The more things change…the more things stay the same. Certainly that’s the feel that you get here, some three years since the last new album Hex-Angel (there has of course been a steady stream of compilations of older stuff in the meantime, so it is hardly as if we have had the chance to forget […]
Johan Van Roy has been at this music lark for some time now – nearly twenty years, in fact. And in all that time, he has written and released songs about the darker impulses of human nature, following a similar pattern that appears to have served him well and driven him to ever greater success. […]
Nothing is ever all that simple with Laibach. Providing a somewhat…different spin on popular music and culture for many years now, it did appear back in 2003 upon the release of WAT that they had perhaps tired of this, and released what was on face value a disarmingly straight industrial album. It spawned one massive […]
Of all the so-called ‘futurepop’ bands – which, lets be honest, was only ever the softer, more melodic end of the EBM spectrum – only Seabound over the past few years have been really that interesting. Rather than taking the usual route of dancefloor anthems that are all surface, and no feeling, with an illusion […]
It’s amazing how things change. I’m all for bands evolving, and changing, and perhaps even maturing. It isn’t always all that popular with the fans, who may like the first album or whatever, and want them to continue in that vein. The creative process doesn’t always work like that, though, and some artists vanish into […]
It has been nearly three years since last album Redemption, and on the first evidence of this album – an early version of the title track on the recent Das Bunker compilation – things were looking good for the new album.
A curious beast, this CD. It arrives – in promo format, anyway – in a clear slipcase, with the CD encased in a piece of sandpaper, with little in the way of information on it. Not that there is much to tell – the tracklisting is simply Parts 1 to 5 of Session 9, clearly […]
A reasonably new band from northern England, this – although at least one of the band members has prior involvements in other bands, and from the packaging, and the slick design and sound of the whole CD, it is clear even to the casual listener that this is a band that know what they are […]
As I have noted before, there are many different strands to the noise scene these days. Among the most straightforward of them all is Terrorfakt. Last album Cold Steel World was notable for its sheer power, even if it was a little one-dimensional at times. However this takes it to another level entirely – that […]
So where the hell to start? JP Anderson has been around a while. Firstly in the band The Shizit, who were Digital Hardcore but US-style. And fucking rocked. If you are aware of that band, it may not be entirely surprising to hear that Rabbit Junk is not all that far removed from them.
Another week, another noise album – despite it appearing to be a reasonably small “scene” there does seem to be a real vitality across the breadth of the noise spectrum at the moment, with release after release trying something just that little different, although not all are entirely successful in meeting what they are trying […]
It is never a good start for a gig when you get to the venue before the bands. But then, when their flight is delayed and they then have to get across the pennines, I guess it can’t be helped. Still, it was a little odd sitting through the soundchecks and an alternately deafening and […]
Really, where the fuck did this come from? Beamed in apparently from the mid-nineties to the now, and still so fresh and current it stings. A one-man project from the North-Eastern US, seemingly it is also a one-man mision to bring all that was best about US industrial from a decade past to a whole […]
First support was a strange, unassuming guy called Martin Archer, who was doing some very clever mis-playing on Clarinet and then Saxophone, followed some rather familiar Bert Jansch stuff. Unexpectedly captivating, and undoubtedly very, very accomplished.
I only really went to the gig for 1349 and Zyklon, and as I was fucking shattered by the end of the latter I decided to leave it at that – Enslaved used to be ace, but are somewhat…different nowadays, and not all that much in a good way in my opinion.
Infest has become, in the now seven years that I have attended, the one thing that gets pencilled in first for each year no matter what. It doesn’t really matter who is playing, I know that whether I like the bands or not I’ll have a blast as most of my friends made across the […]
Put simply, the gig was fucking extraordinary. Well, it was once Jeff Klein, the support act, was done. Another singer-songwriter dressed in a cheap suit, with a guitar and a whole stack of stories about how he’s been hard done by. The problem is, it was almost totally soulless. Technically he’s quite good, but there […]
Little snippets and teaser EPs had slowly but surely got the interest rolling in Chris McCall’s Coreline project, and the release of PKMF really should push this even further.
Something around 40 minutes behind time, the Screaming Banshee Aircrew appear and waste no time in getting on with it. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed that something wasn’t quite right last night. I’ve seen SBA a lot over the past year or two, and they have been much better than this. Off-nights […]
It’s been a tough few years being an FLA fan. Every release in, oh, the past five years has been touted as “the best one since…[insert your favourite FLA album here – me? I’ll lay my cards on the table now and say Tactical Neural Implant]”, when they patently haven’t. Epitaph was well, ok, but […]
