Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
Tom Cruise summer blockbusters are always a bit hit and miss.  For every Mission Impossible there’s a Knight and Day.  With recent years seeing a bit of a backlash against Cruise, he’ll be hoping that new release Edge of Tomorrow is one of the good ones.  Based on the Japanese novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, this is essentially Groundhog Day with robots and aliens.
The X-Men franchise has had it’s ups and downs.  From Bryan Singer’s first two films, which started the franchise off with a bang, to the awful clusterfuck that was The Last Stand. It seemed to be finally starting to find it’s way again by going into the past and providing origin stories in X-Men: First Class.  The follow up Days of Future Past now attempts to combine the two timelines, taking the classic cast of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and co and combining them with the new guns in James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.
If you have recently quit smoking I would stay far away from The Two Faces of January.  Set in the 1960’s, director Hossein Amini obviously decided that alongside the fashion choices of his central characters, the best way to depict the time period was to make sure that every character spent at least 3 quarters of the movie with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth.  Based off of a novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (who’s novels have previously provided the base for films like The Talented Mr Ripley) this is a film that oozes style and class, plus a hell of a lot of smoke.
So last night WWE held Payback and I don’t think it is harsh to say this was a PPV that very much felt like filler.  Despite this, the card actually looked quite strong and I was intrigued enough to check it out.  If you don’t like wrestling I really wouldn’t bother reading any further and if you haven’t figured it out, it will contain spoilers for Payback.
Let’s just set this out from the start.  Some of the views of Emmure front man Frankie Palmeri are something I could never get on board with.  However, that doesn’t mean we should ignore his musical output.  I am personally of the opinion that Dave Mustaine spouts an incredible amount of shit and yet I love Megadeth.  I wanted to set that out so I could make it clear that my views on this album are by no mean affected by the fact that Palmeri is a massive cunt.
When it comes to musical pedigree not many are going to compete with OFF! Boasting former members of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Redd Kross, Rocket From the Crypt and Burning Brides they are a band that know their way around the music business and in particular the punk scene.  Their latest album Wasted Years was released earlier this year and despite being 16 tracks long manages to come in at just over 23 minutes.
Godzilla has an unusual place in movie history.  Originally a Japanese creation, all attempts by the West to transfer it to their own have been a disaster, with the 1998 Roland Emmerich version being the prime example.  Despite this it’s fame appears to have only grown, with the Internet playing a major part in that, along with help from institutions like the BFI, which in 2005 released the original uncut Japanese version to a British audience for the first time.  Therefore it was surely only a matter of time before the big lizard got another attempt to hit your cinema screens, however few might have predicted that the director put in charge of such a vision would be Gareth Edward’s, whose only previous movie was a monster movie, but was made for around $500,000 compared to the $160 million that Warner supplied for Godzilla.
Pointing out that Zakk Wylde is a good guitarist is the equivalent of stating the sky is blue or that James Hetfield is cooler than you, it’s just too obvious to require stating. Â Taking that into account I’m going to attempt to review the latest Black Label Society album without ever feeling the need to express that opinion, because quite frankly if you need me to tell you Zakk can play guitar, you’re probably reading the wrong site.
Continue reading “Black Label Society – Catacombs of the Black Vatican”
The story of Wilko Johnson’s last year is an incredible one.  Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January 2013, he was told he would have around nine or tenths month left to live.  Rather than fight it with chemotherapy Johnson elected to go on a farewell tour of the UK and record one last album with The Who’s Roger Daltrey.  Over a year later Johnson is still with us and recently underwent surgery to have the pancreatic tumour removed and in fact there is still a chance he may survive.  In that time he did record with Daltrey and Going Back Home is the product of that labour and hit number 3 in the UK album chart.
Continue reading “Wilko Johnson w/ Roger Daltrey – Going Back Home”
“Please don’t forget we love you, but now you have to die.”  We Love You is an album that doesn’t take long to establish it’s themes.  Whether you want to call it aggrotech or electronic death metal, Combichrist are a band that are at home in an angry world full of jagged electronic sounds that are designed to have fans flipping tables.
