The Fierce And The Dead – ‘Spooky Action’ [Review]
This has to be the dirtiest album I’ve heard in a long time. The most recent instrumental offerings collected in TMMP’s archives have been markedly slicker than Spooky Action (Alon Tamir’s Terraforming and The Best Pessimist’s Love Is…) and/or Belgian (Celestial Wolves’ Wood For Wood; Marteleur’s My Anvil Is My Tuning Fork; Industroika’s North) – but thanks to The Fierce & The Dead, we now get to check out an album that not only promotes the joys of filthy instrumental noise, but was also created less than an hour away from TMMP HQ. Finally, London gets a well-deserved spot among its overseas art-rock contemporaries, represented in fine form by TFATD. Read more…
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Bands like Evilness never fail to make me nostalgic. Until almost a decade ago, I spent almost every night of the week heading out to rock and metal gigs and one particular club where I spent many relentlessly intense nights pumped full of Red Bull and jumping around to music like this until I inevitably crashed and headed home. Those days were fun, though unsustainable; today, the Red Bull has been replaced by J2O, and my life’s soundtrack has become infinitely more eclectic. 
Here at The Musical Melting Pot, we often give our wholehearted attention to musicians who exist on the densely complex end of the musical spectrum – but every now and then, it just feels good to leave the mind-melting stuff on the shelf and dive into something a little more luxurious. 
Those who have been following The Musical Melting Pot since the start are likely to recognise Chess from 
I’ve never made a big secret of the fact that I love Guildford’s music scene. The sheer amount of musical talent hidden below the level of fashion-clone high street shops and uppity snobs with Come Dine With Me dreams is mind-boggling. Scratch away the net-worth-obsessed surface and you’ll find pop singers, gypsy jazz quintets, folk dreamers, alt-rock groups and, in Doomed From Day One, prog-metal titans in waiting. When they get big, many will assume DFDO’s success to have been some overnight phenomenon – but that’s simply not true. Doomed From Day One have already spent countless nights slogging around the local gig circuit, and their hard work is finally paying off. Nine Fingers is evidence of this. Full track-by-track analysis below: 
Belgium certainly seems to have its fair share of atmospherically-minded musicians, and Marteleur is no exception. There’s a very clear Tool influence on My Anvil Is My Tuning Fork, which initially marked Marteleur out in my mind as potentially being ahead of the competition. This album is very interesting, but to be perfectly honest it sounds more like a soundtrack than something intended to be consumed in a solely audio-only format. As a chillout album it works very well, but the instrumental pieces on display here often feel directionless, with a lot of repeating vamps that remind me of an old songwriting tutor berating me for overusing my DAW’s copy-and-paste function.