London’s Midnight Playlist are a four piece alternative pop-rock/pop-punk band, who bring a strong sense of good times and youthful spirit on their debut EP ‘Built To Break’. There’s a real energy present from the very beginning of the opening track: a door slams, voices chatter, an amplifier buzzes…and with that, the quartet burst into life. That opener ‘A Year In Hell’ mixes pop-punk guitar chords and an alternative rock spirit, like a DIY collision between early Sum 41 and Don Broco; it’s a performance on which drummer Atish really excels. Twin guitars chug and thrash in classic punk-pop style – even making room for a couple of lead flourishes – while lead vocalist Aaron cries each line with confidence, all the while happy to let his natural accent through, despite the attempts of a few vocal filters to make his voice sound more generic to the musical style. You’ll have heard this sort of thing a thousand times before, but there’s an energy and tightness here – even obvious despite the limited recording budget – that makes this tune very enjoyable all round.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
JET BLACK SEA – The Path Of Least Existence
Jet Black Sea is an experimental, extra-curricular musical outlet for a couple of cult figures associated with the prog rock scene. Nine Stones Close guitarist Adrian Jones and his band producer Michel Simons created the project in order to create music that stretches beyond the parent band’s more direct progressive rock and metal sounds. Stripped of all vocals and the most of the crunchy guitars heard on many a Nine Stones Close recording, there are still some meaty sounds present and a few rock influenced passages, but Jet Black Sea’s core sound is almost ambient in comparison. Not necessarily ambient in the true “Eno/Music For Airports” sense, but definitely more chilled out. Naturally, there’s still a great deal of prog at the heart of their music – given the pairing’s usual musical outlet, that is unsurprising – but it is prog rock in a much more minimal sense, although ‘The Path of Least Existence’s broad soundscapes rarely sound minimalist in their overall vision. An hour’s worth of instrumental sounds float by without ever resorting to self-indulgence and a stronger focus on keyboards brings a very cinematic feel to proceedings throughout.
THE CREEP VOID – The Elevation Of Idiocy EP
Hailing from England’s North East, The Creep Void are an independent rock band trading in some great post grunge and alternative sounds. While the core of their work owes a debt to the nineties, the quartet’s 2014 EP ‘The Elevation of Idiocy’ isn’t just a throwback to times of khaki colours and plaid shirts. There are certainly a few unavoidably grungy elements within these four tracks, but the song writing and tough sound places them firmly in the twenty first century – ever looking forward as well as drawing from their classic influences.
STRUGGLE MANIFESTO – EP
When Napalm Death appeared on the metal scene, they sounded like very little that had come before. Sure, death metal had already begun to establish itself by the mid eighties, but the scene’s earliest acts – such as the most literally named Death – combined their brutal speed with fretboard assaulting lead breaks and other elements most closely associated with the thrash and speed metal of the day. Birmingham’s Napalm Death were different: they took that speed and aggression and distilled it to its absolutely purest – and often shortest – essence. With the speed of death metal, but the suckerpunch delivery of hardcore punk, they laid the foundations for what became grindcore. Their earliest works were so frantic and intense that even the original band only stayed together for one side of an album. That LP – 1987’s ‘Scum’ – remains a landmark for the extreme metal/punk subgenre; with its twenty eight tracks delivered in approximately thirty three minutes (a duration bulked out by the title track stretching beyond two minutes), the album was the aural equivalent of being smacked repeatedly with a brick.
Since those days, grindcore has remained a much-loved – albeit marginal – genre among fans of extreme metal. Few have surpassed ‘Scum’ for intensity; even Napalm Death themselves sounded like they were recycling by the time it came to recording a follow-up. On their debut EP, Poland’s Struggle Manifesto come close to re-igniting the sparks of excitement first delivered by ‘Scum’, the vinyl release’s five bursts of sound filling a lightning-fast 3:39, all wrapped up in a Catholic-baiting sleeve.
FRANK TURNER – The Third Three Years
Frank Turner is one of those artists who just never stops working. If he’s not recording a new album, he’s touring. If he’s not touring, he’s recording radio sessions. If he’s not recording radio sessions, he’s touring. If he’s not touring, he’s recording extra material for b-sides or stand-alone EPs. It’s no wonder that his solo career has spawned compilation discs of album length every three years. This traditional taking stock resulted in a third compilation – predictably titled ‘The Third Three Years’ – in the autumn of 2014. While this particular instalment of FT’s extra-curricular recordings is, perhaps, a little more reliant on covers and live/session material than the previous two anthologies, the twenty one track disc brings plenty of enjoyable material for the Turner fan.