Glance at the band logo for this fledgling Brazilian band and there’s every chance you’ll assume they’re called Southern and you might expect something along the lines of Black Stone Cherry. A closer look and that stray and somewhat mysterious L appears, but there’s no soul on offer here either. As you can probably guess from the band photo on the sleeve – a design that conjours up memories of 7”s with DIY wraparound artwork – we’re in very retro metal territory with this demo quality release. In fact, ‘Rock You Till Die’ [sic] is so unashamedly old school metal with a capital M, you might even think these three guys had been in a coma since 1984.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
NORMAL FOX – The Boy Who Couldn’t Change Anything EP
Wisconsin’s Normal Fox bill themselves as sounding like “the best summer you ever had”. The music doesn’t always instantly have a summery feel, but there are times throughout their 2013 EP release ‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Change Anything’ where the four musicians sound like they’re having a fantastic time playing music – and that in itself is probably enough to justify such claims, no matter how you’d personally choose to soundtrack your own (hopefully) sun-filled vacation time. On the surface, they sound like just another alt-rock/emo band, but as these five songs clearly demonstrate, at least one member of the band has broader musical interests than first appears.
MAGNUS KARLSSON’S FREE FALL – Kingdom Of Rock
Back in 2013 Magnus Karlsson released an album entitled ‘Free Fall‘, a disc of hard rock collaborations with various guest vocalists that yielded mixed results. Mixed, maybe, but when those collaborations worked, in terms of classic hard rock, they hit the spot.
UMMAGMA – Frequency EP
Ummagma are a dream pop/shoegaze duo based in Canada. Despite gaining favourable press from the Russian edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, like so many bands of their style, they’re somewhat of an underground act. Their third release, ‘Frequency’ comes three years after their previous works and, if anything, is a far more chilled out affair. The five original tracks on this 2015 EP are slow burning, almost other worldly in their construction; tracks with a minimalism that really expects the listener to sit and lend a very close ear, for the tiny details are often where the magic lies.
VARIOUS ARTISTS – Electric Gathering
When it comes to hard rock and metal guitar playing. there’s a fine line between melodic, harmonious workouts and empty, soulless fretboard bashing for the sake of it. For every player who understands the importance of filling several bars with succinct and thoughtful soloing, there are a thousand John Petrucci wannabes who think – oft like Dream Theater themselves – that notes and flash are a thousand times more impressive than actual tunes…and just because we can see them pulling orgasm faces while bending strings at lightning speeds, we’ll somehow feel the magic too. They’re wrong, of course.