Joe Cirotti of blues/garage rockers Only Living Boy has posted an acoustic Christmas performance on YouTube, to help everyone feel a little festive spirit. (See below)
Only Living Boy released their debut full length, ‘Hide Nothing’ in the summer of 2011, showcasing a heady mix of garage rock, blues, retro rock and a smattering of punk attitude with some interesting results. (Review here)
After touring their 1997 release, the optimistically titled ‘Album of the Year’, Faith No More disbanded. Following the break-up, frontman Mike Patton went into recording overdrive, releasing various avant-garde records, not only under his own name but with metal band Fantomas, funk/alternative oddballs Mr Bungle and a whole bunch more besides.
As great as some of these projects were – always interesting, if not always entirely enjoyable – fans still held his work with Faith No More in very high regard.
In 2009, Faith No More reformed and played some festival shows. Over the following two years, the momentum grew and the band made even more appearances, though after two years of sporadic touring, appearances in the UK were somewhat under-represented.
In November 2011, Faith No More played four shows in South America, culminating in two festival headline slots. The first, at Maquinara in Chile proved to be a wholly unique experience as the band played the whole of ‘King For a Day…Fool For a Lifetime’. The following night, their slot at the SWU Festival, Brazil was professionally filmed and can be enjoyed below. The set-list may be more varied than Maquinara, but still contains it’s share of classic moments.
Perhaps most importantly, it still included what most fans are calling “mystery song” which appeared at the start of the encore. Could there be long-awaited new material on the way?
Captain Beefheart’s legendary 1976 shelved recording ‘Bat Chain Puller’ is to get an official release on January 15th 2012.
The original album was shelved after a dispute between album producer Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen regarding monies earned via their Discreet Records label, sometime recording home to Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart).
Many of the ‘Bat Chain Puller’ songs were re-recorded and issued on subsequent albums; even the title itself got recycled two years later for Beefheart’s 1978 release ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’, but despite circulating on bootlegs for many years, those original 1976 recordings have never been available in their entirity on an official basis.
January 15th would have been Don Van Vliet’s 71st birthday.
2011 has been a good year for Thin Lizzy fans, with various deluxe reissues bringing new life to the band’s classic back catalogue. The year saw deluxe and expanded reissues of ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Johnny The Fox’, ‘Bad Reputation’, ‘Live & Dangerous’, ‘Black Rose’ and ‘Chinatown’.
The end of the year also saw the release of a seven disc (6CD+1DVD) box set of the band’s extant BBC recordings. It was not complete, however, since Lizzy’s 1983 performance at the Reading Festival was conspicuously absent. The gig was previously issued by a BBC subsidiary in the mid 90s, but for whatever reason, they chose not to include it as part of an otherwise unmissable set.
The band’s 1974 and 1975 releases ‘Nightlife’ and ‘Fighting’ seemed to be overlooked – an odd move in the case of the latter – but there’s some great news. Both albums will be reissued as 2CD deluxe sets on February 27th 2012. As yet, no tracklistings have been announced.
Following those, it is likely 1981’s ‘Renegade’ and 1983’s ‘Thunder & Lightning’ will receive deluxe treatment – making a complete set of expanded studio albums – but this is not yet confirmed. The absent Reading Festival ’83 appearance would make a perfect bonus disc for ‘Thunder & Lightning’ after all.
Austrian born singer-songwriter Thomas King relocated to Los Angeles in search of his musical dream. His first release, the 2010 EP ‘High On Life’ attracted some good press from various independent music websites. King maintains the momentum with 2011’s ‘Last Night Living EP’ by picking up where he left off, resulting in four studio-honed pop tunes. On paper, well crafted pop with a knowhow of the recording studio seems like a winning formula, but in reality, the studio trickery quashes most of what could be great about King’s material.
Nearly everything on this EP sounds like it’s under a metallic, fake sheen. In the case of the throwaway but catchy ‘Round Again’, this is an approach which just about works, since the main chorus line adopts a simple, chantable ‘whoah’ in a way which screams Europop. Similarly, ‘Stay With Me’ bounces merrily under a barrage of keyboards which nod to The Killers and so many other eighties revivalists. On both these numbers, there are plenty of elements just tailor made for radio play and King’s knack for a chorus manages to shine from beneath the studio filters.
In terms of studio tweaking, he pushes his luck just too far with the title cut, as his voice is subjected to extreme levels of auto-tune. No doubt this is for stylistic effect, but it doesn’t make it in any way enjoyable. Even the most disposable of pop should be able to stand proudly without sounding like Cher’s ‘Believe’; countless bands managed it throughout the 80s, after all – even the campest of Euro-poppers. Attempting to get past the robotic vocal ugliness, there’s a one-two robotic beat which goes nowhere until the chorus where, unbelievably things get worse. Swamped with the levels of auto-tune best reserved for r ‘n’ b trash, King delivers a chorus which is stupidly repetitive to the point of annoyance.
The best of these four cuts – without question – is ‘It Starts Tonight’ which fuses choppy new-wave guitars, a wash of keyboards and a catchy hook. Sounding more like something from California delivered in 1987 (with another hint of the early twenty-first century thrown in for good measure) as opposed to Euro-pop, this shows Thomas King at his best. Although still radio-friendly in the extreme, he needs to embrace this slightly tougher edge more often; those extra layers of guitar – and (very slightly) less vocal filtering really helps to give his song writing a lift. The end result could stand proudly among similar post-millennial pop-rock workouts.
There are some good moments here – at least from a song-writing perspective – there’s absolutely no denying that ‘It Starts Tonight’ has a fantastic hook with the ability to stick, potentially in the long-term. However, an over-reliance of that autotune knob – even if just for dramatic effect –is not only horribly distracting, but for your average adult pop-rock fan, it’s hugely unwelcome. Yes, this is an artist who can write a chorus, but for best results, those choruses need to be delivered with some real human emotion – for King and his studio honed sound, there’s barely anything approaching such old fashioned luxury.
December 2011