Dropped right before Christmas last year, Rose Coloured’s Doorstep Volume 2 compilation doubtless made great stocking filler for a number of Surrey and Hampshire’s resident music fans. It also offers plenty of great reasons to get excited about the Guildford- and Aldershot-centred music scenes in 2015. Read more…
The “death of the album” has been declared many times in recent years – but nonetheless, musicians keep making them and are showing no signs of stopping (and thank God for that!). Almost a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, there still exist bands and artists capable of composing immersive, engaging, and fully satisfying collections of songs that stand up to repeated, unshuffled listens. Here are fifteen of them. Read more…
I have a very strong emotional attachment to many of the releases listed below. Choosing this list was exceptionally tough; I’ve been fortunate to discover some incredible bands and artists over the past year, and it’s safe to say that outside this list lie a great many immense tunes that can be found via a quick browse through TMMP’s archives when you’re done with this lot. However, the following choices are the cream of the crop. Read more…
Beyond the fuzzy opening grind of They Should Have Warned Us Years Ago, For Astronauts And Satellites’ new mini-opus drops straight into the Yellow-Magic-Orchestra-go-post-rock sublimity of title track A Homing Light. Read more…
If your plans for the night of February 2nd 2015 involve chugging absinthe, spinning round in circles until you fall over or puke or both, repeating the above until you pass out, and then waking up and putting on your coat and going to work, this album is the soundtrack you need. Read more…
Hacktivist defy categorisation. Their music is a mix of djent’s brutality and hip-hop’s flamboyance – but it’s impossible to merge those two genre labels without generating results that are…well…pretty shit. ‘Hip-djent’ reads like something you’d spot in an out of touch news rag whose contributors only feel truly comfortable with shameless fearmongering and casual racism, while ‘djent-hop’ sounds like a dance move guaranteed to alienate all but the most loyal friends. Read more…
As the originators of the metal style known as djent, Meshuggah are one of the most influential heavy bands in existence today. If you’ve ever sat and scratched your head at an ultra-complex riff until you listened to the cymbal pattern and suddenly it all made sense, you were most likely listening to a band paying lip service to Meshuggah – if not a track by the Swedish maestros themselves. Djent bands the world over owe their rhythmic and tonal signatures to Meshuggah, although the origin of the genre-encompassing word itself is the subject of much controversy. Read more…
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On the walk from Waterloo station to Camden, I passed at least three busking beatboxers. The faces were different, but the acts were the same – a combination of robot impressions, oppressively generic beats, and faithful and flawless impressions of a variety of non-percussive instruments. By the time KOKO’s dramatic facade came into view, the novelty of solo beatboxing had more than worn off; London was beginning to feel saturated by Beardyman wannabes. Read more…
Some shows are born special. Although I’m relatively new to The Hell, I’ve already become hopelessly addicted to their latest album (reviewed here) – so nothing short of a bad case of death was going to stop this show (the first of The Hell’s A Shitemare Before Christmas tour) from getting featured on TMMP. Read more…
If you love diversity, Brighton (aka Camden-on-Sea) is damn near perfect. Its top alternative music venue, the Concorde 2 – situated next door to the beach – hosted batshit crazy prog-metal mentalists SikTh on a school night last week. Now, just a few days later, a mixed-bag crowd of dub lovers are filing in to spend Saturday night the right way – enjoying music that moves the hips as much as the head. Read more…