Like Vultures – ‘Win Some X Lose Some’ [Review]
Cute. Cheerful. Bright and sunny. Nice. Win Some X Lose Some is none of these things. Read more…
Colossus – ‘Badlands’ [Review]
This isn’t so much an album as an unforgiving barrage of beyond-heavy ultra-distorted guitars, cage-fighting drums, utterly guttural bass, and brutalising vocals. If you’re only interested in nice and friendly finger-clicking tunes, Badlands is not for you – but if you’re pissed off beyond reason and your tastes tend toward the corner of musicland labelled ‘Extreme Metal’, it most certainly is. Read more…
Palm Reader – ‘I Watch The Fire Chase My Tongue’ [Review]
Hardcore isn’t normally the kind of music I can get into outside of live shows – but with this track, Palm Reader just became an exception to that rule. Maybe it’s the ultra-complex DEP-meets-the-theme-from-28–Days–Later vibe; maybe it’s my fresh, indignant anger at YouTube’s incessant insistence that I spend my time on their site consuming some Creationism-endorsing crapfest; or maybe it’s the bleakly abstract video below efficiently complementing this track’s relentless and ear-rending catharsis. Well, whatever – I Watch The Fire Chase My Tongue is fucking excellent, and if this is just a taste of what to expect from Palm Reader’s next album (Beside The Ones We Love, due out in 2015), then it’s also a reason to get very goddamn excited indeed. Read more…
The Hell / Flesh Trench / The Deadlights / Toska [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 27/11/14]
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…
SikTh / Heart Of A Coward / Idiom [Live Review – Concorde 2, Brighton, 11/11/14]
Outside Brighton’s favourite seafront venue, the wind is whipping up white waves that crash heavily into the shoreline. Inside, the air is moving even more violently as Idiom tear through a barnstorming set, followed in short order by Heart Of A Coward‘s crushing djent-fuelled brutality. Both bands deserve their dues for effortlessly eliciting manic reactions from a crowd set on saving their energy for the headliners. Read more…
The Algorithm – ‘Terminal’ [Review]
Weaponised bleeps and bloops. Gritty and filthy bass layers. Haunting synthetic melodicism. The kind of music that would haunt your dreams if you spent at least six hours playing retro arcade games and eating cheese before going to bed. A sense that you don’t really know what the fuck is going on, but you’re happy to stick around until you figure it out. Read more…
Palm Reader / Flesh Trench / Yearbook / We Never Learned To Live / Eschar [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 24/5/14]
Genrebomb and the Boileroom are always a great combination if you’re looking for an epic night out. Throw in local promoters GU1 PUNX, and you’ve got something really special; an eclectic evening of varied and exciting bands. Read more…
Falsense – ‘One Tonne Skeleton’ [Review]
The secret to effective writing is to omit unnecessary words. So the words that follow are the only ones you need to read.
Falsense is a fucking genius. Read more…
Bob Log III / Thomas Truax [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 1/5/14]
Although it’s great that alternative culture exists, you have to ask how much it differs from the mainstream sometimes.
Standard-model society promotes segregation on increasingly arbitrary lines (watch an episode of Come Dine With Me for evidence) and “alternative” subcultures do much the same thing – think rock and metal subgenres and the constant bickering between them all. Infighting is frequently justified on the basis of appearance (“just look at him!“) by both mainstream and alternative groups. Competitive snobbery thrives in both worlds, based as they are on stereotypical male values – and yes, despite some progress both the mainstream and alternative worlds are still male-dominated. For instance, “alt girls” have been relegated to the status of fetishised objects featured in magazines that copy the topless-babes-and-articles-which-their-readers-will-say-are-the-real-reason-they-buy-the-magazine-in-the-first-place-but-for-some-reason-nobody-ever-seems-to-believe-them model adopted by their equally standardised shelfmates. For more evidence of objectification, go see a heavy female-fronted band play live, and pay attention to how the men in the audience behave. And the online side of things is, naturally, not much different. Overall, it can be argued that “alt” culture is definable today as “more or less the same as the mainstream at a fundamental level, only with different haircuts, a different soundtrack, different clothes, and more imaginative and visible tattoos”.
So let’s say we want to find something that really deserves to be called “alternative”. Where could we start? Read more…
The Dillinger Escape Plan – ‘Happiness Is A Smile’ [Review]
No, Dillinger, it isn’t. Sorry.
Happiness is this song. Read more…