Media hype is an unusual thing.  In the last year or so we’ve seen organisations like Team Rock throw their weight behind bands like King 810 and Babymetal, two groups that arguably couldn’t be more different.  Yet, both apparently have the dubious honor of being worthy of taking their place as a ‘hyped band’.  Whether they would have succeeded with or without that is of course impossible to say, but there’s no denying that they will have come to many people’s attention through the mainstream rock press.
Night of Champions Preview
Night of Champions is a strange PPV this year.  On one hand it feels like a big deal.  Seth Rollins will compete twice and Sting is fighting for the WWE Title, something we never thought we’d see.  However, the rest of the card is same old, same old.  Rusev and Dolph Ziggler are still plodding away in their never-ending feud and Neville will probably beat Stardust again.  As usual, WWE are approaching the end of the year stuck in a bit of  a rut.  Which is probably not the way to entice you into reading this preview.
Hearthstone
Once upon a time I wrote about my Football Manager addiction, admitting that I put more hours into that game than is healthy.  However, the truth is that FM is not my only video game vice.  While other games come and go, Football Manager and Hearthstone remain.
Slayer
Slayer and heavy metal go hand in hand. Enter any gig venue or festival in the world that plays heavy music and somewhere there will be someone wearing a Slayer t-shirt, probably screaming into the air while chugging a bottle of whiskey. Yet, recent years haven’t been kind to the band. The sad passing of Jeff Hanneman and the departure of Dave Lombardo sees 2015’s Slayer looking a bit different.
Bring Me The Horizon – That’s the Spirit
Bring Me the Horizon have been on the verge of going full Hulkamania for a while now. Their last two albums have been all killer, no filler and backing track aided Reading performances aside, they seem capable of doing no wrong at the moment. Even the tidal wave of hate that they used to face every time their name popped up on the internet seems to have calmed, at least a little. Yet is That’s The Spirit good enough to be worthy of the success it seems destined to have? Or are Bring Me about to pull an Avenged Sevenfold by having one of their weaker albums turn out to be their biggest?
Sting
Sting, despite a WWE record of 0-1, is going into Night of Champions against Seth Rollins for the WWE Title. Â He’s also seemingly slipping back into his Joker character, which made an appearance in TNA. Â The question is, is this the right way to use Sting? Â And is there any world in which him becoming WWE Champion is a good idea?
Live Review: Foo Fighters w/Royal Blood and Honeyblood
Stadium shows are weird.  They feel more like a festival than a gig and the abundance of bars and food trucks that surround Murrayfield just enhance that feeling.  The truth is that while they allow many to see their favourite bands, they are rarely (if ever) going to be better than stuffing yourself into some sweatbox venue and being within spitting range of your heroes.  Yet, there are some bands that just feel at home in that environment.   AC/DC are one and The Foo Fighters are another.
Continue reading “Live Review: Foo Fighters w/Royal Blood and Honeyblood”
Batman Arkham Knight
Rocksteady know how to do Batman.  Not just how to make Batman video games, but how to really do Batman.  They get that character and with Arkham Knight they have brought to an end their Arkham trilogy with a game that rivals the very best of Batman’s appearances on a screen.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Teens with cancer is in danger of becoming it’s own genre.  Following the success of the emotionally draining Fault in Our Stars, we now get the quirky indie version.  Sundance awards and all.  It’s a description that is sure to raise the heckles of some, as they expect to hate Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and yet this story about a self loathing teenager called Greg and his friendship with a girl suffering from leukemia manages to never collapse into mawkish sentimentality.
Iron Maiden – The Book of Souls
Encapsulating an Iron Maiden album into a few hundred measly words is a hard job. You have to mention the fact that now on their sixteenth album, they are arguably better than they were 40 years ago when Steve Harris started this whole thing. You could then throw in the fact that live they are still a life affirming experience and doggedly refuse to follow their peers into becoming a heritage act. After that you’ll probably get round to mentioning the music, which usually defies words anyway. With The Books of Souls, Maiden seem to have set out to make that process even harder, releasing a double album which is just over an hour and a half in length and includes three songs over ten minutes long. Here we go anyway.
