With their debut release ‘Gilded Echoes’, Scotland’s Silver Dollar Room delivered one of the finest albums of 2024. Its mix of hard rock and grunge drew from classic sources, including Smashing Pumpkins (with better vocals) and Bush (but with better songs), creating something that sometimes felt a little nostalgic but still relevant in the present.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
MAGANA – Bad News EP
Released during the first quarter of 2024, Magana’s ‘Break Free’ single shared some very interesting musical ideas. Billed as “witchy rock”, the track managed to convey a hard edge, but retain a sense of the atmospheric. With the aid of droning keys and percussive rhythms, the performance conveyed a spooky vibe, but was also unafraid to take detours into harder edged sounds. Like a strange hybrid of 90s goth, classic Cocteau Twins and a deep dive into middle period Lush, it wasn’t for everyone, but for those with a love of various 90s and 00’s alternative sounds, it brought a welcome new slant to genre-specific sounds that often felt familiar.
Watch: Modern Evils share new video for ‘Gitzlaff Lover’
Over the years, Swindon has become famous for its associations with the brilliant XTC, the legendary Justin Hayward, and pop singer turned actress Billie Piper. It also spawned one of the UK’s heaviest bands in recent years – Heriot, who seemed to take forever to record their debut full length – and 90s dance act Meat Beat Manifesto, but you’d be hard pressed to consider the town a Mecca for music fans.
Here’s another Swindon based band worth keeping an eye on. Relative newcomers Modern Evils released a couple of strong singles in 2024, but, on the basis of their first release for 2025, they’re set to up their game this year.
THE GAMBLERS – Boom! Boom! / Sufferer
The debut 7” from The Gamblers gave listeners a very accessible and direct insight into the new band’s key musical interests. The self-penned ‘Tonight’ introduced them with a tight arrangement, underscored by a great bass sound, and an attitude that suggested that frontman Mark – also of punk band Booze & Glory – had a deeper love of Jamaican sounds than many of his peers. For any doubters, the flip-side’s pin-sharp cover of The Pioneers’ ‘Let Your Yeah Be Yeah’ should have been solid enough to allay any fears that this was, in any way, a half-arsed musical diversion.
VARIOUS ARTISTS – Middle Earth: The Soundtrack of London’s Legendary Psychedelic Club 1967-1969
Whenever psychedelic and swinging London appears in documentary footage, there’s always a tendency to suggest, to those of later generations, that Joe Boyd’s short-lived UFO club was where everybody hung out. This is largely to do with an easily available and well circulated clip of Syd Barrett and The Pink Floyd hammering through ‘Astronomy Domine’ against a home made light show. The late 60s saw lots of other underground activity, not least of all at UFO’s successor, Middle Earth.