American audiences are just the same as any other audiences. Except a bit more boring.
Wednesday March 10th 2010

News 09/03/2010

Lucero (thanks to Scott Dudelson)

Lucero (thanks to Scott Dudelson)

Roy Berry and Brian Ven­able of Lucero were mugged recently after a show in Geor­gia (the US state, not the former soviet repub­lic). Berry’s jaw was broken, and the band have had to can­cel at least one gig.

NOFX’s Fat Mike has had his phone stolen in Argen­tina. He was appar­ently send­ing a text mes­sage on his iPhone when it was knocked out of his hand by a guy on a bike, who then made off with it. He lost the phone and “a few hun­dred dol­lars”, but was not hurt. In fact, he seems to be quite pos­it­ive about the whole exper­i­ence, say­ing “What a fuck­ing great way to get robbed. No viol­ence, no trauma, no chance I’m gonna run after him. Pretty sweet really”.

P.O.S. has remixed Breathe Carolina’s Hello Fas­cin­a­tion. The video’s here.

Bad Reli­gion will be giv­ing away a live album being recor­ded on their Spring tour to mem­bers of their mail­ing list. For more inform­a­tion and to join, click here.

Belle & Sebastian have sent an e-mail through their fan mail­ing list say­ing that they’re going back into the stu­dio after a four year break to record a follow-up to The Life Pur­suit. Appar­ently, it’s all writ­ten, so they just need to record it.

Here We Are Jug­ger­naut, a track by Coheed and Cam­bria, is now avail­able on the band’s MySpace.

Amber Pacific will be releas­ing their album Vir­tues on the 13th April. You can pre-order it here (Amer­ican site).

Daphne Loves Derby have pos­ted a new song, Shine, to their MySpace.

Mark Linkous (Sparkle­horse) has com­mit­ted sui­cide. Our thoughts are with his fam­ily and friends at this sad time.

By Joe Innes

Jacko-Wackos! Beat It!

Michael Jackson at the White House in 1984

Michael Jack­son at the White House in 1984

I’m sure you will have been fol­low­ing, as I have, the events fol­low­ing the death of pop’s greatest icon, Michael Jack­son and the sub­sequent trial of his car­di­olo­gist for mis­con­duct in allow­ing the singer to ingest a lethal amount of pain-killers as a sleep­ing aid. If con­victed of invol­un­tary man­slaughter Dr Con­rad Mur­ray could face 4 years in jail in addi­tion to the loss of his med­ical license. All of which is, as they say, fair enough. If Mur­ray did indeed admin­is­ter the lethal dose then he should be pun­ished by whatever means the Amer­ican judi­cial court deems necessary.

What is, how­ever, com­pletely unne­ces­sary is the cluster of half-soaked, whitewash-brained mor­ons who have con­verged around the courts with the inten­tion of hound­ing Con­rad Mur­ray with cries of “mur­derer” and “mon­ster”. I saw a video of Mur­ray arriv­ing at court and was hor­ri­fied by the abuse he had to put up with dur­ing the short walk from the car to the front door. Any­one with enough brains to put their shoes on the right feet will real­ise that Mur­ray was a close friend of Michael’s who has undoubtedly been hit as hard as any­one else by his untimely death. If it was his fault, then it doesn’t need to be said that he made a ter­rible mis­take, but he did NOT murder him, des­pite the best attempts of the corn-circle soci­ety to claim otherwise.

This is what really gets on my nerves about these situ­ations; the imme­di­ate and incess­ant fin­ger point­ing, the unquench­able need to find a scape­goat and witch-hunt them into sub­mis­sion. And it ALWAYS hap­pens when someone as fam­ous and as widely-loved as Michael passes away. Bruce Lee for example, was appar­ently not killed by pre­scrip­tion med­ic­a­tion, but in some weird con­spir­acy involving mar­tial arts mas­ters who took excep­tion to his teach­ing Kung Fu to west­ern act­ors. Kurt Cobain, des­pite a col­our­ful his­tory of heroin abuse and sui­cide attempts, allegedly has his brains blown out instead by his wife Court­ney Love, in a mad attempt to squeeze some extra cash out of him. And Elvis, well he’s not even dead. Yeah, right.

This is a prob­lem when a celebrity’s fame reaches crit­ical level. Fans become so in awe, so enam­oured that that their idol becomes, in their eyes, almost immor­tal; a celes­tial demi-god far above the mantle of the bottom-feeding masses. So when the star even­tu­ally bites the dust they can’t take it. It’s impossible for them to believe that their star is in fact human just like them, as equally sus­cept­ible to over­dose, buck­shot or toilet-induced heart attack as they are. And so they point fin­gers, they demand answers, and if there aren’t any then they make up a few of their own. Some unbe­liev­ably can’t even func­tion without the pres­ence of their idol. We’ve all seen the tear­ful rant­ings of pitiful-excuse-for-a-whining-web-wimp Chris Crocker defend­ing Brit­ney Spears, and when Take That split up in 1996 a sui­cide hot­line had to be set up. I mean, how pathetic is that?

And yet, this is the dir­ec­tion in which our celeb-obsessed soci­ety seems to be head­ing and why these idi­ots won’t rest until they see Con­rad Mur­ray hanged.

What you need to remem­ber is that this man was the per­sonal doc­tor to one of the richest and most suc­cess­ful pop stars of all time. This was not just a reg­u­lar patient who would take a pre­scrip­tion and shuffle off to the phar­macy, this was a man who could afford the best doc­tors money could buy. It was no secret that MJ was addicted to paink­illers fol­low­ing his acci­dent whilst film­ing the Pepsi com­mer­cial, so think about it — if the man who pays your wages and puts your kids through col­lege asks you for a bit more medi­cine, you give it to him; if not, he’ll simply find a doc­tor who will. I am by no means try­ing to jus­tify what Mur­ray may or may not have done, but he is being tried for man­slaughter, not murder. The man is inno­cent until proven guilty and own­ing a sub­scrip­tion to the Michael Jack­son fan club and a dodgy hair­cut doesn’t appoint you judge and jury. We live in a civ­il­ised soci­ety where every­one is entitled to a fair and unbiased trial, and any­one bone-headed enough to con­demn a man without full pos­ses­sion of the facts deserves a bet­ter view of the courts, from the dock. So my advice to any of these would-be Jacko-Wackos is this:

Put the plac­ard down. Go home. Get a life.

By Tom Lawlor

News 02/03/2010

By way of apo­logy for the slow news week, please accept this amaz­ing video of Ellie Gould­ing cov­er­ing The Tem­per Trap’s “Sweet Disposition”.

Punk Goes… next release will be “Punk Goes Clas­sic Rock”. It will include cov­ers of Boston, Queen, Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, and more.

You can check out Kill­switch Engage’s con­tri­bu­tion to the God of War soundtrack, My Obses­sion, here.

Please don’t vomit with this one: Chad Gil­bert and Hay­ley Wil­li­ams have done a low-quality cover of The Moldy Peaches “Any­one Else But You”. If you are a mas­ochist, then click here.

By Joe Innes

Two Tongues — Two Tongues

Two Tongues

Two Tongues

Two Tongues is a col­lab­or­a­tion between Max Bemis of ‘Say Any­thing’ and Chris Con­ley of ‘Saves the Day’. Being a huge fan of both the bands I was very excited about the release of these thir­teen tracks; and I am not disappointed.

Bemis and Con­ley share writ­ing, vocal and gui­tar duties. Bemis brings his trade­mark venom­ous vocal styl­ing to the mix but it is Con­ley who truly shines; with a sound remin­is­cent of ‘In Reverie’.

Bemis describes the album as an ‘expres­sion of the Yin and the Yang; how two “oppos­ite” souls stim­u­late and battle each other in any truly lov­ing rela­tion­ship.’ and that is cer­tainly the impres­sion that you get from listen­ing to it. The lyr­ics to some of the songs are ambigu­ous as to whether the two are singing to each other or about another unvoiced person.

The writ­ing is con­sist­ently strong, soul­ful and mildly dis­turb­ing at times with both bands’ influ­ences instantly recog­nis­able. The music is strong through­out although the more exper­i­mental songs do make you wish that they had stepped out­side their safety zones on more of the tracks.

Over­all this is a bril­liant effort with some truly great gui­tar riffs and lyr­ics that will rattle around your head for days after­wards; both Bemis and Con­ley excel in their writ­ing and per­form­ance of these songs, it just never quite reaches the level of bril­liance of ‘…Is a Real Boy’ or ‘Stay What You Are’.

Stand out track: If I Could Make You Do Things

By Christopher Hodgkins

News 23/02/2010

Straylight Run (thanks to Wehwalt)

Stray­light Run (thanks to Wehwalt)

Stray­light Run have announced that they are now on an “indef­in­ite hiatus”. How­ever, Shaun has quit the band for good.

Zoli Teglas (Ignite) is Pennywise’s new vocal­ist. Allegedly, it happened as a res­ult of a mis­di­alled tele­phone number.

As part of the Olympic cel­eb­ra­tions in Van­couver, a pro­ject called “Live­City” was con­ceived, to bring live music to Van­couver for free. Alex­is­on­fire were play­ing one of these free con­certs, and unfor­tu­nately the crowd rushed the stage, and sev­eral people were hurt.

The first batch of bands con­firmed to play Down­load this year are: Rage Against The Machine, 30 Seconds To Mars, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Aer­o­s­mith, Bul­let for My Valentine, Deftones, Fine Fin­ger Death Punch, Lamb Of God, Mega­deth, Motör­head, Stone Sour, Stone Temple Pilots, Them Crooked Vul­tures, Vol­beat and Wolfmother.

The drum­mer from Dream Theater, Mike Port­nay, will be record­ing drums on Avenged Sevenfold’s new album. He was Jimmy “The Rev“‘s favour­ite drum­mer, and when the band asked, he said it was an honour.

Street­light Mani­festo have released the track list­ing for their upcom­ing album, instal­ment one of their 99 Songs of Revolu­tion. You can check out the track list­ing here.

Hawthorne Heights have post­poned the release of their next album, Skel­et­ons, until 1st June.

One Nine Nine Four, a doc­u­ment­ary about Punk Rock, fea­tur­ing some of the biggest names of the nineties is expec­ted to be released this year. In the mean­time, a clip has found its way onto YouTube.

Gob are plan­ning to record a new album next month, accord­ing to this MySpace blog post by Tom.

You can stream “This Addic­tion”, the whole album, for free, from Alkaline Trio’s MySpace page.

Pocket Satellite’s car got broken into, a gui­tar, a snare drum, and a violin were taken. The violin was quite dis­tinct­ive, and had great sen­ti­mental value.

The Climb­ing, made up of former mem­bers of Daphne Loves Derby and Trans­ition are allow­ing stream­ing of their new album, Per­spect­ive, fea­tur­ing Stephen Chris­tian and Mike Her­rera, of Anber­lin and MxPx respect­ively. You can check out the stream on Face­book.

You can down­load a new track by Forever the Sick­est Kids over at their MySpace. The track is called “Get Over Yourself”.

Motion City Soundtrack are releas­ing a free down­load of their track “Sunny Day” to their UK fans ahead of the release of My Dino­saur Life on the 22nd March. You can grab the track here. Imme­di­ately after the album release, the band are going on a UK tour. Dates are on their MySpace.

By Joe Innes

Motion City Soundtrack — My Dinosaur Life

Motion City Soundtrack's Justin Pierre, thanks to elisasizzla

Motion City Soundtrack’s Justin Pierre, thanks to elisasizzla

Motion City Soundtrack’s new­est offer­ing ‘My Dino­saur Life’ is an album I want to be derog­at­ory about. I want to say that it is just a rehash of albums past, the same tired old offer­ing etc., etc. I want to say all of these things but I just can’t. Like every Motion City album since ‘I Am The Movie’, the first listen doesn’t wow you, but gradu­ally those twelve songs worm their way into your sub-conscious and you find your­self hum­ming them in the car/bath/toilet.

This is another fine offer­ing from the quin­tet, full of songs of insec­ur­ity, pess­im­ism and slasher films. Pop-culture ref­er­ences are rife and the hooks are as catchy as ever, but there is some­thing miss­ing. Long time fans will by now have come to expect the haunt­ing acous­tic track that adorns every album since ‘I Am The Movie’. ‘Stand Too Close’ is ‘Dinosaur’s’ offer­ing and it’s fine. It’s just no ‘The Con­ver­sa­tion’ or ‘Hold Me Down’. That theme is recur­rent through­out the album; the songs are good and catchy but there’s no ‘Cap­ital H’, ‘The Future Freaks Me Out’ or ‘LGFAUD’. The stand-out songs are very good ‘Worker Bee’, ‘A Life­less Ordin­ary’ and ‘Pulp Fic­tion’ but I doubt you would put any of the oth­ers on your MP3 player.

With Mark Hop­pus back on pro­duc­tion à la ‘I Am The Movie’, I expec­ted so much more than an album that is fine for back­ground music and not much else. Although in say­ing that, I am hum­ming ‘A Life­less Ordin­ary’ as I work so maybe it’s not all bad.

By Christopher Hodgkins

News 16/02/2010

Travis Barker, thanks to David Guirl

Travis Barker, thanks to David Guirl

Travis Barker is releas­ing a solo album. He’s invited Lil’ Wayne, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, The Game and a whole host of other big names to guest on the record. Barker says “It goes from everything from punk rock to hip-hop to some elec­tro stuff on there to a metal song with Corey Taylor from Slip­knot. It’s been really fun and inter­est­ing up till now.”

Wes Bor­land (gui­tars) has spoken out about Limp Bizkit’s new album, say­ing that it will have a “Daft Punk vibe to it”. He says that the band haven’t really grown up, and the album’s pretty much just more of the same from Limp Bizkit, just with that Daft Punk influence.

The Knack’s Doug Fieger has died. The 57 year old co-wrote the hit “My Shar­ona”, and had ser­i­ous drug and alco­hol prob­lems when he was younger, although he claimed to have been liv­ing a healthy life­style for 25 years.

Chad Gil­bert of New Found Glory has released a few tracks from his band, What’s Eat­ing Gil­bert, which you can check out by click­ing the band name. It would appear that he’s come in for some cri­ti­cism for one of the tracks in par­tic­u­lar, “Think­ing About Her”, with some people con­sid­er­ing it an attack on his ex, Sherri DuPree (Eis­ley). Max Bemis, who is now with DuPree pos­ted on twit­ter, although has since admit­ted he over­re­acted. In a mes­sage to AP.net though, Gil­bert denies the song is spe­cific­ally about DuPree. How­ever, this hasn’t stopped Adam Laz­arra (Tak­ing Back Sunday), wad­ing in, cri­ti­cising Max Bemis (Say Any­thing). Adam Laz­arra was Jesse Lacey’s (who, incid­ent­ally, also used to go out with DuPree) replace­ment in Tak­ing Back Sunday, after Jesse left (if you don’t know why, it’s an inter­est­ing story, and explains Your Favour­ite Weapon. Check it out). Adam Laz­arra, how­ever, was engaged to Sherri DuPree’s sis­ter (Chaun­telle, also Eis­ley), before they split in 2008. Every­body fol­low so far? Oh, and the DuPree’s mum stuck her oar in as well, hit­ting out at Chad, accus­ing him of cheat­ing on Sherri with Hay­ley. My God. And just to make things worse, Chad’s going to release another three songs on the 9th March.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Joel Mad­den (Good Char­lotte) and Nicole Ritchie, who, accord­ing to People, are get­ting mar­ried. Let’s just hope their rela­tion­ship doesn’t turn into as epic a saga as the one above.

By Joe Innes

YouMeAtSix — Hold Me Down

YouMeAtSix (thanks to roamthestreets)

You­MeAt­Six (thanks to roamthestreets)

You­MeAt­Six have divided the music crit­ics with their latest offer­ing, Hold Me Down, since it came out on Janu­ary 11th. And to be fair, I can see why. The main cri­ti­cism that has been lev­elled at the band are that the record is unori­ginal, and that there’s noth­ing on the album that hasn’t been done before (New Found Glory, Tak­ing Back Sunday, and Hoo­bastank are three names knock­ing about on the Wiki­pe­dia page). But then, in the words of Jeremy Clark­son, isn’t that like cri­ti­cising a man for look­ing too much like Brad Pitt?

I have to agree with the crit­ics, I don’t think there’s much new or excit­ing on this album. There’s noth­ing ground-breaking, and noth­ing to write home about. The album is well put together, the tracks are well writ­ten and well per­formed. The lyr­ics are well thought out. In fact, “well done” is pretty much a catch-all term to describe this album. It has no faults, noth­ing bad that I can pick out. It runs the gamut of pop-punky power rock with, for example, “Under­dog”, through to the softer, more bal­lady “Liquid Con­fid­ence”. There are guest vocals provided by The Blackout’s Sean Smith and Kids In Glass Houses’s Aled Phil­lips, both good choices, and it’s undeni­able that they add some­thing extra to the tracks they guest on.

But does it have a spark? Is there some­thing in the album that makes it spe­cial? Frankly, I can’t say that there is.

And it doesn’t mat­ter. The album is so well done that it fits in with its con­tem­por­ar­ies. It might be gen­eric, but it’s incred­ibly listen­able. If You­MeAt­Six come on, I’ll never skip the track, I’ll never change the radio sta­tion, and by the end of the song, I’ll be singing along. If You­MeAt­Six wanted to change the music scene, they failed. But if what they wanted to do was to put out a record that people can enjoy, not once, not twice, but over and over again, then they suc­ceeded. And then some.

By Joe Innes

Bombay Bicycle Club

Thanks to Amy Brammall

Thanks to Amy Brammall

Feb­ru­ary 11th and after a week in action, the NME Awards tour is in full swing. Tonight it’s Birmingham’s turn to play host to the onslaught of Indie rock and judging by the num­ber of people, young­sters and adults alike who are already brav­ing the freez­ing con­di­tions when we arrive, it’s not hard to see why the tour has sold out all but three of its four­teen dates. Bom­bay Bicycle Club are amongst the line-up which also boasts the Mac­ca­bees, The Drums, and London’s electro-rock duo The Big Pink, who are already warm­ing up the ruddy-cheeked mem­bers of the audi­ence as we pick our way through towards the back rooms where Suren and Ed are enjoy­ing a quiet beer before its their turn to hit the stage. They con­fess to being a little tired at this point in the tour, but there are some smiles when they see the don­key piñata we brought for them to pose with. Before they can get down to some ser­i­ous mule-whacking though, we have a couple of questions….

You just came back from a pre-show gig at Birm­ing­ham Uni­ver­sity, how did it go?
Suren: “Well, it was quite good…”
Ed: “We kept fuck­ing up in little ways that made us look very dumb!”
Suren: “It was quite weird because we were play­ing in a Cafet­eria; there was a lot of noise from the crowd.”
Ed: “Yeah, and half the people were there to eat lunch and the other half were watch­ing us.”
So are you more com­fort­able play­ing in a smal­ler envir­on­ment?
Ed: “Yeah, any­where but a cafet­eria though. It is nice to go to Uni’s and places like that, just for people who can’t come to the show.”
Suren: “We’ll be doing a few things like that dur­ing the tour, we’ve played in lib­rar­ies and just ran­dom places like that.”

As a band you star­ted quite young, do you feel like you’ve had a good head start in the music industry?
Ed: “Yeah I think we have, most people reach the stage we’re at now when they’re in their early twen­ties, so we’ve got a good amount of time.”

Have you ever found that other bands have been threatened by how much younger you are?
Suren: “I guess some bands prob­ably get kind of arsey, they think we’re just stu­pid little kids.”
Ed: “That’s fair enough, we are stu­pid little kids! We find most people are friendly with us, but we just play music and hang out.”

You’re known for hav­ing quite a laid-back atti­tude towards your music. Do you feel that it’s some­thing that can be passed on to fledgling musi­cians?
Suren: “We’re prob­ably a little bit too laid back to be hon­est. They should find a middle ground.”
Ed: “Yeah, they prob­ably shouldn’t be this laid back about it because they won’t get any­where, we were very lucky. We are very focused when it comes to play­ing and writ­ing music, and everything else.”

Apart from win­ning “Road to V” was there a defin­ing moment when you real­ised “Fuck, I’m fam­ous”?
Ed: “Well, we entered Road to V more as a joke and then we for­got that we’d entered, but we just happened to win. It didn’t even feel like a defin­ing moment then, only recently have we real­ised that it was big­ger than we thought it was at the time.”
Suren: “But even now we still don’t feel like we are fam­ous.”
Ed: “There’s been defin­ing moments in our career that have been amaz­ing, and we’re thank­ful for hav­ing done them.”

Do you still get to do the nor­mal side of things like going out with friends?
Ed: “Yeah, all the time. When we’re not play­ing in the band we’re still friends with the same people we’ve always been friends with, prior to the band. It’s just like the band is a job we have, we do it and then we go home, like we all still live with our par­ents. It’s still fairly normal.”

Ed, you joined the band when you met them at a funeral, how did that hap­pen?
Ed: “Well that’s just some­thing we say in inter­views really; I did know the guys before­hand, but we were all at a funeral, and they had to play a gig the next day. I knew them fairly well and I can play gui­tar so they asked me to play bass just to fill in, and after that they asked me to join.”

You’re play­ing a fun­draiser for the Haiti earth­quake in a couple of weeks, is that some­thing you per­son­ally wanted to be a part of?
Suren: “It’s def­in­itely some­thing that we wanted to do. We get asked to do quite a lot of char­ity gigs that we cant do coz’ we’re always up and down, but this is one that we were really inter­ested in doing.”
Ed: “Well after a dis­aster like that you’ve got to help out any­way you can. And this is some­thing we can do fairly eas­ily, so we have to do it to make a difference.”

And are you get­ting along well with the other bands on the NME tour?
Ed: “Yeah we love them, they’re all really nice. We usu­ally go and have a few drinks with them most nights.”
Suren: “We some­times have DJ sets after­wards as well so the other band will come along and they’ll be like…”
Ed: “Boogie-ing to the mixes!”

Some of the songs for “I Had the Blues…”were writ­ten a few years in advance, do you think there’ll be a more pres­sured approach for the second album?
Ed: “Some of the songs are about four or five years old, but some newer ones were writ­ten at the time of record­ing. I think there can be the nor­mal second album syn­drome, where you’ve got 15 years to write one album and then one year to write the second, but I don’t think we would find that kind of pres­sure.”
Suren: “Well we’ve got a few ideas already for songs, so they’re already com­ing along.”
Ed: “I don’t think we’re a band that would ever rush any­thing any­way; we’re so laid back it could take years, I don’t think even the record com­pany would be able to make us do it!”

Any other plans after the NME tour?
Suren: “Well we’re just about to fin­ish record­ing a new acous­tic album which was meant to be fin­ished quite a long time ago, in fact I think we’re sup­posed to fin­ish it like, tomor­row! But that should be com­ing out in the sum­mer.”
Ed: “I think we’ll do a nice little tour of that as well, hope­fully in some nice ven­ues. We like to play in churches, places you wouldn’t expect a band to play. All these big­ger ven­ues are the same really, they lack soul.”
Suren: “We did an acous­tic tour before, and we asked our fans to sug­gest some ran­dom places for us to play, so we ended up play­ing on a beach, down a mine shaft, in a castle, and it was the fun­nest tour ever.”

Any plans to con­quer Amer­ica yet?
Ed: “I’d like to go to Amer­ica first, really.”
Suren: “We might actu­ally be record­ing in Amer­ica, we’ve been talk­ing to a pro­du­cer over there. We won’t actu­ally be play­ing over there yet, but hope­fully we will soon”.

Jack rubbing some funk on it (thanks to Amy Brammall)

Jack rub­bing some funk on it (thanks to Amy Brammall)

Jack and Jamie are now in the room again, and as a com­plete group they cer­tainly seem to become more fired up as show-time approaches.
As they take to the stage and imme­di­ately com­mence with their set
opener; “Emer­gency Con­tra­cept­ive Blues” is undoubtedly the begin­ning of the most ener­getic live per­form­ance I (and most likely a lot of people) have seen the band play to date. Jack in par­tic­u­lar, thrashes around like a man try­ing to shake a bat out of his hair and in the quieter moments, looks as though any­thing could set him off again. Suren and Ed exhibit none of the leth­argy we saw earlier. Instead they dis­play such enjoy­ment at what they do that when Jack assures the audi­ence (as bands always seem to), that they have been the best of the tour so far, it’s dif­fi­cult not to believe him. Des­pite the amount of oomph they throw into their set, it sounds water-tight, and not once dur­ing Jack’s phys­ical tirades do I hear him miss a note. All the favour­ites are thrown in; their most pop-friendly num­ber, “Open House” is greeted with a riot­ous response and festival-favourite “Can­cel on Me” her­alds the first of a steady stream of crowd surfers. But it’s “Always Like This” that steals the show, and ensures the band can leave the stage know­ing they’ve conquered another city. They aren’t head­lining the show, which is brought to a fire-breathing con­clu­sion with an indefatig­able per­form­ance by The Mac­ca­bees, but I don’t doubt that they will be back here soon with a show of their very own; these kids are going to be around for a while!

By Tom Lawlor

Against The Wheel

The first instal­ment of the Joe’s Big Toe “Unsigned Artist of the Week” is “Against The Wheel”, a dynamic rock four-piece from Birm­ing­ham. We caught them at The Act­ress and Bishop last week and we liked what we saw:

Against The Wheel

Against The Wheel

It’s 10:45pm and Against The Wheel are just tak­ing the stage. Whether it’s strictly busi­ness or they’re just run­ning late, it looks like there’s no time for small-talk. Guitarist/lead vocal­ist Gavin Flint and drum­mer Andy Wat­son share a quick exchange before launch­ing into the first song of the even­ing; and almost imme­di­ately it becomes clear that this is a band who know their trade. This is uncut no-frills rock that at times resembles a head-on col­li­sion between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

The music itself is elec­tri­fy­ing, care­fully craf­ted but instilled with a raw pas­sion you can only get from new tal­ent wait­ing to be dis­covered. Tech­nic­ally pro­fi­cient without sound­ing too stu­di­ous; it’s easy too see why Against The Wheel have cited such a var­ied selec­tion of artists as the influ­ences for their sound.

The only cri­ti­cism I could have about this band is that you can’t help but feel that some­thing is stop­ping them from really cut­ting loose. Watch­ing them play gives you the same feel­ing as being in a school­yard goad­ing your best friend into a fight, and I almost found myself wav­ing my arms at them; “more energy, more punk, more pas­sion!!” Their last two songs were clearly old favour­ites, as some­thing lit a fire under them and as they drew their set to an ear-splitting close, you could almost hear the reac­tion of the audi­ence around the room – “that’s more like it!”]

Against The Wheel will be at Marrs Bar, Worcester on 13th Feb – def­in­itely worth a look.

By Tom Lawlor
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