Xenophobia is experiencing a real renaissance in the UK right now. Anti-EU attitudes seem to be a real talking point around these parts – and frankly, I think they’re fucking stupid. European people are badass – and if you need proof of that fact in musical form, this album should do the trick.
Although Read more…
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As one of the UK rock scene’s most hotly-hyped bands of right now, Black Peaks are a band you’ve probably at least heard of, and definitely need to hear. Talked up with huge enthusiasm by Jamie Lenman during a recent TMMP interview, behind the praise and acclaim Black Peaks are more than a mere “hype band”. On record and onstage, Black Peaks have Read more…
Prog is, at times, a strangely divided world. On one side are the true progressives, fiercely determined to push music forward into the future. On the other side stand the stuck-in-the-mud individuals whose primary objective is to cling tenaciously to the ways of the past.
Cheating the Polygraph is guaranteed to ruffle the latter camp’s feathers. A collection of Porcupine Tree songs reworked using Read more…
Planning a quiet night in this Saturday? Considering lighting some scented candles, taking a bubble bath, and listening to some light jazz?
The hell you are!
If you’re a serious UK rock fan, you’re doing one of two things this weekend. You’re either heading to Southampton for Takedown Festival and getting sweaty in the pit for an immense lineup of epic bands, or Read more…
This show may have been a hard sell for a Sunday, but a sizeable portion of local music fans still made it down to the Boileroom for this show. Earlycomers were treated to Tusks (aka Emily Underhill), a recent discovery who is fast becoming Read more…
Although I enjoyed Red House Glory‘s Foo Fighters-esque radio-friendly rock songs and decent vocal harmonies, and Bridges deserve recognition for their frontman’s emotive vocals and their unorthodox harmony guitars, I have a few things to get off my chest not only about Cavalier, but bands who come from a music-school background in general.
First off, I should say that I come from that background too – I did four years at ACM, and although when I put it that way it sounds like a prison sentence, it really Read more…
Nine Inch Nails. Tesseract. You Me At Six. Strange stylistic bedfellows maybe, but Grumble Bee (aka ex-PaperPlane man Jack Bennett) has succeeded in welding them all together and creating something you absolutely have to hear immediately.
Two of my favourite TMMP genre categories are “Genre Terrorism” and “Complete Batshit Insanity” – and few acts fit those labels quite as snugly as Read more…
As a music venue embedded into Stamford Bridge (the stadium called home by Chelsea F.C.), Under the Bridge was an appropriately unique venue for this unique show. An industry showcase set up by trade paper Music Week, networking hub MusicConnex, promoters ILUVLIVE, and south coast music school BIMM, it goes without saying that the high-profile nature of this show inevitably brought its own special set of performance pressures. A quality showcase set has the potential to push an act to the next level, while a duff performance can see a band crossed off “Ones To Watch” lists in the blink of an eye.
On top of the potential for mind-freezing attacks of performance anxiety, this was not Read more…
Imagine you’re a beatboxer. You’re pretty good, so you enter the UK Beatbox Championships. You win. You eat, breathe, sleep and sweat beatboxing for a solid year before returning. You win again. Things get a bit crazy. A comedy video you made in a kitchen gets uploaded to YouTube (as freshly purchased by Google). In time, it will attract over 5 million views.
Over the next several years, you take solo beatboxing as far as it can possibly be taken. You play underground comedy clubs, TV shows, festivals. Your YouTube presence grows. You begin experimenting with live looping technology, battling not rival MCs but inefficient circuitry and user interfaces in the name of getting the ideas in your head into other people’s earholes. You find yourself in a studio, recording an eclectic collection of tracks that takes in everything from dubstep and hip-hop to almost every international folk music style recorded by history. Your debut album gets released; it sells nicely.
Finally, you hit on a pair of serious problems. Read more…
Tuesday was a good day until I got to this show and realised it had started earlier than predicted, and I’d missed not only openers Sutek, but also one of my favourite new bands of math-metal maniacs, Let’s Talk Daggers. Sad face indeed. Still, Swim Good soothed my cravings for complex tunes with a loose but still awesome set. These guys can do no wrong, even when beset by technical issues. They really are that goddamn good. Happy face: restored for the rest of the night.
Yearbook (think a pop-punk Reuben augmented by the occasional bit of fancy guitar work) never fail to Read more…