Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
As a newcomer to New Japan, Fantastica Mania is a bit of a strange one. It’s the bump in the road before we get back to the serious stuff and it introduces a whole new cast of guys (the CMLL wrestlers) into a group that I’m only just getting to know. However, I’m nothing if not a trooper, and I wasn’t about to slow down on my newfound puroresu love. Therefore, over the last few days I’ve tuned into all the broadcast shows of Fantastica Mania and here are ten things that I took away from them.
Enough has been said about Dillinger Escape Plan’s decision to call it a day after this album cycle. Happy about it or not, we have to accept it and move on. Move on to celebrating one of the greatest bands of all time. Dissociation was a fantastic way to start to that process. An album that somehow managed to encapsulate everything that that band is. Now, we move onto the final tour, as Dillinger rolled into Glasgow.
Continue reading “Live Review: The Dillinger Escape Plan w/ Ho99o9 & Primitive Weapons”
If you like your music to sound like it has dragged itself out of the sewer with the sole ambition of punching you in the face until you are nothing but a bloody and unattractive stain on the concrete, then do we have the band for you.
Continue reading “The Drip – The Haunting Fear of Inevitability”
Two weeks ago Kenny Omega walked out of Wrestle Kingdom as the hottest thing in wrestling. Ignoring the fact that Kazuchika Okada was as important to that match as he was and that Omega has been brilliant for years, it suddenly felt like the world woke up to The Cleaner. Yet, rather than turn his sights towards a potential rematch with Okada and a chance to become only the seventh non-Japanese wrestler to hold the belt and help spearhead New Japan’s push into the US, he began talking about taking some time off.
The UK Championship worried me. It worried me because I saw a future when WWE stepped into the British market and ripped apart something that has taken decades to build. That they would cherry pick the best talent and walk away having added nothing to what they left behind. It wouldn’t be the first time WWE played the big bully. Thankfully, it looks like I was wrong.
Capturing childhood on film is tough. Oh, it’s easy to put up something that kind of resembles it and passes for it in the glossy world of cinema, but putting kids on screen that actually act and feel like children? That’s difficult.
The Last Guardian is a difficult game to love. The nine years it took to develop comes out in its many flaws, and you will deal with dodgy frame rates, a camera which makes the one in Dark Souls look genius, clipping, occasionally poor graphics, more than a few bugs and a rather stubborn dog. And yet despite every one of those issues I adore it and particularly said dog.
The hardest albums to review aren’t those so catastrophically bad that you want to slap the band round the face with the CD. Nor are they the technical masterclasses, albums so full of intricacies that ten years later you still hear something new. No, the real fucking buggers are the ones that are just alright. Not too bad, not too good. What the hell are you meant to say about that?
After a brief time in the US of A, we are back in Dave Meltzer’s beloved Japan for our next five-star classic. Once again it is a tag team match featuring Stan Hansen, but this time he teams up with Terry Gordy to take on Genichiro Tenryu and Toshiaki Kawada. This match was the final of the bizarrely named World’s Strongest Tag Determination League in All Japan Pro Wrestling.
Continue reading “Meltzer’s Classics – Hansen & Gordy vs. Tenryu & Kawada”
Coming into 2017 I made the decision that from now on I was going to watch less WWE. With five hours of Raw and SmackDown and two PPVs a month enough was enough, and it was dampening my enthusiasm for other wrestling. Alongside that, I vowed that this would be the year I finally got into New Japan. I’ve watched a couple of Wrestle Kingdoms in the past, but it is time for me to give it the effort it deserves. With that in mind, the last two days have seen me sign up to New Japan World and tune into Wrestle Kingdom 11 and New Year Dash and as this is the internet in 2017, here are some things I learnt.
