Thomas Giles has a pretty cool day job. As Tommy Rogers, he fronts American prog metal outfit Between The Buried And Me, adding idiosyncratic touches to albums like Colors and Coma Ecliptic. During downtime, Thomas Giles emerges with fresh music that is itself unique and compelling.
Velcro Kid begins with Immersion Highway – a song that sounds like a Muse remix until Thomas Giles’ vocal enters. From that point on there’s no doubt as to who you’re listening to, although Read more…
Iggy Pop is pretty good at picking out quality collaborators. In 1977 – almost forty years ago – Pop and David Bowie produced a pair of legendary albums in The Idiot and Lust For Life. Both were billed as Iggy Pop solo albums – as was this year’s Post Pop Depression, produced by Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age and featuring the additional talents of Queens’ Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders.
Post Pop Depression: Live At The Royal Albert Hall is a full-scale onslaught of art-rock songs cherry-picked from the aforementioned albums. It also showcases one of the music world’s most famed and infamous characters in Read more…
Fall Out Boy have attracted a lot of hate over the years – especially as they’ve gotten poppier and poppier. To some, they’re shiny, glossy sellouts – but really, Fall Out Boy’s popularity is just the inevitable product of a knack for writing great songs, making them an ideal gateway band capable of pointing younger fans toward more mature influences. If your lyrics and vocal melodies stick in people’s heads and you don’t push them away with too much intensity and ear-warping dissonance, you’re going to attract fans.
Pop is pop because it’s popular. That’s just the way it works Read more…
Listening to the career retrospective of an artist you’ve only just discovered can be a dangerous proposition. If it sucks, you’re fine; life continues as normal. If it’s great, on the other hand, you may be at serious risk of kicking yourself half to death for your ignorance.
So, if you’ve never heard of Carina Round before now, you’ll need to focus in order to keep your feet rooted to the floor rather than buried in your own backside. Deranged To Divine covers fourteen years of temporal ground, collecting cuts from four solo albums and an EP alongside two previously unreleased recordings (namely Gunshot and an alternate take of Want More), totalling nineteen tracks if you buy it on iTunes. It is also, to say the least, pretty fucking good.
As well as counting herself a member of Puscifer – the electro-industrial brainchild of Tool’s Maynard James Keenan – Carina Round has collected her fair share of legendary fans, among them Lou Reed, Ryan Adams, Billy Corgan, Dave Stewart and Brian Eno. You don’t get to that level of respect without demonstrating exceptional dedication to your art. But if Carina Round’s credentials aren’t enough, the music contained within Deranged To Divine is Read more…
When you have five albums, a Grammy nomination, and sellout arena shows behind you, where do you go from there? How do you propel yourself over those final few hurdles and hit that next level? Needtobreathe now face that problem – a quality problem, sure, but a problem nonetheless Read more…
Over the past couple of years, Nothing But Thieves have risen from underground up-and-comers to guaranteed stars in the making. On the evidence of last year’s eponymous debut album and a firecracker of a show at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town (not to mention support slots scored with the likes of Muse), Nothing But Thieves are set to become global household names by 2018 at the latest. I had a quick chat with NBT vocalist Conor Mason as his band look forward to a set of recently announced winter shows… Read more…
When I first heard In Dynamics’ second EP Questions back in 2014, I was floored. Few bands are that on it so early on in their recording careers. In Dynamics were a hot prospect then – and over the past two years they’ve been hard at work crafting this full-length alongside Chris Coulter, the production mind behind releases from Arcane Roots and Jamie Lenman.
Fans of the above and Biffy Clyro should probably get a bucket before listening to Everything I See, because they will be salivating for the duration – and nobody wants drool drying into their carpet Read more…
Practically every pop-punk band on the planet wish they were Blink-182. Since hitting the big time way back in 1999 with Enema Of The State, Mark Hoppus, Tom Delonge, and Travis Barker have rarely been far from the limelight whether together, or working in a wide assortment of solo projects. More recently, Alkaline trio guitarist/vocalist Matt Skiba replaced Delonge following the most recent in a series of internal spats – and California, its title paying tribute to Blink-182’s home state, is the band’s seventh studio album, their first since 2011’s Neighborhoods. Read more…
Watching a band you love level up in front of a packed venue is one of the best experiences a music fan can have. Hatton Manor – the guitar-vocal duo now expanded to a trio with the addition of brand new drummer James Purvis – did exactly that at Komedia Read more…
Over the past thirty-two years, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have carved a singular swathe through the musical jungle, strutting and preening like one of a kind wildlife. Unlike the majority of musicians so desperate to give off an air of idiosyncrasy, studiously cultivating an image in line with the trends of the times, the Chilis more than look the part. They walk the walk –and that is an undeniable fact Read more…
