Mostly Autumn announce details of October Leamington show

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Tim Hall

Mostly Autumn have announced detials of the Leamington Spa show in October

We have a very special gig coming up at The Assembly, Leamington Spa on Sunday 9th October. This will be from 3pm until 10pm and will feature a Mostly Autumn acoustic set, where there will be performances by individual members, as well as the full band. This was received extremely well last year at the same venue – who knew Alex could play the guitar and sing?

We also have the absolutely amazing Papillon (Anna Phoebe and Nicolas Rizzi) – they captivate us every time we hear them, as I’m sure all of you who have seen them will agree.

Mostly Autumn will play two sets, the first being a set of songs which have inspired the band members – guaranteed some Pink Floyd and who knows what else!!! The second, a set of their own music in their own inimitable style, with Anna Phoebe as guest on a few numbers .

There will be an hour or so interval, during which there will be some time to say hello to the band.

Please join us for this festival of Mostly Autumn – back following the overwhelmingly positive feedback from last year. We’re looking forward to seeing you.

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What next for the music blog?

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Tim Hall

I know I write about this band a lot. But this blog is more than just a fan-site for one band

Here’s a question for readers of the music posts on this blog. Over the past couple of years I’ve focussed on album and concert reviews, news items focussing on the independent prog scene, and short opinion pieces which are often part of the ongoing music conversation of the day.

Are there other sorts of things you’d like to see on here? Here are some of the thoughts I’ve had.

  • Retrospective reviews of older records, either classic albums revisited or overlooked gems. I did one of these recently, for The Fire Sermon by The Violet Hour, which came out 25 years ago but was new to me. There are many more such pieces that could be written.
  • Overviews of bands, a bit like the “Cult Heroes” column in The Guardian, but with bands from the underground progressive rock scene, with the emphasis on bands who are no longer active.
  • I’ve written a couple of “Ten of the Best” features for The Guardian for the likes of Yes, Black Sabbath and Ritchie Blackmore, and these things are fun to wrire. But what about some Ten of the Bests for the smaller bands that feature a lot on this blog? It would have to be bands who have been going long enough to have produced a significant body of work, probably four albums at a minimum.
  • More news pieces. I tend to restrict news announcements to the bands I follow, like Panic Room or Mostly Autumn or their various spinoffs. But I get loads of press releases from PR agencies, often for higher profile acts. While the indie and pop announcements aren’t really relevant for this blog’s audience, a lot more are for the rock, metal and prog scenes. Should I published a few more of them?

Over to you. Any other things you’d love me to write about?

Posted in Music Opinion | 6 Comments

Eurostars for Scrap

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Tim Hall

According to Rail, Eurostar is to scrap the first class 373 Eurostar trains, with the first one due to make its final journey to Kingsbury in the West Mindland this week. The ones going for scrap are those which haven’t been refurbished.

It seems a waste to scrap to 186mph trains, but they’ve been replaced by more modern Velaro trains on Three Capitals services, and aren’t reeally suitable for cascading on to other work. While they still seem relatively new, their 22-year working life is the same as that of the Deltics from the east coast main line. Like the Eurostars, the Deltics were complex and sophisticated machines, built for one specific purpose and unsuitable for anything else once superceded.

It’s only the unrefurbished trains which are going for scrap, the refurbished members of the class 373 Eurostar fleet are likely to be around for a good few years yet.

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Voodoo Vegas – Freak Show Candy Floss

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Tim Hall

voodoo-vegas-freak-show-candy-flossVoodoo Vegas play old school twin guitar hard rock, and their second full-length album “Freak Show Candy Floss” makes a powerful statement of intent. The title reflects life on the road, driving hours to play high energy rock’n'roll in places like Merthyr Tydfil and Basingstoke, and how that dedication to live music must seem incomprehensible to those with 9-5 lifestyles.

From the opening chords of “Backstabber”, this is the sound of a band who mean business. Laurence Case has a classic hard rock voice, Ash Moulton and Jonno Smyth make a hard rocking rhythm section, and guitarists Meryl Hamilton and Jon Dawson serve up monstrous riffs and shredding solos. Which would all count for little unless the songs were there, but Voodoo Vegas have the songwriting chops to match.

It’s one of those albums where it’s hard to single out highlights. “Killing Joke” with its references to dancing with The Devil in the pale moonlight along with freaks and candyfloss is almost the title track. Then there’s there’s the blues-rock stomp of “Lady Divine” with Lawrence Case throwing in a harmonica solo. Some of the strongest songs appear on what would in the days of vinyl have been the second side of the record. “Black Heart Woman”, “I Hear You Scream” and the album closer “Walk Away” are driving hard rockers with barrelling riffs. There are a couple of changes of pace, with the swampy blues of “Poison” and the acoustic “Sleeping in the Rain”, but there’s no filler here, every song on the album is a belter.

This is an album of no-nonsense no-frills rock and roll that does what it says on the tin. When working within a fairly traditional form, you have to be very good at what you do to avoid sounding like a derivative pastiche of other, better bands that came before. Voodoo Vegas pass that test with ease. To put it simply, they rock.

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Where is Tom Bombadil?

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Tim Hall

Something Tolkienesque?

Is this deep in the mysterious Withywindle valley, or is it really the Thames path near Goring? Perhaos Tom Bombadil is a distant relative of Old Father Thames, or perhaps J.R.R.Tolkien used to walk this way and it gave him the idea?

Leaves on the water

Here’s another picture from almost the same spot.

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Didcot and Goring

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Tim Hall

66086 at Didcot

A few photos taken last week when Summer briefly returned. First, DB Sschenker class 55 No 66086 at Didcot Parkway, still with the old EWS “Three Beasties” logo on the cabside.

66524 at Didcot

Freighliner’s class 66 no 66524 heads an up intermodal through the slow line platforms at Didcot Parkwau. The overhead knitting is already in place here, ready for Great Western’s new electric services.

Goring Gap

An unidentified Great Western HST set in the new green livery speed through Goring Gap. There were complaints made when the catenery went up because they were thought too visually obtrusive. Were there similar complaints when Brunel built the original railway in the 1839s?

Goring Gap

Again unidentified (you think I can read numbers at that distance?), a Cross Country Voyager crosses the Thames midway between Goring and Pangbourne..

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Peel and Prog

Posted on September 16, 2016 by Tim Hall

Haze

It was suggested on Twitter than the revival of progressive rock over the past decade and a bit was a consequence of the death of John Peel.

I’m not buying it.

It’s true that Peel, who famously dismissed Emerson Lake and Palmer as “A waste of talent and electricity” wasn’t a big friend of progressive rock. Any progressive band he did champion in the early days he dropped like a stone as soon as punk came along. And it’s also undeniably true that he had an enormous and possibly unhealthily excessive influence as a gatekeeper across several decades.

But the timing simply doesn’t support the hypothesis. Peel died in 2004, and the progressive rock revival began in the late 1990s with the emergence of bands from Porcupine Tree to Mostly Autumn. Surely the revival of a grassroots progressive scene has more to do with the rise of the internet allowing music fans and artists to bypass gatekeepers altogether? And possibly the 90s peak of Britpop was a factor too; that was a revival of precisely the sort of one-dimensional guitar pop that the original generation of progressive rock was a response to.

Anyway. I’m sure Peel would be playing bands like The Fierce and The Dead and Knifeworld if he was still alive.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

You won’t beat Trump by shaming voters

Posted on September 16, 2016 by Tim Hall

virtue-signalling

When you see something like this (It’s a screenshot of a tweet promoting the Boing Boing blog), you have to wonder exactly what they’re thinking.

Remember the recent all-female Ghostbusters remake? “Dudebro manbabies are losing their shit“, went the pre-release publicity. The subtext was “If you don’t love this film, you’re a nasty evil misogynist”, trying to shame people into watching it.

It didn’t work. The film, which at least according to the reviews was a fair-to-middling Hollywood popcorn movie, flopped badly at the box office. It turned out that the marketing succeeded in alienating a large section of the potential audience, and the only people it appealed to were those who would have gone to see the film anyway.

Why is anyone trying to emulate that disastrous marketing fail?

Perhaps it’s people who have little idea how anybody outside their middle-class progressive bubble thinks or feels? Whatever it is, the stakes are far, far higher than a generic Hollywood remake. A Trump victory could devastate the world. And Clinton supporters are sleepwalking into that terrifying reality.

To be fair, we in Britain made the same mistake in the European referendum. And 52% of the electorate told us to go screw ourselves.

Of course, Boing Boing are not the Clinton campaign as such. Cory Doctorow, who runs the blog, is a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. So perhaps these people don’t really care about winning elections?

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The Greying of Rock Fandom?

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Tim Hall

The Mentulls

Some thoughts struck me about the Cambridge Rock Festival back in August, which saw some discussion on Twitter.

There were one or two very young bands, such as The Mentulls, playing music in a very traditional classic rock style dating from before any of them were born. But the audience was overwhelmingly middle-aged, old enough to remember the heyday of blues-rock and prog from the first time around.

You see a lot of this in the progressive rock world. There are plenty of young bands like Haken, Maschine or Synaesthesia. Maybe it’s just an artefact of the festivals where I’ve seen them, but there don’t seem to be many of their own generation in the audiences. And the blues-rock scene is even worse. It’s as if anyone under the age of 35 who actually loves “old” music is already in a band.

As the existing audience continues to grey, who will replace them when they’re too old and infirm to get out to gigs?

Maybe I’m just being pessimistic here. Perhaps the bands would rather establish a niche than compete in a much more crowded market playing generic contemporary indie or pop. And maybe an audience of fiftysomethings whose kids have grown up and left home will actually age out more slowly than an audience of twentysomethings most of whom will drop out of music fandom when they get married and have kids?

What do you think?

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An Endless Sporadic – Magic Machine

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Tim Hall

endless-sporadic-metal-machine An Endless Sporadic is an instrumental project from composer and multi-instrumetalist Zach Kamins, On the album “Magic Machine”, he’s joined by guests including Dream Theater keyboard player Jordan Rudess and The Flower Kings guitarist Roine Stolt, with instrumentation going beyond standard rock and orchestral instruments to include such things as hand hammered lasagne trays.

The opener “Agile Descent” sets the tone. It starts with moody film-score atmospherics including violin and brass, then switches to jazz-fusion electric piano, before exploding into guitar-driven prog-metal. It goes on like that, a splendidly bonkers record, blending modern jazz, metal and symphonic rock with occasional hints of spaghetti western soundtracks and even Bavarian oompah music. Like the late, great Frank Zappa at his most inventive Kamins mixes disparate genres with gleeful abandon. You can sense the musicians enjoying themselves whilst making this record,

The music constantly twists and turns in unexpected directions, a reflective woodwind section or jazz piano run will lead into a spiralling metal riff, then to something else entirely. Often the first few bars give little indication of what’s to follow, a full orchestra on the intro can lead into a jagged prog-metal power-trio number, until it takes off on yet another tangent later on. But despite the undoubted virtuosity of the musicians involved, the complex, swirling kaleidoscopic arrangements emphasise composition over soloing.

One standout is “The Assembly” towards the end of the album, with it’s main theme first played on brass, including tuba for bass, then after some swelling strings the main theme returns, but this time played on metal guitars.

Titles like “Agile Descent”, “Galactic Tactic” and “Impulse II” imply a science-fiction theme, and “Sky Run”, “The Departure” and “Through the Fog” imply a picaresque journey, the whole thing could be the soundtrack for an imaginary space opera adventure, and the ever-changing music certainly takes you on an exhilarating journey through many musical moods and styles.

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