Pioneering art-punks WIRE have released a new music video for ‘Burning Bridges’, taken from their self-titled 13th album that was released this week via their own imprint, pinkflag.
Tonight the band begin their five-night headline residency at DRILL: LEXINGTON, and will play a string of shows across the UK from April 20th on the dates below.
April
20th – Southampton, Engine Rooms
21st – Ramsgate, Music Hall
22nd – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
23rd – Liverpool, Kazimier
24th – Hebden Bridge, Trades Club
26th – Aberdeen, Lemon Tree
27th – Glasgow, King Tuts Wah Wah Hut
28th – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
29th – Manchester, Academy 3
30th – Bristol, The Fleece
It’s not often that you stumble across a band that love sludge, and space cakes, so much they launched a KickStarter to fund a trip into orbit as the first stoner rock trio to jam in outer space. Gnob are that band, and thank green we’ve found them, and their new EP, Temple Of Sinners – a mind-melting home brew of cosmic dirge that is guaranteed to blow your ears clean off.
Sadly, KickStarter denied their proposed £498,000 space ritual fund-raiser, but this bunch plough on to higher realms regardless. Opening track ‘Curse Of The Jester’ takes a treacherous plunge into some seriously evil aural gloop, before coming up for air to breath the kind of vocal you’d expect to find on Master Of Reality. Bridging the gap between this filthy offering, and the bold psychedelic dimensions that lay ahead, though, is ‘Ceremony’. Five minutes of what’s only describable as shamanic, almost recalling the sitar-like noodling prowess you’d expect to hear hailing from the mystic Goat commune.
As if your ears weren’t smouldering already, ‘Temple Of Sinners’ morphs into a ten-minute psychedelic close, building Sleep-indebted riffs to monolithic heights before hurling into a wonderful haze of warped eastern jams.
Hit play below and let Gnob’s sludge ooze (careful) from your speakers. There’s nothing short of a masterclass in the dark arts of sludge, doom and psych to be found here.
Following the chaotic introduction of their debut track, ‘Hungry Heart’, London’s Yak have announced their debut EP Plastic People for May 25th, and served another head melting slice of their delicious garage rock to match.
‘Smile’ sees the trio loose and laid back over a near-four minute jam that creeps and crawls like Iggy Pop on a guest vocal with the Bad Seeds. Stream it here and catch them on tour through May at the dates below.
April
29th London, St Moritz
30th Nottingham, Bodega Social Club
May
1st Manchester, Soup Kitchen
5th Newcastle, Cluny 2
6th St Albans, The Horn
8th Bristol, The Louisiana
9th Exeter, The Cavern
13th London, St Moritz
16th Brighton, The Great Escape
22nd Liverpool, Sound City
Following 2014’s full length, The Best Day, Thurston Moore has announced he’ll take his solo avant-garde rock show on the road through Spring 2015.
Joined by the Thurston Moore band, James Sedwards of Nought on guitar, Deb Googe of My Bloody Valentine on bass and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth on drums, the quartet will play the below dates through May 2015 with an appearance at Latitude in July.
May
2nd Live At Leeds
3rd Live At Glasgow
14th The Great Escape, Brighton
15th Oslo, London – Sold Out
16th Oslo, London
18th Phoenix, Exeter
19th Birmingham, Hare & Hounds
20th Cluny, Newcastle
22nd Trades Club, Hebden Bridge
23rd Sound City, Liverpool
Aussie psych-pop giants Tame Impala have unveiled the first single from their upcoming third album, Currents. Sketched out whilst touring across the globe since the world-wide explosion of 2012’s Lonerism, the upcoming album is also entirely written, performed, recorded, produced and mixed by Perth mastermind, Kevin Parker.
Stream ”Cause I’m A Man’ here and check out the UK tour dates below.
September 2015 UK Tour
4th Electric Picnic – Dublin, Ireland
5th End of the Road Festival – Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset, UK
8th Barrowland – Glasgow, Scotland – SOLD OUT
9th Olympia – Liverpool, UK – SOLD OUT
10th Bestival – Isle of Wight, UK
Teenage Bottlerocket Tales From Wyoming
Rise Records
Sometimes, the biggest joys in life are the most straightforward, uncomplicated ones. The great thing about Wyoming quartet Teenage Bottlerocket is that they don’t fuck around, not wasting a single chord or word over the 35-odd minutes of Tales From Wyoming (their sixth record), and no end of great tunes.
Seriously, those tunes – they don’t half stick in your head. These guys play melodic punk rock in a similar vein to the Ramones, Misfits and Screeching Weasel; with few songs clocking in past the three-minute mark, and all the important topics – girls, horror movies, insanity, heavy metal heroes, comic book villains, etc. – covered. Watch the video for ‘They Call Me Steve’ below.
After blazing a trail through The 100 Club last month, and gracing us with brand new material from the forthcoming METZ II back in February, the Toronto noise fiends have dropped a second offering from the record in the form of ‘Spit You Out’.
Opening with a token shotgun snare roll its business as usual with Alex Edkins’ relentless, throat shredding, mantra spat all over this riff-ridden little ditty. There’s a twisted guitar solo chucked in there too, get some below and catch them live in London at The Underworld on June 16th with support from Bad Breeding.
Ceremony have returned with their fifth album, The L Shaped Man for May 19th via Matador. The band are streaming their latest cut, ‘The Separation’ & ‘The Understanding’, now on YouTube, but it’s a far cry from their brutal hardcore roots.
“We’ve always tried to be minimalists in writing, even if it’s loud or fast or abrasive,” says lead guitarist Anthony Anzaldo of their comparatively stripped back approach to making this record than their previous four. The L Shaped Man is said to use singer Ross Farrar’s recent breakup as a platform to explore loneliness and emotional weariness, but it is by no means a purely inward and melancholic album. “It’s really intense when I hear it. Not in a way where you turn everything up to ten. Things are so bare, you’re holding this one note for so long and you don’t now where it’s going, to me, that’s intensity,” Anzaldo adds.
Watch the new music video for ‘The Separation’ & ‘The Understanding’ here and check out the album track listing below.
Track Listing
1. Hibernation
2. Exit Fears
3. Bleeder
4. Your Life In France
5. Your Life In America
6. The Separation
7. The Pattern
8. Root Of The World
9. The Party
10. The Bridge
11. The Understanding
Riddles
‘Psychedelic Power Engine Iron Claw Thunder Mistress’
What would Hawkwind have sounded like if they hadn’t kicked Lemmy out of the band, let him cane his speed and take full control of the musical reigns? Sadly we’ll never know, but Hastings’ Riddles offer a pretty likely idea.
‘Psychedelic Power Engine Iron Claw Thunder Mistress’ is the near six-minute space rock epic from this electrifying foursome, and it will leave your ears red raw. Phasers cranked and tubes cooking hot, this lot only do business if it’s coated in feedback, fuzz, and steaming along at 100 miles per hour on a hell-bent journey to terrifying sonic altitudes.
Watch the dark and twisted new music video below that matches this head-melter perfectly, and keep an eye on their facebook page for gigs.
Last month, high street fashion outlet H&M raised eyebrows with a new line of Camden market indebted garments, emblazoned with heavy metal band logos. Naturally, Guns N Roses, Metallica and Slayer all featured, with some designs promoting what appear to be fictional bands too.
Ok, no surprise on the Slayer knock-offs, but fictional bands? Well, it is H&M, the second largest clothing retailer in the world, so I guess there’s no surprise there either. But the eyebrows raised further this week when it appeared that H&M are going to great lengths to convince people that their make-believe metal bands are actually real. Even though they’re allegedly not.
Strong Scene Promotions is, apparently, a fictional record label and metal collective front created by the Swedish marketing whizzes at H&M HQ to back up their recent clothing line. They’ve even created samplers and mix tapes with ACTUAL MUSIC to keep the yarn spinning. Highlights include song titles like ‘No Kontact! Fukk Out!’, ‘Jesus Rape, Battery Of Satan’, ‘Wine and Tears’, and last but not least, ‘Vaginal’s Juice Dripping Into Cadaverous’.
Recent press releases sent by a, presumed to be, fictitious metal-head PR calling himself Ville Huopakangas have included fake album artwork and bonkers press shots too, pictured below. To add to the calamities, yesterday the Strong Scene Promotions Facebook page posted a status denying all accusations of collaborating with H&M, but confessing to making music inspired by their new collection. But hold up now, there are also rumours spreading that Strong Scene Promotions may not have been created by anyone at H&M at all, and are manifested by devious internet trolls trying to get one up on the brand for their attempt at capitalising upon the metal scene. Or perhaps we’ve all had our heads in the sand and ‘Wine and Tears’ is infact about to receive it’s deluxe 30th anniversary remastered double gate-fold reissue, courtesy of none other than Strong Scene Promotions.
If you’re as confused as we are, head to the Strong Scene YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts to feast your eyes on what’s, at first glance, a perfectly plausible operation.
Metal, Thrash and Grind fans of the world, what do you think about this? Is it offensive? Hilarious? Or down right daft? Leave a comment below, or place your order for that lovely new jacket pictured above.
Teenage Bottlerocket
Riddles
