Music Opinion Blog

Opinions and occasional rants about the state of the music scene. The views expressed are entirely my own, and do not represent those of any artists or publications with whom I may be connected.

The rate at which the smaller bands that feature heavily on this blog change linueps and in some cases split up entirely means we should never take any of them for granted. One of the most common things I hear when a band splits is “And I never got to see them live”. Never put off seeing a band live; there might never be another opportunity. “Carpe Diem”, as the song says.

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Tim Hall | 5 Comments

Beginners’ Guide to Mostly Autumn?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Tim Hall

Mostly Autumn at The Komedia in Bath, September 2012

Over the past few months, The Guardian have been running “Beginners Guides” on their music blog. For each one, they select an iconic artist with a substantial body of work, and ask readers to recommend one song with a few words to justify the choice. Then they collate the ten best responses and publish them on the music blog.

They’ve covered artists such as Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Black Sabbath and Bob Dylan to far; they have yet to include any major prog artists, thought I’d suggest King Crimson, Rush, Van der Graaf Generator or Marillion as excellent choices for the future.

But what about the smaller bands that feature heavily on this blog? Let’s try our own version of the same thing.

We’ll start with the band I’ve written far more about than anyone else, Mostly Autumn. With ten studio albums over a decade-and-half they I think they meet the “substantial body of work” criteria.

So. Which Mostly Autumn song would you recommend to a listener unfamiliar with their work, as a good and accessible introduction to what you love about the band? Leave your response in the comments.

Assuming I do get sufficient responses, I will collate the responses here and on various social media sites, and post them, with your reasons as a blog post.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , | 20 Comments

Roskilde vs. Glastonbury

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Tim Hall

The Glastonbury festival is one of those things that divides opinion amongst music fans. On one side there are those that complain that the bill is always far too corporate and indie-centric. On the other side there are those who dismiss the complainers as genre snobs, merely sneering at the mainstream from the sidelines.

The BBC have a lot to answer for. Their coverage always seems to contain far too much of the intensely annoying Jo Whiley fawning over the latest overrated three-chord wonder and far too little of the eclectic variety taking place across the many small stages. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that rock and metal are very conspicuous by the absence from the festival.

So the bill of the Roskilde Festival in Denmark makes an interesting comparison with that of Glastonbury. There are many of the same names, but you’ll also see names like Iron Maiden, Mastodon, Slipknot and Judas Priest alongside the likes of Oasis and The Arctic Monkeys. It’s all but impossible to imagine any of the former making an appearance on the Glastonbury bill.

Does this reflect something fundamentally different about the music scene on the Continent?  Are rock and metal seen as a part of the musical mainstream in a way they are not in Britain?  Or does the British musical establishment of which Glastonbury is an important part just hate rock and metal?

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

I know music is subjective and all that, but if you really think that Beady Eye or Mumford and Sons represent the very best that contemporary music has to offer, then you really do need to get out more.

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

“There is something distinctly galling about witnessing mainstream media commentators gushing about Glastonbury signifying the beginning of the British summer festival season. For those of us who enjoy music that allows for a touch more aggression and energy than Mumford & Sons, the true start of the summer comes with Download” – Dom Lawson tells it like it is. Never thought I’d read words like that in The Guardian.

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

I’m not even remotely a fan of hip-hop or rap. But you don’t need to be to recognise this piece as hilariously ignorant pieces of music criticism I’ve read all year. Pro tip; if you want to make a serious critique of “modern music”, you do need to listen beyond top 40 radio if you want to be taken remotely seriously.

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

CRF 2013 – Really not for me this year

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Tim Hall

Panic Room at the 2012 Cambridge Rock FestivalPanic Room at the 2012 Festival

I’ve decided that I’m probably going to give The Cambridge Rock Festival a miss this year.

It’s not that bands who had been highlights of previous years, such as Stolen Earth and Panic Room are missing, it’s not the absence of any big-name headliners, it’s just that the retro blues-rock and rather dated old-school metal that dominates this year’s bill really isn’t for me.

It might be that we prog fans were spoiled the last couple of years, but the genre is reduced to a token this year. It’s only really Mostly Autumn who fly the “new generation prog” flag on the main stage, and I will see them plenty of other times this year.

I have no idea whether the bill reflects an intentional change in direction, perhaps in response to feedback that there was too much prog last year. I’m hoping this isn’t the case, and 2014 will see a return to the sort of diverse, prog-friendly bills we saw in 2011 and 2012. Certainly there are plenty of great prog bands out there who aren’t CRF regulars. The recent Celebr8.2 festival in Kingston (which I never had the time to review properly) was filled with bands that would fit the Cambridge bill perfectly; I would name Alan Reed, Harvest, Threshold and Arena as bands with precisely the sort of crossover potential that would go down well with the CRF audience, and none of them have played the festival before.

With a few bands like that on the bill, I’ll certainly be back. And if you’re not really into prog but love old-fashioned metal and blues-rock, CRF 2013 should still be a great festival, with a great vibe and good beer.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged | 1 Comment

Has the music died, or was it never True Love in the first place?

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Tim Hall

Guardian writer falls for the new-age fad of “decluttering” and throws away her entire record collection. And then regrets it, because streaming everything on a laptop just isn’t the same.

Listening on my laptop wasn’t so much making me think music shouldn’t take up physical space – it was making me forget the aural space that music was supposed to take up. My ears stopped expecting so much from the sound. The songs were compressed; the quality decreased; the speakers just two little discreet areas on either side of my typing hands. The music sounded about as deep as an oatcake on there. There was no graphic equaliser or anything like that – if I wanted to experience the song with more dimension to it, I just turned the volume up. It’s not so much that my laptop made all other physical forms redundant, it’s that it made music so dull that I lost interest in music.

You do have to wonder whether someone who was willing to throw away their entire music collection has some serious neuroses; so terrified of turning into a Nick Hornby style music nerd that they go to the opposite extreme. Or is it perhaps that they never truly loved music in the first place? As much as some music journalists love being part of the rock’n'roll circus, do they ever make any deep emotional connection with the music itself?

Posted in Music Opinion | 6 Comments

US Entertainment Cartels turn into The Mafia

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Tim Hall

Boingboing on the latest anti-piracy nonsense from US entertainment industry.

There’s a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime.

What next? Drone strikes on suspected file-sharers? I’d love to think that crazy proposals like this had absolutely no chance of becoming law, but given the corrupt nature of lobbyist-driven US politics we can’t take anything for granted. When those whose business is supposed to be entertaining us adopts business models indistinguishable from those of The Mafia, something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong.

Posted in Music Opinion | 2 Comments

While it’s not surprising that news reports about Trevor Bolder’s death emphasise his role in David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars in the early 70s, it’s a shame there’s not more mention of Uriah Heep, for whom he was a member for more than 30 years, representing the bulk of his musical career.

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off