Zero She Flies, the band formerly known as Mermaid Kiss, follow up their earlier single “Small Mercies” with the four-track EP “The River”, available today as a download from Bandcamp.
The EP features a number of guest musicans including Panic Room’s Jon Edwards alongside the core quartet of Maria Milewska, Jamie Field, Wendy Marks and Shane Webb. More detail including full credits and lyrics can be found on the band’s website.
The Fierce and the Dead have just announced on Twitter that they will be taking pre-ordered for a new EP, titled “Magnet” this coming Friday, July 17th.
Mantra Vega and The Dave Kerzner band have announced two co-headline live dates at the 350-seat Joseph Rountree Theatre in York on the 3rd and 4th October.
Tickets go on sale on Friday July 17th, full details on the Mantra Vega website.
Update:Â Unfortunately these dates have been postponed. As stated by the band:
Due to unforeseeable circumstances touring plans have been placed on hold.
We apologise for any incovenience caused.Â
Meanwhile we will be keeping you updated on the progress of ‘The Illusion’s Reckoning’ which is scheduled for release 5/10/15.
Remember #East17 ? No exaggeration this was me minutes before and during their gig in the Academy last night pic.twitter.com/qTyoek6dbR
— Tom Flynn (@tomflynnphoto) June 26, 2015
Got to love this story.
I’m not in the habit of seeing has-beens whose fifteen minutes of fame are long past, but I’ve been to a fair few gigs that have been as poorly attended. I’ll spare the names of the bands to save them embarrassment.
What I do know from speaking to bands is, apart from them not wanting it widely known that a particular gig only attracted a handful of people, is that they hate it when everyone hangs at the back rather than coming forward.
If there’s any kind of stage lighting, the band can’t see much beyond the first couple of rows, so if there’s nobody within ten feet of the stage it looks to them as if they’re playing to an empty room. In contrast, if all thirty people present come down the front, it looks as if it’s a full house for the same reason.
It also helps if those thirty make enough noise that it seems like two hundred. I have been to gigs like that too….
“Coma Ecliptic”, the seventh album by Between the Buried and Me can only be described a progressive metal monster.
It begins with brooding electric piano, the opening number all keys until symphonic guitars burst in right at the end. The comes “The Coma Machine”, an amazing kaleidoscopic piece who’s twists and turns combine melodic atmospherics with full-on death metal. That number flows straight into “Dim Ignition”, which takes off on yet another tack with some Tangerine Dream style electronics. And those three openers set the tone for the rest of the album.
This is a quite remarkable record that sounds like all the best bits of contemporary metal and progressive rock from the last decade put into a blender. It’s hugely varied with musical references all over the place, yet it still hangs together as a coherent whole. There is an awful lot happening on this record, and it does take a few listens to take it all in. Songs take off in unpredictable directions, and there is more than one number that feels as though it contains a whole concept album’s worth of music in seven or eight minutes.
The combination of clean and death vocals combined with a masterful sense of dynamics is always going to invite comparisons with Opeth, although they avoid copying much of Opeth’s actual sound. Quite a few of the melodies in the clean vocal passages are reminiscent of Dream Theater, although there’s none of that band’s self-indulgent showboating; they keep the soloing brief and to the point, using the twin lead guitars more for riffs and intricate harmonies.
Progressive metal sometimes gets a bad name with bands who show off their instrumental chops without having the compositional skills to back them up, or bands that over ambitiously attempt to mix incompatible styles and turn into an incoherent mish-mash. Between the Buried and Me are neither of these things, and have succeeded in delivering one of the best albums of the year so far.
The video for Mastodon’s “Asleep in the Deep” is definitely a bit surreal, but does star a cat.
Cats are indeed metal. We had a cat (black, of course) who was a devoted fan of Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show. Don’t try to claim it was just because he knew he’s be fed at the end of the show and had come to associate the sound of Tommy Vamce’s vpice with “food”. He surely had a deep and abiding love for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
Cats may be metal, but they aren’t punk. We had another cat who absolutely hated The Damned.
This very perceptive piece on the economics of music streaming by Anil Prasad, The Finger’s on the Self-Destruct Button includes this very illuminating quote from Matt Stevens.
“Streaming makes it very difficult for cult bands who sell 1,000 copies of each release,†the noted British guitarist and composer Matt Stevens told me. “If 1,000 people stream an album 10 times, we probably make a few pennies versus 1,000 download sales which create a model that will pay for modest recording expenses. At present, with downloads, it’s roughly sustainable, but not profitable. If we move to streaming and that income disappears completely, we’re in serious trouble.â€
That’s a potentially very bleak prospect for much of the music that features heavily on this blog. Anil Prasad also believes the current streaming model of Spotify et al is unsustainable and will eventually collapse. What will that collapse leave in it’s wake?
It’s easy to be pessimistic, though it’s also important to remember the the old pre-internet music industry wasn’t perfect either; the vast majority of bands never got signed and never got to make a record, and most of those that did had to sign away the rights to their own music in order to be able to record and release it.
In many ways it’s a shame that hybrid streaming and download sites like mFlow failed, and that last.fm was forced to shut down their streaming radio stations. Both sites had great value for music discovery, and both drove actual music purchases. But both ended as internet roadkill under the wheels of Spotify.
Streaming in its present for isn’t going to provide a worthwhile income stream for anything other than the most mass-market and commercial end of the market that can benefit from scale. It’s easy to imagine a world divided into a small nunber of heavily hyped stars and everyone else relying on crowdfunding for much of their revenue.
Quite what the music landscape of a decade’s time might look like is anyone’s guess. All that can be said is that we live in interesting times.
With news that the NME’s circulation has sunk to a pitiful 15,000, and it’s going to turn into a freesheet, a lot of people are giving eulogies for how it was a vital part of their teenage years, featuring such great writing from the likes of Tony Parsons, Julie Birchill and Paul Morley.
I am not one of those people; back in the NME’s 1980s heyday I was a loyal reader of Sounds, which was always far more catholic in its music coverage, and didn’t sneer at rock and metal. If your music world revolved around punk and indie, the NME at the time was your bible. But if you didn’t, the NME really wasn’t for you; it was the paper than hated what you loved.
As Classic Rock’s editor Scott Rowley famously said, had one of the other “inkies” survived instead of the NME, we might have a better mainstream music scene today. But in the end it wasn’t really the the NME’s fault; much like the excessive sanctification of John Peel, it was the laziness of the rest of the media that allowed the NME to punch well above its weight as a gatekeeper, and whatever the NME didn’t like (which was a lot of things) tended to get marginalised. It was pointed out on Twitter than in the years 2005 to 2015 the NME faves the Gallagher brothers appeared on more front pages than all female artists put together. And Pete Doherty wasn’t far behind.
With a combination of the internet and a whole load of more specialist publications on the market meaning there’s no longer one powerful gatekeeper, the British music scene will probably benefit from the NME’s continued slide into irrelevance.
The comments in The Guardian’s Muse: 10 of the best have predictably filled up with drive-by trolls dismissing them as “shite”.
What is it about Muse that attracts the haters? Is it just that the self-appointed elitists hate anything that’s successful and popular? Or is there more to it than that?
There are of course many, many bands who are far better than Muse when it comes to pressing all the right buttons for specific niche audiences. But when it comes to bands who have reached the level when they can play stadiums and headline major festivals, there is a strong argument that Muse are the best band of their generation.
My theory is that the division of Britain’s music scene into separate indie/alternative and rock/metal tribes that seldom mix is a major factor. Muse are one major-league act who stand defiantly with one foot in both camps. They’re a band at ease with headining both Glastonbury and Download. They combine Jeff Buckley-style vocals with flamboyant guitar solos. And that offends the tribal purists in both camps.
A couple of days ago a blog post appeared revealing the real identity of the troll known as Winterfox and Requires Hate who also wrote fiction under the name of “Benjanun Sriduangkaew”. Although rumours that she might actually be a white individual based in the UK turned out not to be true, she does, as was widely suspected, come from an extremely wealthy background, a scion of a powerful family with extensive political connections.
What’s more chilling is that at a time when she was writing racial revenge fantasies about killing white people she was actually implicated in multiple deaths due to criminal negligence at a hotel belonging to her family, an event for which nobody ever faced criminal charges, and for which incriminating evidence appears to have been covered up.
The post contains names and links to family members, so I won’t link to it here, but I am including this very telling quotation:
Privilege takes many forms. These can include
- Being born into an extremely wealthy and politically connected family
- A debt-free college education
- A high-paying job given to you by your father or any other family member
- Being responsible (whether as an individual or a corporate entity) for the deaths of multiple people and facing no legal consequences
Someone who benefits from all these things is neither marginalized nor systematically oppressed, and to claim as such is an insult to those who are.
I recognise why releasing personal information (known as “doxxing”) is a bad thing which exposes individuals to harm, and I can understand why people believe it’s still wrong in this case despite Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s long and well-documented history as an abuser.
But every strict ethical rule will eventually encounter a difficult edge-case, and this is one of these. I don’t think it’s a coincidence her identity has been revealed just at the time her author harassment has started up again. I don’t have a problem with those whose moral calculus leads them to conclude that outing her is the lesser of two evils, in that her priviledged situation means she’s at low risk of serious harm, and it in turn reduces the harm she can do.
Of course her sock-puppets, acolytes and useful idiots want to make the conversation about the outing rather than the harm she’d done and is continuing to do.