Manchester Oxford Road is a strange place. The cramped inner-city location hemmed in by buildings on all sides makes it look like a full-sized model railway rather than a real station. Here a Trans-Pennine Express emerges from the fiddle yard between the two buildings that hide the hole in the sky
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Goost Community, the supergroup formed of past and present members of The Reasoning, Also Eden and Crimson Sky are now taking pre-orders for their début album “Cycle of Life”.
Mixed by The Pineapple Thief’s Bruse Soord and apparently “sounding awesome”, the album can be pre-ordered from Ghost Community website.
Marillion announce the name of their new album, “F*** Everyone And Run”. As lead singer Steve Hogarth describe it:
What’s in a name?……
All worthwhile human impulses come from love. And all negative and destructive human impulses come from fear.
This album is called Fuck Everyone and Run or F.E.A.R.
This title is adopted not in anger or with any intention to shock. It is adopted and sung (in the song “New Kingsâ€) tenderly, in sadness and resignation inspired by an England, and a world, which increasingly functions on an “Every man for himself†philosophy. I won’t bore you with examples, they’re all over the newspapers every day.
There’s a sense of foreboding that permeates much of this record. I have a feeling that we’re approaching some kind of sea-change in the world – an irreversible political, financial, humanitarian and environmental storm. I hope that I’m wrong. I hope that my FEAR of what “seems†to be approaching is just that, and not FEAR of what “is†actually about to happen.
The album will be released on September 9th 2016, and the final date for pre-orders is 17th June. You can pre-order now on Pledge Music. You know you want to!
Exactly what is the purpose of egg-manning “news” pieces with titles like “Dudebros are butthurt over female lead in new Star Wars trailer“? It’s not exactly news that you will find icky, slimy creatures if you go looking for them by turning over enough rocks, but what does anyone gain by giving such troglodytes the attention they don’t deserve?
The whole thing smacks of manufactured controversy for cheap clicks, relying on people who ought to know better to share the links in order to feel superior to their chosen outgroup. Sadly it appears to be the default business model for online publishing, even as there are more and more signs of the bubble bursting.
The long-established SF convention DragonCon has announced a new set of science fiction & fantasy awards, The Dragons.
Welcome to the first annual Dragon Awards! As a part of our 30th Anniversary as the nation’s largest fan-run convention, we are introducing a new way to recognize excellence in all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. These awards will be by the fans, for the fans, and are your chance to reward those who have made real contributions to SF, books, games, comics, and shows. Not only can you nominate and vote, the Dragon Awards lets you share your support with others!
As well as awards for comics, games, TV and Films, there are seven different “Best Novel” categories covering different sub-genres; Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, Military, Alternate World, Post-Apocalyptic and Horror. There are notably no awards for less than novel length fiction.
Votes both for the nominations and the final ballot are open to anyone without the need to register for the convention itself or pay to be a supporting member, and you get one and only one nomination vote in each category.
It’s early days yet, and I’m sure there are plenty of bugs that will need to be worked out over the first couple of years. Certainly the focus on sub-genres could end up rewarding work that’s faithful to genre tropes at the expense of perhaps more imaginative works that defy easy pigeon-holing. There’s nothing I’ve seen that implies you can’t nominate something the crosses genre boundaries more than once in different categories, but genre-straddling works still risk getting their votes split.
Given the increasingly bitter wars over the Hugo Awards a rival high-profile award organised in a radically-different way does seem like the best way do go. In recent years the Hugos have come to represent one subset of science fiction & fantasy at the expense of others, which has left some readers feeling disenfranchised, one cause of the bitter fighting over the nominations last year. Far better to give the Hugos some serious competition in the shape of a rival high-profile award, and for those disenfranchised fans to put their energies into that.
Seen in the light it’s even possible that some of The Dragons’ apparent flaws are deliberate design features, in that the awards are intended to showcase the sorts of novels that have been passed over by The Hugos in recent years.
Panic Room hit The Flowerpot in Derby and Sound Control in Manchester for the third and fourth dates of their 2016 “Start the Sound” tour. Last year they supported themselves by starting the show with a semi-acoustic set promoting their mostly unplugged album “Essence”, but this time it’s all-electric, with two lengthy sets and a brief interval. Even with no support band there was more than two hours of music, and at Derby especially they pulled a sizeable and appreciative crowd.
For this run of gigs it was close to a greatest hits set, drawing heavily from their strongest album, “Skin” as well as obvious highlights from their other albums, with a focus on the harder-rocking side of the band’s music. “Song for Tomorrow” got the full electric treatment and made a dramatic opener, and the jazz-tinged “Chameleon” with the flute solo was an early highlight. The blues number “Denial” from “Essence” made an appearance, and there was also a welcome return for their imaginative reworking of ELP’s “Bitches Crystal”. The highlight of the set on both nights was the absolutely stunning “Nocturnal”, a song not performed live for several years.
With Dave Foster now well-enough established in the band it’s almost time to stop thinking of him as the new guitarist; much of his playing was spectacular. He’s starting to put his own stamp on the older songs, and it’s an amazing sight watching his hands fly up and down the fretboard during the solos, especially his shredding on songs like “Apocalypstick”.
After the two-day convention at The Robin 2 in Bilston in May, the band return for six more dates in June including a high-profile showcase gig at Islington Assembly in London. Then they’ll be heading into the studio to work on a new album for the rest of the year. They will be rehearsing a lot more material for the convention, so it’s entirely possible the June setlist will be different, but whatever they play, they’re on such great form at the moment that those gigs are not to be missed.
Big Big Train announce the pre-order for their fortciming album “Folklore”, to be released on May 27th.
A song from Finnish symphonic metallers Ravenia featuring Armi Päivinen on lead vocals and a five-piece string section as part of the band.
The song comes from the album Beyond the Walls of Death, released on April 28th.
2016 continues to take more and more of our best-loved entertainers.
In one of those strange coincidences, Tweets about /r/ sounds in South East Asian languages came acorss my Twitter feed today, and reminded me of Ronnie Corbett’s Japanese villain in “Death Can Be Fatal“, with his “wringering wrothsome death they will remember for the rest of their rives“. Then I heard that Ronnie Corbett had died at the age of 85.
In Tissingdown, it will be raining all day, and the lady from Nicaragua decided to leave early.
If everyone adopts the tactic of ostracising The Bad People rather than the far more difficult task of discrediting bad ideas, it’s not surprising that the culture wars become so toxic. It will inevitably devolved into witch-hunts and guilt-by-association. Getting somebody from your outgroup banned from a confererence or fired from their job may seem like a satisfying short-term victory, but does that really contribute towards making the world a better place?