Category: Reviews – Audio
Glorious metal in all its earthly forms, compressed onto shiny plastic discs or into digital files. Which ones will become the soundtrack to your life?
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Day Of Phoenix: Mind Funeral – The Recordings of 1968-1972
Now that’s an excellent name for a band, and this is an excellent compilation. It seems there were so many interesting progressive rock bands in the late 60 and early 70s, and Day Of Phoenix are no exception. There is a pleasing element of the psychedelic to Day Of Phoenix’s prog rock, not surprising when you…
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All Them Witches – Nothing As The Ideal
Over the last five years or so, I’ve become acquainted with Nashville’s All Them Witches; reviewed a couple of their albums and gotten to feel like I know the band – or at least know what to expect from them from album to album. I figured I knew, for example, that their psychedelic/classic rock amalgam…
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Acid Dad – Acid Dad
I must confess that I slept for an unreasonably long time on Acid Dad’s self-titled debut album. I’m not sure how or why, I have to own that it did indeed happen. I have to own it because from the first moment the sound began to build after I put the album on my turntable…
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Thee MVPs – Receiver
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Receiver EP by Thee MVPs. There aren’t many things in this day and age of digital recording, mastering and production which feel like “going home,” but the tinny production, screeching guitars and speedy, cymbal-soaked drumming which dominates Thee MVPs’ Receiver EP comes pretty close. For about…
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Noi!se – Price We Pay (one-sided 7”)
A lot of years ago, this guy played in a really, really good rock-punk band. For a long time that band had a standing tradition: release a 7” single and go out on tour to promote the release. It was a fairly lucrative practice and, eventually, the band celebrated a milestone anniversary (I can’t remember…
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The Slackers – Peculiar
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the LP + 7” reissue of Peculiar by The Slackers. I remember the first time The Slackers released Peculiar in 2006 (back then, it came our on Hellcat Records). At that time, I was only a few years into working in the music press. I had a…
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Wildlife – Take the Light With You
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Take The Light With You LP by Wildlife. Sometimes the arrival of a record doesn’t bring with it a spectacular introduction – in fact, it would be easy enough to overlook some albums completely on the wrong day – but those albums can sneak up on…
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Noi!se – Lost 12″
For novelty’s sake, let’s address all of the obvious potential talking points to be found about Noi!se’s UV Digitally printed 12” “Lost” single. Yes, it looks really, really cool. Yes, I think that stranding a three-and-a-half-minute song all alone on a 12” vinyl record is a questionable use of resources, regardless of how cool it…
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The Glands – Double Thriller/The Glands/Double Coda
As good or remarkable as any band would eventually prove themselves to be, history has proven conclusively that it’s truly rare for any band to arrive that way (see Nirvana, Ween, Wilco… for examples of bands which developed over time) out of the proverbial box. In that regard, The Glands were no exception; when they…
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NWOBHM THUNDER – The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal: 1978-1986
The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal has acquired a legendary status amongst music lovers. Not only was it a highly influential movement (without the NWOBHM, we would not have had bands of the status of Metallica for instance) but it has an innocence and purity which would be hard to countenance in these more cynical self-obsessed…