Album Reviews
Album Review: Big Top Heartbreak – Deadbeat Ballads
Opening with a brief stacked choral and minimal piano number like “Dogs Can’t Play Cards” displays a certain amount of confidence. Do Big Top Heartbreak deserve this level of self-asurdness on a debut album? Is this even a debut album? To be honest I don’t know, because sometimes it’s just fun to plunge yourself into …
Album Review: Videodrones – Mondo Ferox
“It’s pretty late, yet I still have a couple videotapes left to watch. I burned through some Argento, Fulci, Carpenter; now its time to jump into a stack of Gorgon Videos that I found tucked away in the back room of Video World. Faces of Death, A Night To Dismember, and Evil Dead Trap seem …
Album Review: Touché Amoré – Stage Four
Touché Amoré have been one of the shining lights of modern hardcore ever since they announced themselves to the scene with 2011’s “Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me”. This record showcased a perfect balance of unrelenting punk aggression and serene melancholic melody. The follow up “Is Survived By” possibly slowed the groups momentum, the …
Say Psych: Album Review, Magnetic North (Drone Rock Records)
Drone Rock Records is a Brighton-based label that has been steadily building up a reputation amongst Psych fans. A series of releases from the likes of Kill West, <><>)))), Space Spectrum and Psychic Lemon, all of them excellent, means that the label is now getting well-established bands knocking on the door asking about the possibility …
Album Review: SURVIVE – RR7349
Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein seemed to know what they were doing when they formed and created the score to the Duffer Bros Stranger Things. They captured a feeling in those synth-heavy pieces that you can’t just get from a plug-in you use in some computer-based program. These were hands-on pieces; meticulously strung together using …
Say Psych: Album Review, Moral Machine by Colonel Petrov’s Good Judgement
By and large I have a list of reviews to do and gradually work my way down it, it’s simple and orderly and works for me. Every once in a while, however, an album comes along that just blasts me out of my organisational reverie and just demands that I listen to it (over and …
Album Review: The Wedding Present – Going, Going…
In 1994, my irrepressible* psychedelic band (*back then, rip-off promoters, total lack of press or record company interest, and poor quality drugs were seen as challenges, compared to today’s climate, where the literal end of the world is a “no” from Simon Cowell) landed a management/publishing deal with Brian Hallin, the long-time manager of The …
Album Review: Axis: Sova : Motor Earth
Before hearing Axis: Sova’s newest album called Motor Earth I had no idea who he was. Yes, Axis: Sova is a he. That’s the name Chicago guitarist Brett Sova goes by when creating grainy garage rock albums. If you’re at all familiar with DIY, scuzzy rock gods like Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Kelley Stoltz, …
Album Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars – Pretty Years
I can remember hearing “…And The Hazy Sea” for the first time back in 2009 and being completely floored. Cymbals Eat Guitars had created this musical world that encapsulated all those wonderful elements that made the early 90s indie rock movement so magical. Bombastic guitars, quiet moments, tinkling keyboards, wobbly vocals that go from fragile …
Atticus Ross/Leopold Ross/Bobby Krlic : Almost Holy S/T
Almost Holy is a documentary directed by Steve Hoover, and it’s about Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a rogue man of the cloth that works and lives out of Mariupol, Ukraine. In his city there was a massive influx of homeless, drug-addicted children and “Pastor Crocodile”, as Mokhnenko likes to call himself, felt it was his duty to help …