Tag Archives: Featured

Cloud Atlas – The Post Office Social Club

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Tim Hall

People always travel considerable distances to Mostly Autumn’s York gigs, and Cloud Atlas took advantage of many fans making a weekend of it to put on a gig of their own the following night at The Post Office Social Club, and they succeeded in pulling a respectable sized crowd containing a lot of familiar faces.

Sadly the advertised support, one-time Seahorse Chris Helme, had to pull out as short notice, but former Stolen Earth guitarist Adam Dawson was able to step into the breach as a late replacement. He played a mixture of originals and covers, ending with Stolen Earth’s “Mirror, Mirror” and “Silver Skies”, and finally the never recorded “Harlequin” recorded as a duet with Heidi Widdop.

Stolen Earth themselves began with an extended drone of keys, whistles and E-bowed guitar before launching into the distinctive riff of “Searchlight”. The proceeded to deliver one of the best performances I’ve seen them do, helped by an excellent sound mix. Dave Randall on keys was particularly impressive with swirling colours and textures, as was bassist Stu Carver; the band have a very tight rhythm section.

Set-wise it was much the same as at Bilston in August, drawn from the album “Beyond the Vale” plus Heidi’s solo acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and the Stolen Earth oldie “Soul in a Jar”. One change was a rearrangement of the middle section of “Let the Blood Flow” with an electronica element that worked far better than the original. This time the band remembered to save one song for the encore, ending the evening with the epic “Stars”.

Cloud Atlas have one more gig scheduled this year, supporting Lifesigns at York’s Fibbers, after which they will be working on their second album.

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Paris

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Tim Hall

First they came for the cartoonists. And some people wrote ugly victim-blaming thinkpieces in response, preferring to denounce the victims than criticise the ideology of the murderers.

Then they came for the rock fans.

Like so many others on Friday night, I was at a gig. At the time the terrible events in Paris were happening, Mostly Autumn were playing at The Grand Opera House in York. In a dark coincidence they were performing the album “Dressed in Voices” in full, a concept album told from the point of view of a victim of a senseless massacre.

After the gig I spent an enjoyable couple of hours in a pub with several members of the band. Someone did mention that there had been some kind of terrorist attack at a gig in France, but details were still sketchy. It was only when I got back to my B&B and checked the news websites that the full scale of the tragic events in Paris became apparent. As someone who goes a great many gigs, that struck very close to home.

In a sense it was like an attack on a place of worship. It’s what you expect from a cult who regularly attacks mosques that belong to Islamic traditions other than their own during Friday morning prayers.

Terrible events like this bring out the worse in some people and the best in others. The usual attention-seeking blowhards are spouting predictably offensive things; I really do not want to hear what racists, Christian fundamentalists, militant atheists or the US gun lobby have to say and wish others would stop signal-boosting their garbage. The same goes for anyone who’s first instinct is to pin all of the blame on anyone else but the terrorists and their direct supporters. There’s plenty of other blame to go around from the neocons’ ill-conceived and incompetently executed wars to the postmodern left’s unholy alliance with radical Islamism. But it was neither neocons nor postmodernist academics who pulled the triggers on Friday night.

Life has to go on. If Europe becomes a meaner, more xenophobic and more authoritarian place, it will let terror have what it wants. There is great danger that bad actors such as the far right and the security-industrial complex will try to exploit this tragedy, but we should resist them. We must not give in to fear. But we also need to be able to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about what sort of society we want to be, and exactly what we are prepared to do in order to protect it.

I haven’t enabled comments on this post, because I don’t have the emotional energy to deal with the drive-by trolls any post on this subject is likely to attract.

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Panic Room Weekend!

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Tim Hall

Panic Room Weekend

Panic Room have announced the Panic Room Weekend, a two-day event at Bilston Robin 2 on the weekend of 21st and 22nd May 2016.

Full details will be announced in due course, but the weekend promises two full-length headline sets from Panic Room themselves with completely different songs each night. There will also be performances from the acoustic side-project Luna Rossa and a host of yet-to-be announced guests with connections to the band. I would be very surprised if we didn’t see a solo acoustic set from Anne-Marie at some point. It all promises to be a great gathering of the band’s fandom.

Tickets cost £40 for the full weekend, with day tickets for £25, and doors open at 3pm each day, so there will be a lot of music. Tickets are now on sale from The Robin 2 website.

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Support Bands: What exactly are they for?

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Tim Hall

Fahran, Supporting Morpheus Rising at Bilston Robin 2Fahran, suppotying Morpheus Rising at Bilston Robin 2

This is another of those blog posts inspired by some discussion on Twitter, in this case about support bands.

We’ve all been to gigs where the support band has been thoroughly forgettable; sometimes tuneless acoustic singer-songwriters, sometimes third rate generic metal or alternative rock bands. You do sometimes wonder what the point of these support slots are, especially if there’s not one but two supports which either means a disappointingly short headline set or a very late finish.

On the other hand, I’m sure most of us have seen a few occasions where an unknown support act has blown us away. I can think of The Computers supporting The Damned and giving them a serious run for their money, and Labyrinth kicking Sonata Arctica’s arse, both at my local venue in Reading. The very first time I saw the mighty Touchstone was when they supported The Reasoning at the now-closed Limelight Club in Crewe. And I’ll never forget Anne-Marie Helder supporting Mostly Autumn at the late lamented Astoria.

My rule when reviewing is to judge the support act on how you feel at the exact moment the frontperson says “And this is our last song”. That emotion never lies.

So what, exactly, is the purpose of the support band?

If, as was suggested, the sole purpose of the support is to make the headliner look good, I would respond by questioning whether the headliner is good enough to be topping the bill. The days of support bands being thrown off tours for being too good are long gone.

I see the role of the support act as enhancing the overall experience and giving the paying audience better value for money. If they’re a bit rubbish it rather undermines that. The 70s and 80s practice of the headliner actively sabotaging the support for reasons of ego by making sure they had terrible sound only shortchanges the punters.

Nowadays quite a few bands book a strong and complimentary support act and give them prominent billing in the gig’s promotion to boost ticket sales. Just how often have you gone to a gig purely to see the support, or at least had the support influence your decision to attend a gig? I could list a great many of those over the years; sometimes I’ve experience a wonderful headline set I would not otherwise have seen, and once or twice I’ve seen the band I’d actually come to see blow the headliners off stage.

So, what’s your experience of support acts? Who was memorably good, or memorably bad? What great bands did you first see as an opening act?

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Support Live Music

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Tim Hall

Close up of a guitar

This is a bit of a rant.

I’m not going to name the band because it won’t do them any favours having this come up in Google searches for their name. You can probably work out who they were if you really want to know. But it’s not really about them, it’s about you.

I travelled to a gig a couple of hours away from home and booked an overnight stay in a hotel since it would finish well after the last train back. It was in one of the largest cities in England other than London. The gig was in an established rock venue within easy walking distance of the city centre, in the smaller of two rooms, but still with a capacity of a couple of hundred at least. The band have released several albums, won annual “best of” awards, and gone down a storm at festivals, and they’re on fire live on this tour. It was a Friday night rather than a midweek graveyard shift.

There were thirty-five people there.

Thirty-five people.

The band themselves gave what could easily have been their best live performance of the year, pulling out all the stops. And only a tiny handful of people were there to see it, most of them familiar faces you see at gigs all across the country. Many of them were not local but, like me, had travelled a significant distance to be there.

People constantly complain on the interwebs than nobody plays gigs in their towns. The trouble is, when bands do book gigs, these people then can’t be arsed to turn up. It’s not for me to tell the band where they should or shouldn’t play, but if I was in their shoes I wouldn’t be playing either that venue or that city again in the foreseeable future. There’s no way such a poorly-attended gig could have covered its costs.

I know that time and money are finite, and some people have a lot of other commitments in their lives. But a lot of you have no such excuses. If superb bands like this are to survive, and are to be able to continue making music, you’ve got to get off your collective arses and support them. I’ve seen too many bands fold due to lack of success, only to see “fans” complain that they “never got to see them live”. Perhaps if you’d bothered to see them when you had the chance, they might not have split?

If a band you like or have heard positive things about are playing a small club near you, and it’s physically possible to get there, support them. Otherwise the live scene outside the corporate mainstream will be nothing but tribute bands.

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Spock’s Beard – Islington Academy

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Tim Hall

Ryo Okumoto

Spock’s Beard were one of the first of the third generation of Progressive Rock bands, emerging in the mid 1990s when the genre was at its all-time lowest ebb. Over the years they’ve gone through a few ups and downs, including two changes of singer, and have survived to become something of elder statesmen of the scene. They came to Islington Academy to promote their 12th album “The Oblivion Particle”, the second to feature newest vocalist Ted Leonard.

They had two support bands on the tour, and with the customary early curfew due to the following club night, the opening act Synaesthesia were already on stage playing to a near-empty room at the ridiculously early time of 6pm. This extremely youthful band had made a strong impression at HRH Prog last year, and again on supporting Marillion back in April, but on this occasion they didn’t seem quite as together. There were moments of impressive guitar work, especially during the final song, but the set as a whole seemed to lack groove and coherence.

Hungarian four-piece Special Providence were far more impressive. The instrumental band were the missing link between prog-metal and jazz-fusion, a concept which had the potential to be truly awful in the wrong hands. But Special Providence turned out to be one of the best previously-unknown supports act of the year, with tight grooves, fluid guitar and an emphasis on solid composition rather than endless soloing.

Ted Leonard

Spock’s Beard kicked off with the opening number of the latest album, “Tides of Time”, all swirling keyboards, hard rock riffs and anthemic instrumental passages, pretty much the quintessential SB sound. Their music is rooted in 1970s sounds, the keyboards and guitars of classic first-generation progressive rock and the vocal harmonies of west coast rock, all presented with a modern sensibility without the self-indulgent excess.

One of the things that makes Spock’s Beard an entertaining live band is not just that they’re all talented musicians who clearly enjoy being on stage, but they also have a sense of showmanship many of the peers lack. The most charismatic figure is not frontman Ted Leonard or lead guitarist Alan Morse, but keyboard player Ryo Okumoto, his battery of keyboards down at the front of the stage and deployed side-on so the audience can see him play. His love of vintage 70s keyboards is one of the defining elements of the band’s sound. Though this gig didn’t see a genuine Mellotron or Hammond B3 on stage, there was still a real Moog with twiddleable knobs.

The bulk of the set came from the new album or its immediate predecessor “Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep”, all of which comes over impressively on stage. They did throw in a couple of much older songs from the Neil Morse era, both from 1998′s “The Kindness of Strangers”, “The Good Don’t Last” and the acoustic “June”, the latter turning into an enthusiastic audience singalong.

Although he often seems to play second fiddle to Ryo Okumoto’s keyboard wizardly, Alan Morse is a great if sometimes underrated guitarist, and is far more than just a foil. This was readily apparent whenever he cut loose, for example the climactic solo in “Waiting For Me” which closed the main set.

After a brief acoustic excerpt of “Bennett Build a Time Machine”, they encored with a real oldie, the multi-part epic “The Water” from their 1995 début album, stately anthemic passages alternating with jazz-rock workouts, with a few bars of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” thrown in for good measure, and the infamous “**** You” passage predictably became another singalong.

And so ended an excellent performance. Even twenty years into their career Spock’s Beard have avoided the all-too-easy the trap of turning into their own tribute act playing sets filled with crowd-pleasing early material, instead challenging and winning over the audience with a heavy emphasis on their most recent albums.

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PiL, Reading Sub89

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Tim Hall

PiLIt’s always a good thing to get out of your musical comfort zone. PiL playing a gig at Reading’s Sub89 provided an opportunity to see the post-punk legends featuring the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten in action. A few clips from their 2013 Glastonbury set, and a hilariously funny new single were enough to suggest they were worth seeing.

They opened with that single, with sweary lyrics about broken toilets and having to get the plumber in. If you only know John Lydon (as he now calls himself) from the days when he was Johnny Rotten, PiL are a very different beast. Instead of three-chord primal rock’n'roll it’s dub-reggae tinged bass riffs and intricate guitar textures. Lu Edmonds with his overgrown beard and slightly disturbing stare is what Rasputin might have looked like had he been a rock musician, swapping between guitar and electric baÄŸlama, sometimes making some very Robert Fripp-like sounds. The amazingly tight rhythm section provided the foundation of the music giving Edmonds the space to weave textures and colours around the grooves.

As for Lydon himself, the standard refrain that he can’t sing was never really accurate. He does have a highly unconventional and individual vocal style, and you can still hear the influence of Peter Hammill in the way he uses his voice as much as a lead instrument than as a vehicle for the lyrics. He’s still got a definite rock star charisma, and his voice is still in remarkably good shape compared with some of his peers. His atonal howling could be compelling, though you often found yourself listening as much to the infectious bass grooves or the inventive guitar lines.

“Death Disco” was a particular highlight, with Lu Edmonds alternately riffing and repeating the motif from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, which in combination with the circular bassline came over like a muscular version of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. The main set ended with a dark and theatrical polemic against religion, culminating in the repeated chant of “Turn Up The Bass”, which was indeed turned up to levels where you felt the low frequencies in your guts rather than your ears. After all that, the more conventional pop of the encores, ending in “Rise” was just a coda to the evening.

Even for someone who normally listens to metal and progressive rock, this was a great gig. Lydon has still got it, is currently on great form, and the other three musicians form a very tight and inventive band. And if you stop and think about it, the combination of a guitarist who sometimes sound like Robert Fripp and a singer whose major influence is Peter Hammill is actually a bit Prog.

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Dave Gilmour – Rattle That Lock

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Tim Hall

Rattle That Lock Nine years after his last solo album “On An Island”, former Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour returns with a new record, featuring an impressive cast of guests including Phil Manzanera, David Crosby & Graham Nash, and even Jools Holland on one song.

Dave Gilmour is such an iconic guitarist that the very first note he plays on the opening instrumental “5 a.m.” is enough to give you goosebumps. It’s the following title track that sets the tone for the rest of the record. What he have is a highly polished singer-songwriter album. It does tend towards the middle of the road in places, through Gilmour’s immediately recognisable lead guitar that lights up every song sets this record apart. While it doesn’t reach the epic grandeur of Pink Floyd’s heyday. it’s as much about the gorgeous orchestrated arrangements as it is about the songs. There are occasional excursions into jazz on “Dancing in Front of Me” and “The Girl in the Yellow Dress”, while both album highlight “In Any Tongue” and the instrumental “Beauty” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a late-period Floyd album. The album ends as it begins, with a guitar instrumental “And Then..”, another reminder of just why he remains one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.

In some ways, it’s a better album than last year’s Pink Floyd coda, “Endless River”, which despite some glorious moments featuring the late Richard Wright, never quite managed to transcend its origins as a collection of outtakes.

Dave Gilmour could be accused to playing safe on this record. But he’s a musician who’s more than earned the right to make whatever music he wants to make; he’s under absolutely no obligations to satisfy expectations of either audiences or critics. So if he chooses to make a record firmly within his comfort zone, that’s his right. And comfort zone or not, he’s still very good at what he does. Anyone expecting something as edgy and abrasive as “Ummagumma” should really be looking elsewhere.

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Chantel McGregor – Lose Control

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Tim Hall

Chantel McGregor - Lose ControlIt’s been four years since Chantel McGregor released her début album “Like No Other”. She’s been working on the follow-up for over a year, and many of the new songs have been lighting up the live set for quite a while.

She describes the concept behind the album as Southern Gothic; while it’s not a full-blown concept album with a narrative, the theme of loss of control in the album’s title recurs across many of the songs. To quote Chantel, she immersed herself in the “sinister, dark world of depravation, magic and voodoo, writing most of the songs from the perspective of the disturbed flawed characters“. It’s all rather different from the first album.

The album starts off with a bang with “Take the Power”, rocking out in a similar vein as the live favourite “Caught Out” from “Like No Other”. The grunge-influenced “Your Fever” has an interesting structure; it starts out dense and claustrophobic with a single battering chord in the verse, then opening out with a spiralling second part. The dynamics and use of strings for colour stand out. The strings even sound like Mellotron at one point; like Nirvana jamming with King Crimson. After that, “Burn Your Anger” is a more conventional driving hard rocker with a brief but very explosive solo.

Then the mood changes with “Anaesthetize”. There’s always been an acoustic side to Chantel’s music, originally expressed through stripped-down covers. This one is an original, a beautiful vocal accompanied with delicate and understated guitar work with subtle use of strings.

Then it’s back to rocking out. “Southern Belle” with it’s bluesy riff and the opening line “I’ve been dancing with The Devil since the day that I was born” is the most out-and-out blues song on this record. There’s also a blues element in the Zeppelinesque serpentine riff of the title track.

After the album’s second delicately beautiful acoustic track, “Home”, “Killing Time” is the hardest rocking track on the album. The spiralling riff has a modern feel, with something of the vibe of contemporary bands such as Muse. Then in complete contrast again, the dark brooding “Eternal Dream” on unaccompanied electric guitar is Chantel’s tribute to the late Jeff Buckley.

The album ends with “Walk On Land”, the most ambitious song on the album, inspired by Steven Wilson’s modern take on progressive rock. It builds from from an acoustic intro, a chorus with complex layered vocal harmonies, an atmospheric instrumental section featuring piano and strings, ending with a superb extended solo, the sole lengthy guitar workout on the record.

The whole album shows Chantel’s growing talents as a songwriter, guitarist and singer. On this record her guitar playing puts the emphasis on riffs, and takes a less-is-more approach when it comes to soloing; the darker, denser sound is more Jimmy Page than Jimi Hendrix. It shows her great versatility as a vocalist; able to belt out hard rockers as well as delicate ballads. The vocals on “Eternal Dream” and “Walk on Land” at the end of the album are especially stunning.

It’s a very different beast from Chantel’s début. That was partly a singer-songwriter record and partly a blues-rock guitar record, and was really more a collection of songs. This one in contrast flows as a coherent album, far more hard rock than blues, though the acoustic numbers add variety and complement the heavier songs. It combines elements of 60s and 70s classic rock with far more modern sounds. And at just over forty minutes in length it doesn’t overstay its welcome; there’s absolutely no filler.

It’s been a long wait for this album, but it’s well worth the wait.

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Operation Mindcrime – The Key

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Tim Hall

Operation Mindcrime The KeyAfter making their name in the 1980s with the ambitious concept album “Operation Mindcrime” and its more commercial successor “Empire”, Queensrÿche crashed hard in the 90s. A combination of internal problems and an ill-judged attempt to move with musical fashions rather then play to their strengths saw a string of lacklustre albums including the dull “Q2K” and the directionless “Operation Mindcrime II”. It all ended in an acrimonious split that finished up in court over who would be allowed to perform what.

The result was singer Geoff Tate forming a new outfit “Operation Mindcrime” while his former bandmates regrouped with a new singer as a new incarnation of Queensrÿche. The name of the band and the legal agreement that only he can perform material from the album of the same name infers an intention to build on the legacy of the album that made his reputation rather than start anew with a clean sheet. So how does the album stack up?

Opener “Choices” builds on a repeating pattern sounding uncannily like “Eclipse” from “Dark Side of the Moon” and despite being a little derivative makes an impressive opener. But doubts set in when the bass-heavy riff of “Burn” swamps Tate’s rather tuneless vocal. The big guitar riffs and prog-metal stylings of “Re-Inventing the Future” and “Ready to Fly” both manage to evoke a hint of Queensrÿche’s glory days instrumentally but both are let down by weak vocals. When the next track, merely a short atmospheric piece to bridge the gap between two songs is the best so far purely because it’s an instrumental, the album’s biggest problem becomes apparent.

The truth is that Geoff Tate’s voice, once a magnificent lead instrument, is a shadow of what it once was. Even when Queensrÿche toured Operation Mindcrime II a decade ago he was relying on Pamela Moore to sing the high notes he could no longer reach, and now he’s got little of his former power and range. One could draw comparisons with former Marillion singer Fish, except that Fish has adapted his style over the years to work within his limitations, giving greater emphasis on lyrics and delivery, and still manages to make strong records. Tate, meanwhile, is trying to create the same sort of music as he did years ago, and much of it falls flat without the soaring vocals of old.

The album hits the lowest point with “The Stranger”, which marries an industrial guitar sound with what comes over as a half-arsed attempt at rapping. Things do improve towards the end; the instrumental “An Ambush of Sadness” leading into the ballad “Kicking in the Door” again give something of a Pink Floyd feel, and album signs off with the almost epic “The Fall” ending in some climactic soloing. But even here the vocals let things down.

The saddest thing is that there are still good musical ideas on the record, but Tate’s consistently weak vocal lines fail to do the rest of the music justice.

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