with old friends – last year (review in the box), there wasn’t ever really any question that we wouldn’t make it back to Chicago again – and so a year on, here we were once again, in blazing September sunshine […]
This week, within four days, I’ve seen two bands live that very much rely on the visual as much as the audio. One is a fiercely political industrial project taking it’s first steps into the live arena, the other is a band dedicated to meshing old informational and propaganda videos with taut post-punk rhythms, and […]
This year: 170 bands, 57 days worth of gigs. Five festivals, three countries, eight cities/towns. From venues holding thousands to those holding tens. Due to personal issues and, frankly, being too damned busy for much of the year, I didn’t get to write about many of them aside from the festivals, so writing this list […]
In the annals of crazy plans by me, this one was up there with Festival Kinetik 4.0 in 2011, where my friend Tim and I headed to Ottawa and then Montreal for a heavy, heavy week of music, drinking and sightseeing. Doing Cold Waves III came up from similar origins – a lineup too good […]
A sign I’m clearly getting old – this was my fourteenth Infest. God, time flies. This year was perhaps a bit special for a number of reasons, though, at least partly down to the fact that this edition very nearly didn’t happen, and in the event it is a damned good thing that it did […]
Heroic. Ballsy. The Greatest Band of All Time. The six-strong band known as Arnocorps are not short on confidence, that’s for sure.
Christ, 2014 is passing by in a flash. With Easter so late this year, it has resulted too in Resistanz and Whitby being on back-to-back weekends, which has left a number of us fearing for our livers during April, never mind an attempt to get any sleep. As I write this, the first of those […]
After a bit of a slow start to the year gig-wise, into February and all of a sudden there is a short spell of a number of gigs. Time constraints and other distractions have meant I've struggled to finish full reviews, so here is a roundup of the gigs I attended during February.
Every year I seem to be starting my live gig attendance that little bit later. Last year I began with easily the best show of 2013 in mid-January, with a trip to Germany to see Kraftwerk, and this year we are into the last week of January before I attend a show. And this time, […]
After a period with only one gig in a month, this was a return to gigging again, the first of ten shows or so between now and Christmas. And for this one, it was my first ever visit to Alexandra Palace for a gig (somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit), and while well organised – […]
The Lexington is one of those gig venues that I’m seeming to revisit more and more. This is a good thing – a good-sized venue, great acoustics, good booze, and it’s easy to get to. Not to mention a habit of putting on great bands time and again. Although judging on the few questions I […]
For this night, back to the Buffalo Bar for Guided Missile's latest presentation, with some familiar music and one band new to me, and offering proof once again that the North London live music scene could be seen as in rude health.
The years haven’t been especially kind to bands that came to popular attention from the nineties industrial rock boom in many ways, with few bands surviving the late-90s as the bubble burst – either they fell victim to alcohol and drugs, the mass of record label consolidations at the end of the decade, volatile inter-band […]
It has been noted recently that there have been a dearth of “club” shows in the industrial scene, at least in the UK, of late, with pretty grim predictions for 2014, too. But in the meantime, there have been the odd show to restore faith somewhat that strong bills can occur, with support acts as […]
For the tenth time – I started writing a seemingly ever-expanding review of the annual festival in 2003 – here goes with my coverage of Infest rundown for 2013. As usual this is mainly covering each of the bands in turn from my point-of-view, with a few other opinions as we go, and I’m well […]
