heavy metal
Kieron Tyler
Santa has returned home, but he wasn’t the season’s only visitor from the Nordic lands. The crop of recent music in from the region embraces genre-crossing jazz, vintage-style rock, the expected electropop, cross-border collaborations and a seven-year-old Finn. Exploring all corners of Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk journeys where no one else does, landing in Norway first for some finely formed jazz.The debut album from Trondheim's Moskus ought to straightforward. And it is, to a point. A jazz piano trio, their line-up conforms to the known. Yet, as Salmesykkel unfolds, it’s increasingly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Begins – The Flying Dutchman MastersKieron TylerThis fine box set has a cuckoo in its nest which has to be dealt with instantly. Like Eric Clapton’s 1976 declaration of support for Enoch Powell, Scott-Heron’s “The Subject Was Faggots” is a blot that’s hard to erase from a career otherwise marked by inclusivity. “Giggling and grinning and prancing and shit… faggots who were balling because they couldn't get their balls inside the faggot hall,” is how it goes, with Scott-Heron plumping for “he, she or it” as his favoured signifier. Yeah, times were different, the Read more ...
garth.cartwright
As Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister heads towards his 67th birthday does he ever reflect on the strange and fabulous journey his 50 years as a professional musician have taken? I doubt it – navel gazing not being something Stoke On Trent’s most famous son is known for indulging in. Yet this fierce pensioner has worked his way from grafting on the 1960s Northern working men’s clubs circuit as guitarist with The Rockin’ Vicars through roadie for Jimi Hendrix to providing hippie blowhards Hawkwind with their most memorable moments then forming Motörhead only to find that punk’s toilet clubs were the only Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The Darkness are back, and predictably, as they inch towards serious rock’n’roll, they also tourette tic a little preposterousness. “Every Inch of You”, which opens the album, sees Justin Hawkins filling his lungs and screaming “suck my cock". It has left some commentators scratching their heads. Do The Darkness want to be ACDC? Can they ever match the wit of Bon Scott’s bon mots? Neither are questions worth asking. This album simply wants you to air guitar 'til you drop.It also soon settles into a slightly less tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Seventies good-time rock; more like the Black Key’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s Sunday lunchtime and Swiss thrash metallers Battalion are hammering out jagged, smashed up riffage with gleeful ferocity. Indeed, every one of Bloodstock Open Air’s four stages contains bands playing the hardest metal. To aficionados this music breaks down into multiple sub-genres – death metal, power metal, prog metal, and on and on, ad infinitum - but to the rest of us it’s simply a fearsomely tough, ear-searing pummelling. Like all extreme music, it’s easy to dismiss as noise, and that’s both the point and missing the point. I wish, however, that I’d got there a bit earlier, then I Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.G! is the Faroe Islands’ – The Føroyar - annual celebration of its own music. The chocolate-box coastal village of Syðrugøta is the host ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sacred word 'om' is spoken in different ways according to its context. Elongated, it can be stretched over multiple syllables. As a musical unit, OM work with building blocks that are similarly minimal, yet drawn out for maximum effect. And like the origins of their name, their heady, psychedelic music is heavily indebted to cultures which lie to the east.California’s OM were originally vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius. Both used to be in drone/metal outfit Sleep. After a late-2007 five-hour live set in Jerusalem, Hakius left and was replaced with Emil Aros. Although Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cartoon goth-metal boogieman Brian Warner and his gang return with their first album in three years, and their 10th in all. In Europe Marilyn Manson – the stage name of both the front man and the band - are rightly seen as an industrialised update of Alice Cooper’s horror-film showbiz rock but in the States the country’s more conservative elements really do seem to buy into their cabaret antichrist schtick. This even led to Warner’s articulate and amusing appearance defending himself from accusations of driving the nation’s youth to gun-crime in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.Marilyn Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anyone remember gabber? It was a moment in the mid-Nineties when Dutch and New York dance music went as fast and loud as it could. In retrospect it was a bizarre anomaly but achieved brief cult popularity combining puerile juvenility, punk, avant-garde experimentalism and techno in a way that’s never been repeated. It was a bloody racket but the best of it had a real venomous sting and eventually appealed to the heavy rock community as much as ravers. The same can be said of Huoratron, AKA Finnish producer Aku Raski.Raski was discovered by Last Gang Records, the label that homed fellow Read more ...
theartsdesk
Biz Markie: The Biz Never SleepsJoe MuggsThere are plenty who talk about hip hop's “golden age” as being circa mid-1980s to mid-1990s. This tends to be done out of snobbery or nostalgia and ignores all kinds of incredible musical developments that have taken place since. However, while this 1989 album is playing it's extraordinarily easy to get sucked into feeling like it is as good as it got. It's such a good-natured, infectiously joyful and straight-up funky gem, you may very well find yourself wondering why all rap albums can't be like The Biz Never Sleeps.Biz Markie is possibly the most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To dubstep or not to dubstep, that was the question perplexing the nearly 5000 metalheads jammed into the Brixton Academy to see Korn.The California four-piece made their name as purveyors of "nu metal" in the mid-Nineties (like old metal - but with funkier rhythms), and they’ve done extremely well, topping the album charts in the States and around the world. They have always reinforced their sound with funk and hip-hop stylings, but their latest album, The Path of Totality, their 10th, pushed unexpectedly far into the snarling world of dubstep (of the post-Skrillex variety).Throughout the Read more ...