If history suggests anything, it should suggest that Halestorm are not the band for me. Actually, it suggests a lot more than that, but for the sake of this review that’s stick with it. On the surface its middle of the road radio rock and the first time I heard them that’s exactly what I thought. However, a couple of years after that first listen, I still find myself going back. Because as much as Halestorm haven’t reinvented the wheel, the wheels they are making are full of the kind of big choruses that it’s hard to reject.
Gallows
Losing key members of a band is always tricky. In the case of Gallows, it arguably knocked their career back several years. To the NME crowd who had embraced them, Frank Carter was the band, without him they may as well not exist. However, that didn’t stop them releasing an awesome slab of hardcore punk in 2012. For their fourth album, Desolation Sounds, they have trimmed down even further, losing their second Carter, but that doesn’t mean they are not in the mood for kicking some serious arse.
Everything is Awesome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0bPIgJSg00
Music is a funny old business. Heavy metal is a genre that sits outside the mainstream and 99% of the time, relishes in that fact. We embrace our difference and we love it. That is until something like the Grammy Awards comes along and gets metal horribly wrong. They don’t get us, so they just go with the safest option, this year that was Tenacious D, and hand them a trophy, before ushering the whole thing off stage and breathing a sigh of relief. Should we care? No, of course not. Do we care? Well sadly, a glance around the internet suggests some of us do.
Live Review: Mariachi El Bronx w/ Pounded By The Surf
Usually when The Bronx come to town, they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Upturned tables and a crowd with a look that sits somewhere between confusion and ecstasy are their stock in trade. However, every now and then they leave that insanity behind. They don the Mariachi gear and choose instead to serenade us, with tales of love, life and all those other lovely things.
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Live Review: Slipknot w/ Korn and King 810
It has become accepted that Slipknot can fill venues like the Hydro. However, when you sit down and think about it, that fact is insane. 9 masked men wearing boiler suits and playing pretty extreme metal, should not be coming close to filling places like this. Yet, here we are.
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Christmas Number One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mHe6FMs46o
The annual get so and so to Christmas Number One, has become almost as big a tradition as turkey or drunk argumentative relatives. Ever since the Rage Against the Machine campaign knocked Cowell and co off of the top spot, it has become somewhat fashionable to push an alternative band towards the top of the charts. This year the always wonderful Iron Maiden are the chosen band. Now quite frankly, I would love Iron Maiden to get only their second UK number one single, they damn well deserve it, but do we really need to care about Christmas Number One?
Playing the Blues
If you ask most people to describe what they consider the standard blues guitarist, they would probably go down the old, craggy man route. Someone who can damn well play, but is not exactly one of the hip young people the modern music world seem to have such an obsession with. However, if you dig below the surface, times are a changing and two albums I’ve checked out in the last week or so, are the perfect proof of that.
Feed the Rhino w/ Night Verses and Baby Godzilla at Ivory Blacks, 21/10/2014
Having dropped the best album of their career, Feed the Rhino made the decision to hold off on starting their UK tour. Instead, they waited a few months before rolling into Glasgow with their electrifying live show.
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Music and Films
Music is integral to films. It is one of these facts that you do not always realise until you think about it. Take your favourite film and remove the music and it will be a completely different experience. It’s also true that movies have always depicted music in a variety of ways. Whether that be the ridiculousness of Spinal Tap or the freedom and enjoyment of Good Vibrations, music is a ripe subject area to be plucked and enjoyed.
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?
Ramblings About Wrestling 