In their own way, Bullet For My Valentine have played a big part in my musical education. They were the first metal band that felt like one of my own, a band whose debut album I went out and bought and it wasn’t thirty years after the fact. Of course, since then things have only seemed to go downhill and they’ve gone from the UK’s next big hope to being overshadowed by Bring Me The Horizon and their American peer’s Avenged Sevenfold. Which bring us to Venom, their latest attempt to prove they aren’t dead yet.
The Wolfpack
The Angulo families seven children have been raised without really seeing the real world. An active year was leaving the house nine times, while there were years where they would never leave at all. When Crystal Moselle met them walking down the street dressed like they had walked straight from the set of Reservoir Dogs, she found out about this story and determined to discover more. Henceforth, The Wolfpack was born.
The Diva’s Revolution
On Monday night the Raw crowd at the Brooklyn Center turned on the WWE Diva’s segment. They begun to perform the usual antics of a bored crowd, Mexican waves and unrelated chants. Yet, only 48 hours beforehand a similar crowd had come unhinged when Bayley pinned Sasha Banks to win the NXT Women’s Title. So did the crowd change in that 48 hours? Or does it point to all the ways that the WWE is failing the Diva’s Revolution? It’s hardly a spoiler to claim it’s the latter.
ICW Flying Circus
In the build up to the biggest show in their history, Fear and Loathing VIII at the SECC on the 15th of November, ICW made their way to Edinburgh for a run of shows at City Nightclub. I was lucky enough to have a season ticket for the event. Having previously been a bit of a part-time ICW fan, it’s fair to say that this particular run has seen me fall in love with this Scottish wrestling company.
Alien Isolation
Few games have ever caused me to experience the seemingly contradictory emotions of love and loathing at the same time. Alien Isolation may in fact be the only one.
Trainwreck
Being funny is hard. Being funny for two hours, is very hard. That’s the challenge laid at the feet of Trainwreck from the start and, like most Judd Apatow films, it is probably around half an hour too long. However, it does manage to be funny. A lot of which is due to a star making performance from Amy Schumer, who is also the first person to write a film that Apatow directed who is not called Judd Apatow.
The Gift
The Gift is a film that would do better without a trailer. A glance at said trailer would believe you to think you were about to witness a very simple home invasion horror. A man and his wife return to his hometown and are haunted by an old school friend. However, the film itself is much more intelligent than that.
Summerslam Preview
For the first time in a long time, WWE seem to have decided to make Summerslam a big deal. Always seen by the fans as one of the bigger events. Recent years have failed to live up to those expectations. There have been some big moments, Lesnar demolishing Cena for example, but the event has always felt a few notches below Wrestlemania. This year it feels different. Not only has the show been expanded to four hours, but we have a huge main event and the kind of celebrity participation that is usually reserved for the biggest show of the year. Summerslam feels like a big deal and what goes down this Sunday, could well shape the WWE all the way up to Wrestlemania.
Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People
Frank Turner has had one hell of a career since the end of Million Dead back in 2005. He has played 1708 solo shows (as of Sunday the 9th of August 2015) and released six albums. That’s not even mentioning side projects like the brilliant Mongol Horde. In that time, he’s risen from playing the back rooms of pubs to a handful of people, to selling out arenas, all seemingly off the back of word of mouth and good songs. It’s a journey that now continues with Positive Songs for Negative People.
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Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation
There are a lot of parallels between the Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises. Both started quite small-scale, based around a specific idea, and as they’ve gone on they have got bigger and sillier and seemed to settle into what they want to be. They’ve also at this point, both peaked with their fifth film.
Ramblings About Wrestling 