Rubbish

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Silent Cry is Feeder’s sixth album but it could easily be any of them as they all sound the same. Bland rock acts can sometimes muster offense by their blandness but Feeder can’t even reach that pinnacle of Snow Patrol turdness. Brisk drums, banal guitar work married to insipid vocals and melodies are the order of the day in a fashion that makes the Stereophonics resemble the Supersuckers. We Are The People opens the record on would be chest beating anthemics, “Why do we pray? Why do we talk about angels flying on their golden wings?”. Even fucking Creed would’ve thought twice about this track’s pompous metaphysics, marrying rubbish lyrics to big diet-metal guitars. Dragged out to nearly five minutes, We Are The People well…drags. Follow up Itsumo is more or less the same song but with louder bass in the mix. Miss You is slightly better, a brisk pop punk number that rattles along and manages the record’s only true spark of life. Being Feeder of course there are rubbish...

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Queensryche, internationally renowned prog metal band from Seattle perform concept albums Operation: Mindcrime I and II at the Carling Academy Glasgow on Friday 13th June 2008.

Rock, Dublin, SiAn Records, Jaded Sun. Gypsy Trip

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This is an amazing album. From the first note to the last chord I loved the whole thing (with minor lulls around Crazyman and Higher—so minor they're hardly worth mentioning). The dirty rock sound, the not-entirely-unreminiscent-of-Rod-Stewart vocals, the crashing loudness, the lyrical stretch from sweet to silly to downright dirty, have all added up to make Gypsy Trip a staple on my mp3 player since it dropped through my letterbox. Jaded Sun are a Dublin based five-piece formed in 2003. They released an EP Raw in 2004, the title track of which broke all download records in Ireland. In 2005 they were asked to pen the theme to the remake of 80’s cult snowboarding film Apocalypse Snow (I’m not gonna pretend I’ve ever heard of this film before much less seen it). In 2007 they went into the studio with a view to making a rock album that felt “fresh and exciting”. I’ll nod my head to that; they did a bloody good job. Bits of it reminded me of AC/DC, bits of it reminded me of...

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No Remote - never heard of them? There's a reason for that. What a waste of time. Musically bland with a singer who can't decide between hero worshipping the Muse vocalist or the shortarse from Placebo. Honestly, sometimes I genuinely can't imagine what record companies are thinking. These guys must have got a fair amount of cash to write and record an album and have managed to produce something less pleasurable than listening to kittens being tortured. I know I'm in trouble for taking ages to review this album (sorry Woolies!) but after listening to it the first time it was an absolute chore to put it on again. I genuinely can't think of a good thing to say about Shadow Boxing other than the CD will double as a nice coaster next time I have a cup of tea. Or a frisbee if I happen to be feeling slightly more energetic. The problem is I can't even work up some decent vitriol towards the album or the band. It doesn't even stand out as an example of such atrocious quality...

One day I'll review something that isn't rap-metal related in some way. Just not today.

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The fact that I was even able to travel all the way to London for a STUCK FUCKING MOJO concert in the year 2008 is nothing short of incredible. Their unique 90s-borne blend of hardcore/metal groove-riffage and aggressively upbeat rap vocals found the band tarred with the same brush as many inferior bands at the turn of the millennium, and the band collapsed under the pressure of the nu-metal backlash shortly after. Fans feared the band were lost forever. Fans feared that they had lost this great band forever. They say that time heals all wounds, though, and with the stench of nu-metal finally lifting from the air the band did last year what many critics and long-time fans alike thought was the impossible by releasing a comeback album that simply did not suck balls. With a newfound politically-charged intensity to their lyrics forcibly ramming their way into our eardrums on the back of possibly the heaviest and most crushing riffs that founder and guitarist Rich Ward has...

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Burn The Witch is like the bastard child of Iron Maiden and AC/DC which means if you're still reading this you've more than likely worn your hair long & greasy, cut the sleeves off a band t-shirt, combined leather & denim in obscene ways and chosen partners based only on how slutty they'll look standing next to you impressing your mates - so let's talk ROCK. The lead tracks stands out as well suited for grabbing your attention by the balls to ensure you listen to the rest of the EP. You Brought A Knife To A Gunfight then throws Motley Crue into a pit with Skid Row and a thousand weekend rockers with too tight trousers and hairbrush mics, it even has a "Fuck You" chorus making it almost impossible for the true Rocker to dislike it. Thin Lizzy get their chance next as the over-whelming influence on Breakdown and then we wind down to a too soon end with the obligatory lighter-in-the-air ballad of Heartburn. Stone Gods galloping through every genre of hard & heavy...

Crap name... crap band?

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Any thoughts I may have had this band would be boring were blown away the first time a stick hit some skin here. A blinding little drum intro perked up my interest like a meerkat surveying the savannah. Danava are from some part of America. They sound like they should be from the deep south and sick of it. Big riffs, pounding drums and a trippy, psychedelic singer should really annoy me. Especially the 'big riffs' part but it's hard not to listen and even harder not to enjoy. I mean I listen to punk music so anything over three minutes should be carcinogen to me (apart from "The Decline" by NOFX and "At The Mall" by Pansy Division). The real test will be if an album of seven tracks ranging from 4:13 to 13:21 in length can stop me from turning it down to find out who the killer is on CSI. They don't manage it. 3:22 seconds into track 2 (when a good song should be finishing) some crap organ comes in. Bad choice, even for an outro, it reminds me of Yes. I hate Yes,...

Looking back at music past

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The Triffids formed in Perth, Australia in 1980, led by vocalist and song writer David McComb. Across the 80s they released several albums, beginning with Treeless Plain and ending with their final release, Black Swan in 1989. This review concerns their 1985 album, the strangely titled Born Sandy Devotional. Taking the folk by way of the Velvet Underground sound that they had harnessed on earlier albums, on Born Sandy Devotional the Triffids give it a big melodic sheen without losing any of their melancholy to 80s pop technology. Recorded in London this was the band’s biggest moment, even getting them on the cover of the NME. But there’s little of the noise and thunder of London or indeed any city to be found within the songs of Born Sandy Devotional. Seabirds, Esturary Bed, Lonely Stretch and Wide Open Space are just examples of how the titles alone conjure up images of Australia’s immense out back and rugged coastline. Reissued now in 2006 by Domino, the album’s original...

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AN: Happy new year from AN, how did you spend Hogmanay? Ricky: Thanks, Hogmanay was brilliant for me, I was doing a solo show opening up for Cheap Trick in LA, it was an amazing way to spend it as they are legends and I'm a big fan of the band. AN: It's coming up for the 20th Anniversary of The Almighty Ricky: It's scary

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What a strange little jewel of an album. VietNam's self-titled debut album is a retro sounding amalgamation of Dylan vocals, hinting at the Mark Knopfler/Leonard Cohen at times, over a Velvet-Underground-meets-Sonic-Youth sound. Okay, now I've got the music wankery out of the way (all true by the way) I can get down to business. This is a lovely wee collection of songs. Really. The words are cowboy blues meets the drug-ravished streets of the underground scene and, I have to admit, I have a soft spot for the storytelling style in a lyricist. Mr vocalist, Michael Gerner, has one of those cracked voices beloved of singers who inhabit that low-light, claustrophobically small, whisky-as-payment type of bar that, in my head, you find taking up where jazz bars left off. The music is a 60's psychedelica sliding into the Sonic Youth-esque screaming, clashing approach which means there's always something to process. In the more melodic areas the almost-orchestral sound hints at...