Music For Nations Despite being fronted by ex-Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik and having in the past featured Gaahl on vocals, Wardruna are very much not a metal band. Oh sure, metalheads love them, and they did a bunch of stuff with Enslaved, but they are not a metal band. Because […]
Justin Farrington
147 posts
Burning World Much like Tigger, the funny old thing about genres is genres are funny old things. They don’t really mean that much in and of themselves. Like nicknames at school, you can have them thrust upon you without consent (just ask Andrew Eldritch if the Sisters Of Mercy are […]
Blang Bit of a history lesson for you. Way back in the Before Times, when people used to do things outside together and Carole Baskin didn’t get blamed for everything by everyone, there were things called “festivals”. Now, what a festival was was when people would come from far and […]
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of […]
London 14 November 2019 It’s weird being at the Electric Ballroom. Not that it’s a particularly weird venue in and of itself; I mean, it’s actually a good one. No, what’s weird about being at the Electric Ballroom is that we’re here to see New Model Army. In November. .
London 17 October 2019 “Crom! How do the Four Winds get in here?” one might be forgiven for thinking, stepping into the Shepherd’s Bush Empire through clouds of weed smoke from the pavement outside. And it would be entirely appropriate, as the first band to take the stage this evening […]
Riot Season The cover of The Cosmic Dead‘s new album Scottish Space Race appears to be making an impassioned plea for national independence, depicting as it does a Scotland that is so independent it has become an island away from all the bullshit going on in the rest of the […]
Ear Music If you’ve ever read David Zindell‘s Neverness books, you will know there is nothing more badass than a warrior-poet. For nearly four decades now, New Model Army have been some of the hardest-working warrior-poets in the business, touring the world to their legions of fans (the NMA Family) […]
London 20 July 2019 It’s 6:30 — SIX FUCKING THIRTY — on a Saturday evening and I have never seen The Forum so packed so early (in fact, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever seen it this early at all). The place is an oven. Fortunately, metal crowds tend to […]
Peaceville It’s become something of a cliché to say “I like their early stuff”, but in Darkthrone‘s case I don’t actually know a great deal of their recent stuff. I loved the first few albums, especially once they really hit their stride with Under A Funeral Moon
Back2Forward The long-awaited début album by London’s Flesh Tetris, Wrong Kind Of Adults, is finally here. And Flesh Tetris is really quite a name, isn’t it? Echoes of Cronenbergian erotica funnelled through retro videogaming, an ambience which translates directly to their music.
London 3-5 May 2019 Friday: Gary The May bank holiday is normally a time for the revival of pagan customs in Britain. These can be found from local village morris dancers to the crowning of the May Queen in Glastonbury. For a few days, Britain takes on the stance of […]
London 19 April 2019 Ten years is a long time in music. Well, I mean, it’s quite a long time in anything, really. And if you adjust for inflation, ten years in the nineteenth century is actually AGES. Especially for a punk band. So it’s quite a thing that The […]
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with […]
New Heavy Sounds Hey kids, let’s talk about nominative determinism! You know, that thing where someone’s name informs what they do, like having a dentist called Dr Tooth or a Tory councillor called Mr Gaping-Anus. It’s fun! Thing is, it tends to work the other way round with bands, because […]
London 29 January 2019 A couple of months ago, the world lost perhaps its greatest showman, the driving force behind the creation of an entire universe: Stan Lee. Today, his creations and co-creations are everywhere — on our TV screens, at the cinema, in book stores and adorning all types […]
London 1 December 2018 It’s Saturday night. It’s Oxford Street. It’s nearly Christmas. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is. And what a relief to get into The 100 Club which, while packed, is still somehow less claustrophobic than the street outside. And the reason it’s packed is because everyone’s […]
Cleopatra Well deck my balls with holly and call me The Saviour, bugger me if it isn’t nearly Christmas. So get the tinsel up, dangle some dongles from a tree and slap Die Hard on the telly. Oh, and at this holiest time of year, have you considered inviting William […]
Cherry Red OK. I have a shocking revelation to share with you. And there’s an easy way you can test my hypothesis. Get thee to the internet and find a recording of the Enfield Poltergeist case. In case you’re unaware, in the late 1970s, an Enfield family reported strange goings-on […]
London 31 October 2018 Years ago, back in the early 1990s, I had a friend (well, I say “had”– we’re still friends and he’s here tonight) with whom I shared a lot of common ground in terms of musical taste. He used to always be on at me to listen […]