As their name might suggest, Messiness make music that doesn’t always fit neatly into a box. By taking elements of rock and indie, a swathe of older psychedelic elements and a pinch of alt-pop, their debut album shares sounds that are always interesting, even if they don’t always work.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
Listen: Ocean Planet share the brilliantly heavy ‘Devastate’
Ocean Planet waste no time in grabbing their audience’s attention on ‘Devastate’. The opening bars attack with pneumatic rhythms offset by a twin lead guitar sound worthy of peak Trivium. From there, the Reading based band branch out with an arrangement that feels a little more original when they blend elements of melodic metalcore with prog metal, creating something that sounds absolutely huge. The interplay between the heavy guitars and tight rhythm section is impressive throughout, and on the rare occasion the band lightens up, some very melodic guitar work creeps through an intense arrangement. A hefty and aggressive vocal based around a hardcore influenced growl mightn’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it fits the music brilliantly, helping Ocean Planet sound genuinely fierce.
MAGIC WANDS – Time To Dream / Armour (River Remix By Lost Signal)
Since the release of their ‘Aloha Moon’ album back in 2012, Magic Wands have been a consistantly reliable source for enjoyable music. Their blend of light electronica and dream pop, at its best, sometimes shares some DNA with the short lived Transister; it sometimes plays like a mix of Garbage, Metric and Elastic Sleep, but wherever the melodies go, they’re always strong – and usually very accessible.
DROOL BROTHERS – Psychology
Around the turn of the millennium, the oddly named Drool Brothers delivered a self-titled debut LP that shared a world of different rock and funk influences to create an interesting listen. ‘Fullerton’ somehow managed to fuse baggy-centric rhythms, garage rock guitars, psychedelic elements and semi-spoken vocals without sounding too messy; ‘Happiness Fair’ filled a couple of minutes with heavily treated voices and dance-y beats; ‘Can’t Lick It’ threw a world of fuzz guitar over an upbeat groove and peppered with it with a world of surf tinged melodies and a keyboard sound that felt as if it paid homage to ‘Schoolhouse Rocks’; ‘Blue Velvet Pig Mask’ sounded like a Funkadelic tribute, by way of a rock band deep into experimentation. Better yet, the album’s stand out, the effortlessly cool ‘Lay With It’, worked keys and horns into a soul groove that paid homage to Jr. Walker & The All Stars. There might be many words to sum up such a record, but “eclectic” fit the bill better than most, and while it didn’t always sound like the creative endeavours of the same band, somehow, the Brothers managed to make it all work.
DECIMATOR – Downfallen EP
Since their formation in 2021, Aussie thrash metal band Decimator have gone through a variety of line-up changes, but this potential instability only seems to have made frontman (and only original member) Lance even more determined to make his band a success. Decimator’s 2025 release ‘Downfallen’ features material that, prior to its release, had been pitched as having “more fire and ferocity” but also “a more refined approach to songwriting”.