After spending many years immersed in music, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’ve heard it all. Then, along comes an Afro-psych-doom band interpreting an assortment of mythical spirits, employing a dairy farm’s worth of cowbell while deep-pocketed riffs batter your ears into submission and Read more…
Although music is technically always an experience, some bands fit that description more accurately than others. Vodun are one such group, dealing in heavy and soulful afro-psych.
What is afro-psych? Well, it’s basically this:
Music festivals are clearly Vodun’s natural habitat – and appropriately enough Read more…
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You probably know how it feels to follow a band across the immaterial expanse of the Internet for years, and get super hyped up when you finally get the chance to see them live. When you were going through that experience, a lot of thoughts probably crossed your mind.
Is the show going to be worth the trip?
What if it all goes wrong?
That kind of thing.
Imagine, then, the level of pressure placed on the band themselves. When expectations run high, you need to Read more…
There are few pleasures in life like watching a trio of tour-tightened bands tear a legendary venue apart.
Press To MECO (95%), fresh off the back of dropping a straight up stunning debut album named Good Intent, are on the up – and good on them. They absolutely deserve it. Breaking into Family Ties in front of an already-rammed Borderline after a quick bunch of fist-bumps, Press To MECO wasted zero time before nailing chunky riffs and beautiful harmonies.
No warmup song needed. That is the mark of a band who Read more…
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With Lemmy and Bowie having graduated to the great Hall Of Fame in the sky and poppy rubbish dominating the airwaves, rock ‘n’ roll needs all the fresh blood it can get in order to keep on fighting the good fight.
Back in 2005, Wolfmother emerged as major vital force donors, their eponymous debut dropping bomblike into the mainstream’s staling consciousness. Since then, Read more…
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Imagine you’re a beatboxer. You’re pretty good, so you enter the UK Beatbox Championships. You win. You eat, breathe, sleep and sweat beatboxing for a solid year before returning. You win again. Things get a bit crazy. A comedy video you made in a kitchen gets uploaded to YouTube (as freshly purchased by Google). In time, it will attract over 5 million views.
Over the next several years, you take solo beatboxing as far as it can possibly be taken. You play underground comedy clubs, TV shows, festivals. Your YouTube presence grows. You begin experimenting with live looping technology, battling not rival MCs but inefficient circuitry and user interfaces in the name of getting the ideas in your head into other people’s earholes. You find yourself in a studio, recording an eclectic collection of tracks that takes in everything from dubstep and hip-hop to almost every international folk music style recorded by history. Your debut album gets released; it sells nicely.
Finally, you hit on a pair of serious problems. Read more…
The “death of the album” has been declared many times in recent years – but nonetheless, musicians keep making them and are showing no signs of stopping (and thank God for that!). Almost a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, there still exist bands and artists capable of composing immersive, engaging, and fully satisfying collections of songs that stand up to repeated, unshuffled listens. Here are fifteen of them. Read more…
I have a very strong emotional attachment to many of the releases listed below. Choosing this list was exceptionally tough; I’ve been fortunate to discover some incredible bands and artists over the past year, and it’s safe to say that outside this list lie a great many immense tunes that can be found via a quick browse through TMMP’s archives when you’re done with this lot. However, the following choices are the cream of the crop. Read more…
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On the walk from Waterloo station to Camden, I passed at least three busking beatboxers. The faces were different, but the acts were the same – a combination of robot impressions, oppressively generic beats, and faithful and flawless impressions of a variety of non-percussive instruments. By the time KOKO’s dramatic facade came into view, the novelty of solo beatboxing had more than worn off; London was beginning to feel saturated by Beardyman wannabes. Read more…
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In an age of instant gratification, where everyone wants everything yesterday, dropping a sophomore album over three and a half years after your debut can be an anxiety-provoking event. It can be argued that music fans are more fickle than ever, easily susceptible as we all are to distraction and immediate amnesia – and under such conditions almost any musician could reasonably expect the world to have moved on over the course of forty-two minutes, let alone months. However, Beardyman is no standard-issue artist. Read more…