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?
-
Anciients – Voice of the Void
Album number two from Anciients, Vancouver’s answer to Neurosis, comes roughly three-and-a-half years after their breakout debut, Heart of Oak. So it’s been a little way since we’ve heard from these guys, but it’s safe to say that crafting epic-length tuneage takes a little time. To wit, three of the nine songs of Voice of…
-
Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel – Keep it Greasy
Some bands simply worship the 70’s, but this outfit looks like they stumbled out of a dingy London pub back in ’72. (The one dude even has Lemmy’s burnstache!) Named after a distinguished British seaman, these heavy-rock veterans return with their third album for Rise Above. Keep it Greasy lives up to its moniker in…
-
Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic (reissue)
I must preface this review by saying that I have been a Mike Doughty fan for an incredibly long time. I first became a fan when I discovered Soul Coughing; at that time, I had grown tired of grunge’s (by then) floundering, poor self-image (the genre as a whole really had difficulty regaining its strength…
-
The Girl With All The Gifts – film review
A few years ago, when Andy Black and I wrote The Dead Walk (www.noirpublishing.co.uk), we focussed on the quality zombie films because there are so many bad films that add nothing whatsoever to the genre, and indeed by their sheer generic quality serve only to harm the genre. Time has proved our approach the correct…
-
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree
Since he first broke free of the Birthday Party in 1984 and picked up with the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave has developed and honed an absolutely hypnotizing and disparate body of work (from angry and occasionally manic with Grinderman to soulful on The Boatman’s Call to a bluesy, rootsy and gothic beast on Murder Ballads and…
-
Thundermother – Road Fever
I first became aware of the existence of the splendidly-named Thundermother in the pages of the hallowed Iron Fist magazine. It was obvious that this all-woman group have taken their image for the halcyon days of leather and lycra we see in the photos on albums by ’80s legends like Girlschool and Rock Goddess. Grand…
-
Saint Vitus – Live Vol 2
Normally, it wouldn’t be all that unusual to see a band announce a new tour in support of a live album, but for Saint Vitus, this one comes with a twist. On this particularly shindig, they’re touring with founding frontman Scott Reagers, whereas the record in question was recorded—in Luxembourg, of all places—with Wino at…
-
Crobot – Welcome to Fat City
Does mainstream hard rock even still exist? It seems you hardly hear anything new on the radio nowadays—mind you, I stopped listening to radio back when the CRTC took my baby away. But I know that everyone from Staind’s Aaron Lewis to Default’s Dallas Smith is cutting country-music records now, and judging by the bill…
-
Lesbian – Hallucinogenisis
This Seattle post-sludge/black-metal outfit seemingly sees its shadow every three years, releasing albums in ’07, 2010, 2013 and now this, their fourth full-length, in 2016. I suppose epic tracks of this length take some time to germinate—the four songs on here span just under 46 minutes, with the shortest a shade under nine. “Pyramidal Existinctualism”…
-
Neurosis – Fires Within Fires
A new Neurosis record is always a noteworthy occasion, especially since they don’t come around all that often. Their last album, Honor Found in Decay, was released nearly four years ago to the day, and its predecessor, Given to the Rising, came out in ’07. But you can’t accuse this outfit of making the same…