/Countdown/2015/Gigs
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.
Tag: reviews
/Countdown/2015/Albums
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 […]
/Countdown/2015/Tracks
Week two of the amodelofcontrol.com review of 2015, and it’s onto the Best Tracks.
/Countdown/2015 /Compilations and Re-issues
Is that the time already? You ask.
Into the Pit: 189: 3TEETH – Electrowerkz N1 – 10-October 2015
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.
Into the Pit: 188: The Sisters of Mercy – Roundhouse NW1 – 18-October 2015
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 […]
Memory of a Festival: 025: Cold Waves IV
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 […]
Memory of a Festival: 024: Infest 2015
Christ almighty, this year has passed really fucking quickly – we’re already heading back into autumn, which means I’ve enjoyed my fifteenth Infest. While perhaps not a lineup with too many “marquee” names this year, it was certainly one that had some treasures in it, and away from the bands was one of the maddest […]
/The Rearview Mirror/006 /Machines of Loving Grace
Time to dig back into my musical past once again, this time for a band that released their third – and what was to be their last – album in twenty years ago in 1995. They had, pretty much, already hit their commercial peak by this point, and as things continued later into the nineties, […]
But Listen: 145: A Tale of Two Returns – Failure and Refused
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 […]
But Listen: 144: BLiNDNESS – WRAPPED iN PLASTiC
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, […]
But Listen: 143: Coal Chamber – Rivals
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 […]
Into the Pit: 187: Adventures in Audio-Visual – Randolph & Mortimer and Public Service Broadcasting Live
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 […]
/The Rearview Mirror/005 /Garbage/Garbage
The dawn of a new year, and once again a few posts have appeared from both musical and so-called clickbait sources noting the albums that are turning twenty years old during 2015. For many of my friends and I, this is starting to hit hard – many of these are the albums that we were […]
Memory of a Festival: 023: Cold Waves III
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 […]
But Listen: 142: Prude – The Dark Age of Consent
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 […]
Memory of a Festival: 022: Infest 2014
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 […]
Memory of a Festival: 021: Bloodstock Open Air 2014
A first for me, in attending Bloodstock for the first time, and a first time in fifteen years camping at a festival (I last did so in 1999 for Reading – you know, back when they still booked bands worth seeing). It wasn’t my first festival where the rain was torrential, though, but even so […]
Into the Pit: 186: Arnocorps – Live at The Underworld – 02-August 2014
Heroic. Ballsy. The Greatest Band of All Time. The six-strong band known as Arnocorps are not short on confidence, that’s for sure.
But Listen: 141: Alter der Ruine – I Will Remember It All Differently
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 […]