On arriving at Camden’s legendary Electric Ballroom, I learnt three things:
1) The main room is smaller than it looks, since one wall is partially mirrored;
2) When you walk up to said wall and realise at the last second that it is in fact mirrored, you look like a prat;
3) The Safety Fire are fucking awesome. Read more…
Very few bands give as few fucks as Baby Godzilla. Even fewer bands use this trait to their advantage; there’s a very fine line between “putting in no effort” and genuine fuck-giving-free music. Baby Godzilla, however, are on the right side of every line. Every track on Knockout Machine is intensely chaotic, and yet makes perfect sense. In fact, if you were to force Baby Godzilla into a tightly-quantized corner, the results would most likely lose every last iota of structural integrity, and just dissolve into something utterly unlistenable. Read more…
A common accusation levelled at those whose core beliefs revolve around science and humans is that they are little more than logic-driven robot people, cold and emotionless, utterly devoid of the ability to feel ‘real feelings’. Their favourite music is assumed to consist of late-Seventies robot pop (Kraftwerk / The Normal / Giorgio Moroder / etc.) and the various electronic music styles birthed since that era, while their favourite activities are presumed to be a) watching Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens videos on YouTube, and b) arguing with Creationists and Christians in the comments.
Bats are very different. Read more…
Deep in my iTunes library sits a humble two-track EP by a long-dead band called Strobe 45. That band, when it was around, was completely insane. It was common for their detractors to dismiss them as either being unable to play or sounding so bad that it made no difference – but the truth was, Strobe just didn’t give a fuck. That singular quality made them a quality band. Once you were accustomed to their raw-as-a-Dirty-Sanchez-episode noise, tiny sparks of genius made themselves permanently known, enabling you to listen to something most would deem unlistenable not just out of some misguided musical masochism but rather out of genuine, ecstatic appreciation. Read more…
Well, fuck me. These kids are pretty angry! Hardcore prog-punk’s been a fairly trendy genre since the rock world wised up to the genius of The Dillinger Escape Plan, and few bands following in Dillinger’s wake have made a serious, crystal-clear-obvious effort to escape their heroes’ back-flipping, ceiling-walking, onstage-shit-flinging shadow. But on Tell-Tale Hearts Now, Voyager do precisely that. Read more…
The word ‘epic’ gets tossed around a lot these days, and I’m as guilty as anyone else of overusing it. But what other words could most effectively be used to describe this track? Intense? Sure. Badass? Certainly. But to my mind, all alternatives to ‘epic’ pale in comparison. Perhaps the best course of action is to stick all of the above together, brush aside that writerly aversion to adverbs and state that this track is intensely, epically badass. Read more…
As regular readers will know, Jamie Lenman is a big deal where I’m from. My Facebook feed literally blew up with the release of the double-A-side Fizzy Blood/Pretty Please, news of his secret set at The Boileroom in Guildford, and the dates for his Heavy / Mellow Band’s recently completed tour. On top of all that, of course, there is this album. Not just a standard-length LP, but a 70-minute double album that takes in so many styles that I felt compelled to delay this review and let it all sink in and mature for a while. Now, however, it’s ready to go. Read more…
Welcome to Part Two of The Musical Melting Pot’s Guide To Project RnL! Click here for Part One, where we looked at Project RnL’s YouTube-based output to date. This time around, we’ll be looking at the extracurricular work of Project RnL’s core members: keyboardist Eyal Amir, and vocalist Ray Livnat. Read more…
UPDATE: TMMP has been reborn! This video has the full story:
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Project RnL. Remember that name in 2014. Originally formed in 2010, it didn’t take long for this prog-pop juggernaut to rev its engines loudly enough to be heard by Dream Theater – the band still sitting prettily at the very top of the prog scene’s naturally complex hierarchy – and begin collaborating with DT keyboardist Jordan Rudess. That’s an impressive achievement, by anyone’s standards.
Opinion
I love the Guildford alt-rock scene’s current direction. There are so many fantastic bands strutting their stuff in the South East right now – and with this show, local promoters Genrebomb presented a sizeable crowd with no less than four up-and-coming new talents: Read more…