Calling The Black Queen’s debut album Fever Daydream a masterpiece is not an act of taint-tonguing, banus-licking sycophancy. It’s merely a statement of plain and simple fact. It’s been more than two years since key tracks The End Where We Start, Ice To Never, Secret Scream, and That Death Cannot Touch saw the light of day, and those converted by Read more…
As one of the world’s most respected musicians, Trent Reznor rarely needs much in the way of introductions. The Nine Inch Nails mastermind, famed industrial rock and metal producer, and movie soundtrack guru has been plying his trade under the NIN banner for thirty years. Even those unfamiliar with Reznor’s main band have almost certainly Read more…
When you spend your life immersed in music, it’s easy to assume that you’ve seen and heard it all. When I headed down to Brighton to watch The Dillinger Escape Plan tear the town a new one, then-support-act Ho99o9 immediately shredded said assumption. For more about that show, click here.
Ho99o9 (pronounced “Horror”) live up to their name on United States Of Horror. Focussing mainly on Read more…
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Jamie Lenman is one of the UK’s greatest songwriters. The proof is already out there in the form of Muscle Memory, Racecar Is Racecar Backwards, Very Fast Very Dangerous, and In Nothing We Trust – the latter three released way back when Jamie Lenman fronted underground UK rock kings Reuben. Arriving post-Reuben, 2013’s Muscle Memory was a double album taking in everything from viciously intense mathcore to laid-back ukulele-driven folk Read more…
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If you’re a UK-based rock, metal, and/or punk fan, you need to be at Camden Rocks Festival this year. The lineup is fucking ear-watering, totalling 200 bands performing live and in your face over the course of one single day and multiple London venues.
At the time of writing, 80 bands still have yet to be announced – but of those we do know about, here are seven of my personal favourites:
SikTh
As any self-respecting tech-metal fan knows, SikTh are absolutely sick. Returning to shatter minds after an extended split via a series of rapturously received reunion shows and last December’s awe-inspiring Opacities, SikTh are continuing to Read more…
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Doing something different is difficult.
In a world obsessed with trends and fads that last a microsecond, the pressure is always on to deliver something palatable to a mass audience with the attention span of a brain-damaged goldfish. With his new album Lunaria, Danimal Cannon is ignoring the seductive pull of the same-but-slightly-different, and delivering something really different.
Danimal Cannon is a chiptune master, capable of blending multiple genres, timbres, instruments, and moods into a long-player that is an acquired taste, but a legitimately rewarding taste nonetheless. After I listened to Lunaria in its entirety and reviewed it here, this interview could only kick off with one question…
Your new album Lunaria broke my brain, in a good way! So my opening question has to be: Just how the hell did you make it? How did the tracks on Lunaria go from idea to reality? Read more…
And now for something completely different.
Completely different.
Danimal Cannon’s Lunaria is a mostly instrumental industrial-prog album, composed on a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy and loosely based around a conceptual story inspired by the Giant Impact Hypothesis.
Whether you’re new to the chiptune world or a die-hard veteran, you’re unlikely to have heard something this relentlessly left of centre before.
Acclimatising to Lunaria’s claustrophobic, digitised-to-the-nth-degree universe is challenging, to say the least. But once you get past the initial sense of sonic culture shock, its true nature as Read more…
If you’re a fan of flat-out-fucked electronica à la the Prodigy, you’ve either heard of Black Futures already (and love them), or you’ve never given them a listen and must do so immediately.
Love‘s video carries a warning (“FLASHING IMAGES – MAY CAUSE FEELINGS OF ELATION AND ECTASY”) for good reason, while the track itself features a Read more…
There’s more to pain than just pain itself. Extended periods of serious suffering are not always stable and uniform; the experience can contain many subtle emotional shades. There may be periods of calm, relief, joy, and hope mixed in amongst the darkest of dark moments – and Destrier demonstrates this fact in musical form.
Fuelled by the brutal beating of vocalist Arnór Dan Arnarson at the hands of two strangers, and sharing its name with Read more…
Long-form music making is a rarity in today’s no-speed-except-hyperspeed world. With iTunes cherry-picking and Spotify playlist-generating the default mode of consumption for many, even the idea of the album seems old-fashioned in some quarters. Movies, meanwhile, tend toward tedious strobe-ridden shitfests riddled with action but devoid of connective tissue.
There are few places to turn for those who crave Read more…