Author: Steve Earles
-
Vantablack Warship – Abrasive Pulmonic Speak
Vantablack Warship continue to progress in leaps and bounds, and I could see them being a valuable addition to any quality metal label’s roster. Imagine Rush colliding with At The Gates, and you will have some idea of Vantablack’s sound, but really with each successive release they become more and more their own creation. Their song-writing has…
-
Greber – Cemetery Preston
As you can see by the list of formats below, Greber are definitely committed to the physical format. For that, Sirs, I salute you! The cover artwork is superb too. But, as to the music contained in all these wondrous formats, does it deserve to be so immortalised? Indeed it does. On Cemetery Preston, Greber have produced some…
-
Tony Tears – Demons Crawl At Your Side
It is fair to say a lot of metal fans like Italian horror films. I’m thinking of atmospheric works like Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ or Dario Arngento’s ‘Susperia’, both fine Italian works of art and highly influential and respected. Moreover, Italy is a country with a long and bloody history and the birthplace of the Roman Catholic…
-
Paradise Lost – Host
Paradise Lost really have mutated to survive over the years. With their debut Lost Paradise, they had a sound inspired by Autopsy, Celtic Frost and Black Sabbath, yet even there their own identity shone through. It was dark, and that would be the way for Paradise Lost to this day (a great name, all the great…
-
BOOK REVIEW: Why We Sleep
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams Written by Matthew Walker Published by Allen Lane It was always thought that the three pillars of health were diet, exercise and sleep. But that was wrong: sleep should always come first – it is irrefutably the foundation the other two pillars are built on.…
-
BOOK REVIEW: Aleister Crowley in America
Written by Tobias Churton Published by Inner Tradition Inner Traditions published a marvellously eclectic selection of books that make the reader think about the world in a different way. Aleister Crowley was one of the 20th century’s great thinkers. He saw the world in a very new fashion. Often misunderstood, Crowley’s life and work deserves…
-
Black Moth – Anatomical Venus
Often reviews of an album consist of ‘this sounds like band x’, the singer sounds like ‘singer y’, and ‘this album sounds like album z’. But this is not the case with Black Moth: they are special; they sound like Black Moth, no one else. This in itself is a mighty achievement.Their song-writing and performances are…
-
Book reviews by Steve Earles: Everybody Lies
Everybody Lies: What The Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are By Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Foreword by Steven Pinker It’s hard to get your head around the fact that on any given day the human race searching the internet amasses eight trillion gigabytes of data! Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a Harvard-trained economist and worked as a…
-
Book reviews by Steve Earles: FICTION
Radio Girls By Sarah-Jane Stratford It’s difficult in this 21st century era of mass communications to understand just how important radio was in its early years (think of Rush’s “Spirit of Radio”!). It literally opened up the world. I remember my mother telling me her granny would listen to the radio all day, transfixed by…
-
Book reviews by Steve Earles: HISTORY
Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What He Actually Said By Richard M. Langworth In 1968 Richard M. Langworth founded the Churchill Study unit and its journal Finest Hour, which he edited for over thirty years (since 2014 he has been Senior Fellow for the Churchill project at Hillsdale College in Michigan). It is fair to say…