With debut albums from Crowded House and The Housemartins standing alongside massive hits from Madonna, a-ha and Red Box, 1986 would already have a strong enough grounding to challenge 1984 as one of the decade’s finest years for music. With Huey Lewis’s ‘Fore!’ challenging 1983’s as his masterpiece, a strong AOR debut from Robert Tepper and Jackson Browne’s ‘Lives In The Balance’ channelling a very commercial sound, it was also very much a year for great Transatlantic AOR and sounds that now seem so entrenched within that decade, you can’t help but love them.
Tag Archives: metal
THE WATCHERS – High And Alive EP
Following two enjoyable studio releases, San Francisco stoner rock band The Watchers give fans a genuine treat with their third release. ‘High And Alive’ shows the band in their natural environment, in front of an enthusiastic crowd. With four tracks recorded at The House of Rock, the EP shows how much better this band sounds without the constraints of a studio and with some extra volume applied.
ZERO FIRE – The Attic Sessions EP
Canadian metal band Zero Fire’s second EP ‘Second Sun’ was packed with great riffs. By creating a brand of melodic metalcore that also included nods to groove metal and contrasted its heaviness with use of clean vocals, it managed to be very broad in appeal. A year on, ‘The Attic Sessions’ offers fans and newcomers a couple of live recordings that demonstrate both extremes of the band’s sound. While a new studio recording would have been preferable – and a full length album better still – this EP has the benefit of giving a premier to a pair of previously unrecorded tracks.
DOOL – Summerland
On their debut album ‘Here Now, There Then’, Dool formulated a sound that blended goth, hard rock and a touch of trad metal to create a sound that drew a lot of influence from the early 90s, but in some ways sounded almost timeless. With elements of Killing Joke providing a core influence – especially in some of Job van der Zande’s chosen basslines – it was a record that had a relatively strong musical foundation, even if some of the songs weren’t especially memorable. A cover of ‘Love Like Blood’ flaunted their love of Killing Joke further on an EP in 2019 that, in the band’s own words, saw them growing in confidence.
August Burns Red release new video for ‘Bones’
American metalcore titans August Burns Red released their ninth studio album ‘Guardians’ on April 3rd. A disc that’s been very well received by fans, it’s a record that presents the band in a very heavy mood, but also one that’s packed with great songs.
A new video for the current single ‘Bones’ appeared on YouTube on April 7th. It provides a perfect snapshot of what to expect from the rest of the new album. You can stream the whole clip below.