When Guildford promoters Genrebomb put on a show, you know it’s going to be 1) professionally run, 2) crammed with talented bands, and 3) a great experience. Needless to say, this show was no exception. Read more…
Swedish people get all the good stuff first. Absolut Vodka. Battlefield 3. ABBA. Feeling jealous yet? Thought so. Well, unless you’re Swedish yourself. Anyway… Read more…
The title of this EP sums it up perfectly. To save you a Google search, the term ‘Maya’ refers to the supernatural ability to create illusions, such as the various sensory inputs we all encounter naturally over the course of our lives, as well as those idiosyncratic, subjective experiences that lead us to conclude that we each exist as separate, individual selves. These illusions then become the cause of much suffering, dis-ease, and confusion – and any efforts to escape their all-pervading influence can in turn lead a struggling consciousness into even more confusion, to the point of becoming lost in a philosophical and existential labyrinth. Read more…
We all know the feelings unique to Monday mornings. The bleary-eyed knackeredness, the aching muscles, the brain filled with thoughts and memories of the weekend that, perhaps, make us wish we hadn’t been born with neurons. What you need is to wake up – to be unceremoniously jolted out of your inertia-filled state of conscious unconsciousness. We all have our own rituals with which to achieve this: a morning workout, jog, cigarette, coffee, espresso, Red Bull, perhaps all of the above. But these options require actual physical effort. At the very least, you need to get out of bed. Hassle. Read more…
Wow. Seriously, just wow. As incredible as progressive music is, it remains a rare treat to discover music of that ilk which manages to condense an epic’s worth of consciousness-twisting ideas into a space of time more usually reserved for punk songs about being angry, being angry about being angry, and/or indulging in immature toilet humour, and then makes it work in a way that keeps you coming back for more, never becoming bored even ten listens later. A series of tiny balls of complexity that will take months to really unravel, ‘A Conundrum On My Coffee Table’ is a spectacular mini-album that should keep your headphones glued to your ears. Just remember to tear them away when operating heavy machinery. Read more…
In the music business, as in life, an overwhelming amount of lip service is paid to the notions of individuality, inventiveness, and innovation. But, of course, talk is not action. Record labels, and a great many people out there in the real world, don’t really want to stand out from the crowd; rather, they want to be second to market, and let someone else take that first step into the unknown. That first step takes some serious balls – not least because of the potentially paralysing fear that inevitably confronts explorers of all kinds. Read more…