With competition rearing its head from Apple Music, Spotify have introduced a new feature. Discover Weekly. A weekly playlist put together by, I assume, an algorithm buried away in Spotify which look at what you’ve listened to and comes up with other bands that it thinks you might like. It’s a nice feature for those wanting to move outside of their musical comfort zone, but does it really work?
Bullet For My Valentine: Where Did it all go Wrong?
Here’s a little secret for you, that isn’t actually at all a secret. The first heavy metal band I truly got into was Bullet For my Valentine. They broke at the same time I was moving from Nirvana and Jimmy Eat World onto Metallica and Iron Maiden (not that I stopped loving either of those bands). They were the first band that felt like one of my bands and The Poison is still a cracking album. However, at some point in the last few years things have gone a bit off the rails for Bullet. Rather than, as many predicted, a rise to festival headliner status, they have seen themselves flounder around the same level. Never able to make that next big step.
Continue reading “Bullet For My Valentine: Where Did it all go Wrong?”
One Last Fight: Danny Collins
It is safe to say that Al Pacino hasn’t done his best work in the twilight years of his career. While there is no denying his talent, recent years haven’t been kind to the great man, as the number of films he releases dwindles and the ones he does appear in hardly set the world afire. He’s not alone in this however and he’s joined a surprisingly strong list of actors who have attempted to stage a comeback, by playing a character in a very similar position.
Taking a Risk: Tomorrowland
There are plenty of films out there that just do the bare minimum. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad, but they play to an audience that they know exists and whether they are good or not, there is a decent chance they will find that audience. However, every now and then a film comes along that tries something a bit different and is full of big ideas. Quite often these films don’t quite work and something is a bit off about them. However, should these films not be celebrated over even the better of the safe films? Movies that go for broke and don’t quite make it are surely more exciting than movies that play be all the rules?
The Curious World of Marilyn Manson
Being Marilyn Manson must be weird. I mean you only have to look at a picture of the bloke to figure that out. Throw in the countless rumours, which have swirled around him since he burst onto the music scene (I’m pretty sure he still has all his ribs), a love of absinthe and an image that is part Voldemort and you end up with a musician whose world probably resembles The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet that is not even the half of it, because this is also a man who has given us one hell of a collection of music since the release of his debut, Portrait of an American Family, in 1994.
Feed the Rhino
Feed the Rhino have built up a reputation as one of the the best live bands on the go at the moment. Their shows tend to lead to widespread chaos no matter where they are playing and in Lee Tobin they have a front man seemingly without fear. Throw in two very good albums and you have got a band that would appear to be well on their way to big things. Add most recent album The Sorrow and the Sound and you have to assume it is almost a guarantee.
The Importance of a Title
When it comes to cinema there are a million reasons a film can fail and another million reasons a film can succeed. One of the reasons that is often overlooked, is the title. This week I went along to see The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, a charming film from the director of Amelie, Pierre Jeunet. It was by no means my film of the year, but it was a sweet touching film about a genius child attempting to deal with the death of his brother and the rather eccentric family he has been born into. Now despite this film coming out in a week that was, to put it nicely, slightly lacking in strong cinema releases, it completely failed to scrape the top ten. So why was this? Well the only thing I can think of is that people are being turned away by the title.
Rock and Roll
Every couple of years some twat who has never actually seen a guitar writes an article claiming that ‘guitar music is dead’, as if it is some great scoop and actually true. Which of course it isn’t, yes bands with guitars more often than not fail to top the charts, which is instead full of soulless crap (in the majority anyway), but any slight scratch below the surface shows that music with guitars is far from dead. However, is it still cool? I mean of course it’s cool, but is it really cool? There was a time when rockstars were the coolest fuckers on the planet and had an amazing ability to do more drugs, drink more booze and fraternise with more young women than anyone else. Is that era dead? Are the current wave of rock bands lacking that little bit of va va voom?
Linkin Park in 2014
I’m of a generation of rock and metal fans who probably all, despite what they may claim now, at one point loved Linkin Park. They were releasing their best work when I was hitting that age where I was beginning to make my way over to the dark side, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the traditional musical formula I’d grown up with. Therefore, to sit here and completely destroy Linkin Park would be very hypocritical, this band meant a lot to me once and while I’ve got past that, it doesn’t erase it from history. Despite that, there is no denying that their recent output has all been a bit shit, as they disappeared up their collective arses into a world of synths and musical wankery. Yet this year seems to have seen a turn around from the band, playing Hybrid Theory in full (still their best work) at Download was the first step and then they started promoting The Hunting Party, their most recent album, as a return to their rocking roots, but is it too late? Even if The Hunting Party is great is there still a place for Linkin Park in the minds of people like me?
Ramblings About Wrestling 