Looking back, it’s easy to see that 1983 was a massive year. It represents the point where a few of its stars were making huge steps to being the decade’s megastars. Five years into his career, Prince had finally succeeded in gaining worldwide success with his ‘1999’ album (a double platter of much filthiness); with their ‘War’ album, U2 made the leap from successful rock band to being an act with much bigger potential and Madonna showed early signs of being more exciting than your average pop performer.
TRAVEL LANES – On
In 2015, Philadelphia’s Travel Lanes released ‘Let’s Begin To Start Again’, a hit and miss album that mixed a few pop and power pop influences with several rootsier John Mellencamp, John Hiatt and Connells styled moods. A few wobbly vocals let the side down from time to time, but there were a few decent tracks to be found within. Five years down the road, their third album only offers eight tracks in a very succinct twenty nine minutes, but its concise approach very much suits the band. Compared to previous Travel Lanes works, ‘On’ is far more consistent in terms of quality.
Exclusive: Stream a live version of ‘Verbose’ by The Fierce And The Dead ahead of release!
UK post-rock band The Fierce And The Dead have made some fine recordings over the past few years, but as the fans know, it’s in the live setting they really start making their most impressive noises. Two live recordings sourced from festivals are available already (2017’s ‘Field Recordings’ and 2019’s fantastic ‘Live USA 17’), but on 1st May 2020, the band will complete a live trilogy with a download only release, ‘Show Me Devon: Live At Kozfest’.
Guitarist Matt Stevens calls the recording a record of “…a very special gig.”
Watch: Led Zeppelin live @ Seattle Kingdome 17/7/1977 (full 3hr show)
When the Led Zeppelin anthology was released in 2004, fans were given lots of reasons to get excited. Not only was the black and white footage from Denmark ’69 available for the first time, but the double disc set also included a full set from London that same year, alongside highlights of Knebworth 1979 (full show here) and Earls Court 1975. As has been discussed many times, fans would like to see the latter pair of shows released uncut…but it’s never going to happen.
Check out ‘Forked Road’, a new track from Japanese fuzz/sludge/doom duo BlackLab
BlackLab’s 2018 album ‘Under Strawberry Moons’ really pushed the limits of how much noise a duo could make. Their long-awaited follow up, ‘Abyss’ (due for release digitally on 8th April) presents the band in an even noisier frame of mind, if anything, sharing heavy riffs that are so distorted that you might even believe your speakers have blown.