Snakemother are a four piece band who relish in sharing a mix of heavy riffs and gloomy atmospherics. Within in the vast landscapes of doom metal – often populated by bearded figures with guttural tones – Snakemother really stand out, since the four musicians are unafraid to blend their extremely slow and heavy sound with a relatively clean vocal, which gives the six tracks on their self-titled release a pleasing feeling of balance.
Monthly Archives: April 2025
THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #101
Following another week where there have been an insane amount of submissions for the Singles Bar, this visit offers a broad selection of sounds. Among the eight picks, there’s a really atmospheric slice of pop from a singer songwriter on her way to becoming a proper cult figure, some superb indie pop vibes, and even a long stoner infused jam which really doesn’t suggest a “single” at all. As usual, we hope you find something new to enjoy…
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ROISIN McCARNEY – Guess Who
Between 2022 and 2024, Róisín McCarney released several excellent singles. Whether covering other artists in her own image (turning the Spice Girls’ classic ‘Wannabe’ into a swaggering, rock-pop statement that ends up sounding more like something from Sheryl Crow crossed with Shania Twain), or sharing her own voice on newly written songs, the Scottish singer set herself in place as one to watch. Her contribution to DJ Aaron Kennedy’s single ‘All Night’ proved that her voice was also well equipped to handle dance oriented material, and by the time she appeared as a contender on the BBC’s Saturday night TV show ‘The Voice’ – applying her talents to Blondie’s classic ‘Call Me’ – it seemed as if there wasn’t anything that she couldn’t sing with aplomb.
SAM ROBBINS – So Much I Still Don’t See
From the moment the intro of ‘Piles of Sand’ by Sam Robbins shares a perfect finger picked, acoustic melody, there’s a sense of the artist drawing his audience into something special. As the guitar melody grows with Sam adding a few broader strokes, the opening number from his 2025 album ‘So Much I Still Don’t See’ takes on an amazing folk-pop stance, but it’s with the arrival of a hushed vocal, those very positive first impressions are very much confirmed. The narrative track is perfect for Sam’s voice as he quietly cries through a lyric that reflects on the old adage about how small problems become larger if taken out of context, and how time passes, “empires fall”, but a little self-belief can keep us trucking. Throughout these perfectly formed four minutes, the performer takes the greatest influences from 90s acoustic sounds and even further back, with hints of Bruce Cockburn, James Taylor, and even a pinch of Gordon Lightfoot, blending them into something that’s very much his own. There’s a real purity to this performance. The music is superb, but every vocal note here has an even bigger emotive pull that’s almost impossible to resist.
PEARL HANDLED REVOLVER – Tales You Lose
In 2016, British rock band Pearl Handled Revolver released ‘If The Devil Casts His Net’, an excellent album of dark rock tunes taking in influence from The Doors, with a swathe of riffs from Queens of The Stone Age and a pinch of early Deep Purple. They’d released material prior to this, but this record is where their brand of retro rock really came into its own. Over the course of the years that followed, the band played a huge number of gigs – even appearing on the bill for the A New Day Festival in 2023 as support for Caravan, Ozric Tentacles and System 7 (the electronica duo featuring the legendary Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy) – and released a couple more albums.