The new album is a little patchy I have to admit and it's generally a small fault of the band that they have never made one truly oustanding album with filler on all albums. YUATSTM is probably the most cohesive album. Lights is very good though.

If members would like starter compilations for any artists I put up in here then holler back and I will gladly oblige.

Yes I would, Archive or John Martyn would both be very nice to have.

This :)

I just started listening to Iron Maiden, which will probably surprise many of you here :D. They were one of the many names I heard being thrown around by so many around me to the point where it made me not want to listen to the band. The same thing has happened so far with bands such as Metallica, Slayer, The Beatles, Red Hot chilli Peppers, and many more. Of course I've heard a song or two by those bands before, as with Iron Maiden, but I never gave them a chance. I will get around to all of them at some time. I guess I'm kind of going in reverse in terms of discovering new music. I started listening passionately with a handful of really obscure bands and now I'm working from expanding myself to all forms of music.

One of the biggest things I really loved about Iron Maiden when I first listened is the bassiest, it just brought a certain energy to it that I loved, that you just never hear in other metal music that puts so much emphasis on the guitar.

Steve Harris' bass technique is certainly distinguised. I'm not really sure what word to use to describe it but i'm not really surprised that you would notice it. The bass can often be the overlooked instrument in metal bands and a lot of bands write bass lines that simply mirror the lead guitar and so get lost in the mix. Steve Harris' bass sound is the backbone to Maidens music in many ways.

I really love the Powerslave album, the last 2 tracks on the album alone make it one of my favourites. Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and the title track are just epic beyond belief. My favourite album is Piece Of Mind, apart from Quest For Fire (which i admit is terrible) every track is mind blowing.

I do admit that Maiden are as cheesy as hell, but they do cheesy metal 1000 times better than everyone else.

I much prefer Piece Of Mind to number Of The beast myself and you are right in that's it a damn solid album. One of the most underated of Maiden's tracks from Piece Of Mind:


Compilations coming soon for the first 3 entries.

Piece Of Mind has always been my favourite Dickinson era album.

I love the guitar sound on that album, it's a bit crunchier & dirtier than Maiden usually do, and yet on the other hand it sounds a much more complex album than anything they'd done before. I think both those qualities make it their most unique sounding album.

I agree. Powerslave is a good album but the live versions on live after death far outshine it I think. TNOTB is the breakthrough album but there is filler. On POM they really got heavy I think whereas Powerslave' is a little too polished for me, although the album cover is still one of my faves.

As for the guitar sound you mentioned I think that the final track is a great example of this. Love that riff.


Still the quintessential Metal band and still faithful to their roots.

Grindcore is a genre of music that I grew up with and was directly involved with, knowing a few musicians from the bands that came out of the predominantly Birmingham U.K based scene but within a few short short years it almost became a parody of itself so the scene shifted focus to both South and North America. A few bands such as Brutal Truth and Agoraphobic Nosebleed have carried the torch well and remain faithful enough to the original scene whilst adding elements (Samples etc) that keep them interesting.

In the early 00's however; A 3 piece band called Pig Destroyer arrived with a ridiculously brutal sound that completely wowed me with their intensity and power-all without a bassist! A band that didn't fall into the cliche of distorting guturall vocals with terrible production and muddy non distinct riffs. Instead they have brought us a polished sound that still keeps within the Grindcore ethos whilst simultaneously having genuine song structures and lyrics that don't always fall into the cliched medical terminology adopted by many bands in the wake of the groundbreaking and influential UK band Carcass.

Adding a fourth member to provide samples (that don't impinge on the fercocity of the music) has given the band a fearsome live reputation and a band I would definitely love to see live.

If the mere word 'Grindcore' sets off allsort's of warning in your heads then it won't be your thing but if you like your music heavy and hard and want to hear some genuine brutality with actual structure then get your head around these fellas.

Try:
Prowler In The Yard
Terrifyer
Phantom Limb

Great write-up as always. Also, what happened to those mixtapes you promised?

I will be offline for a couple of days this week so I will compile them in that time and have them ready over the weekend. Promise!

i love loathsome but man that video blows

Anybody want to send me some PMs for John Martyn and Archive? Had no trouble finding a few Pig Destroyer albums, but I can't find a decent place to download Martyn or Archive. Great posts, Jackhammer, I'm going to continue to keep an eye on this and the rest of your threads.

Such a cliched choice I know but I will never dismiss the importance of this band on my musical education. I usually cite Floyd as my favourite band but in all honestly I don't listen to them as much as I used to and this is where the power of liking Floyd is both a help and a hindrance.

I was 17 and started my first full time job having moved towns due to my parents splitting which meant I had to abandon my first serious girlfriend, my college course and my P/T job I had had since the age of 14. However in terms of music is was fortuitous. As a noob to FT work in general and being in a new town, it's only natural to try and ingratiate yourself with new people and I became friends with a slightly older guy who had a fleeting but deep effect on my musical outlook. He liked a lot of Rock music but was never into the Thrash/heavy stuff I was listening to at the time and he loaned me his gatefold copy of Meddle (the days when vinyl was on it's last legs unfortunately). I took it home the same night, played it and admitted to being nonplussed. What were all those weird sounds on Echoes? (the whale calls etc) How the hell is this music? It completely went over my head. He told me to turn out the lights, lay down and play it again. This I did and it clicked immediately. I realised that music wasn't just there to satisfy you in a particular brief moment. It could be more than that. It could transport you somewhere else and become more than just a bunch of notes. Even though I couldn't fully grasp everything about that album I wanted to gorge myself on this music. A few days later Animals was thrust upon me. Music has never been quite the same since. It was heavy, abrasive but rich, layered and laced with genuine emotion that Metal couldn't quite satisfy at this time of upheaval. Sure Metal gave me scope to vent my obvious anger at this turbulent time of my life but the Floyd gave it a grounding in reality. A gravitas that I had rarely heard before. Maybe it was the melancholia that runs through their music that I attached myself too. Whatever it was at that time I was hooked.

This is where Floyd's music enters it's own special place in the musical scheme of things. Their greatest strength is the fact that it is not too outlandish to become ostracised from what they were trying to achieve but it was sufficiently off beat for you to begin to explore new music that may not have appealed to you before.

Listening to the Floyd 1970 onwards it's obvious that their music is a lot more safer than their name and history suggests but they are probably the ultimate 'gateway' band to a broader range of music. They were musicially superior to many other bands but never to the detriment of the music. You learnt about individual instruments, layered composition and production values from the Floyd that lead you to discover a whole new world of music and I think that still rings true today. Despite their many faults, there are very few people who completely dislike Floyd in one form or another and that is one of their major strengths. They are an education onto themselves and although I have since heard many more groundbreaking artists I think that I could never have discovered them if it wasn't for the band.

It still boils down to a simple thing for me. Despite my love for many genres of music I would give all that up right now so long as I could keep my copy of Animals. It always has and always will be everything I want in music.

Recommended albums:
Animals
Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Meddle

Recommended DVD'S:
Live At Pompeii.

Recommended Reading:
Inside Out: A history of Pink Floyd by Nick Mason.

From live at Pompeii:

Man i like this, tales of fortitude and holy music from the archives of the big L. I will read on and dissect the Floyd, mark me words.

I have never listened to Pig Destroyer before, but I really liked that song. Could I get some of this by any chance?

That is an excellent piece of writing sir. It's always great to read about how and why people got into certain artists. As you said, most people like Pink Floyd in one way or another. I've always had a passing interest but will definitely check out your recommended albums more thoroughly. Thanks for sharing!

Piper may not be to everyone's tastes so maybe checkout Obscured by Clouds and see what you think!

As promised here is a comp and this one is for Archive. I won't do one for Pink Floyd or Iron Maiden as I think most people have probably got a vague idea of what they are about.

Archive. If you like the ambient side of Radiohead then you may get into them. I have simply chose one track per album and not included anything of theirs over 10 minutes of which there is a good few tracks. Expect tracks that begin slowly but hook you in. Many of their best tracks I have also omitted as it's better to start from the ground up!

Were your Pig Destroyer recommendations in order? Because i only have Phantom Limb but it's pretty good.

On the subject of grindcore, have you heard this album?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5rL2H5HdXa...albumcover.jpg

It will more than likely be right down your street, but it's only been out a week or two. It's early Peel sessions from Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Heresy and a couple more bands i forget off the top of my head. I'll be hunting down a download in the next few days probably.

I have the Carcass Peel sessions and the ENT Peel session I had on vinyl for years but the overall package looks stellar to me. As for Pig Destroyer, there was no order really. Phantom Limb is definitely my favourite.

Any thoughts on the Archive compilation people?

I tried to download it a while back, but I'm a free user on MegaUpload, so it blocked my attempt.

/100% genuine excuse

I'm gonna give it another go now. I'll let you know what I think of it tomorrow probably.

EDIT: It's just done it again. Fuck's sake. I'll try again a little later.

I haven't downloaded the comp just because I have some of their albums already. But your review did push me to finally listen to them, and I got to say I really like them.

I've been through "Take my head" and "You all look the same to me" for now. The improvement is really obvious. I liked two tracks of "Take my Head", one of them is in the compilation. The other is "You make me feel" which is not as good as the title track.

About the other album, I loved almost every track in it. "Again" is truly epic, other really good tracks are "Finding it so Hard" and "Fool" (which is also on the comp). I think one of the setbacks would be "Now and Then", which really shows the lack of lyric originality their somehow corniness. Fortunately, that track is only 1:25, in contrast to their epic tracks of 15 minutes.

I still have many Archive albums to listen to.
Anyway, thanks for the review, very helpful.

Again is truly sublime and quite frankly a masterpiece in my eyes. Noise is an album that needs to be checked out for sure.

1998. I was already a father to my eldest son (1994) and about to become a father again (October 1998) and although I still loved music I wasn't really following what was going on due to parenthood and I was in a stasis. Music had taken a backseat and I was stuck in a rut. In this year I started a new career as a chef and was introduced to so much new music that my passion was reignited.

I hated Dance music with a passion and dismissed it as emotionally empty with the emphasis on commercial success and little effort regarding composition and songwriting. Then the album Mezzanine was thrust upon me. I was immediately blown away. I didn't need to be convinced of it's merits. I understood straight away that this was something special. I liked Electronic music but only regarding Ambient music (Tangerine Dream had been a fave for years) so when I heard Mezzanine my attitude towards Electronic music did a complete U turn. Here was an album with structure, emotion, power, melancholy, heaviness and repeated listenability.

The bassline of Angel kicks in insidiously before exploding into raw power and energy. The track Angel then begins with it's dark forbidding bassline juxtaposed with a simple elegant Guitar line and beautiful, mournful vocals. I was blown away and had to hear more. Finding that they had only 2 albums prior and both markedly different from each other was surprising but no less rewarding. The band's seminal Blue Lines (1991) was and still is a marker for sampling songs and creating a whole new sound whilst 1994's Protection already saw the band stretching their sound with guest vocalists and the inclusion of Dub, Reggae and unusual beats whilst still remaining highly original.

Listening to the band then made me delve into the more serious side of Electronic music and I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity and craft of artists that were as off mainstream as some of the music I knew and loved.

Since then I have developed a huge love of Trip Hop and indeed a hunger to hear as much Electronic music as I could which means that I enjoy DrumNBass, Glitch, Dubstep and many other sub genres due to this band.

Mezzanine is now quite rightly seen as a masterpiece and I feel fortunate enough to have been there when it blew away many pre concieved notions of the limitations of Electronic/ Dance music.

I cannot stress enough to you that if this sort of music isn't your thing then you are missing out on some truly superb music.

Have some vids:

Possibly the finest Dance track ever put down:

The absolutely gorgeous Protection with vocals by Tracy Thorn (EBTG):

Still one of the most intense songs I have ever heard:


EDIT: Vids sorted!

Funnily enough, Massive Attack were basically my gateway into electronic dance as well, or at least they were my first brush with the whole concept of it (it normally takes me at least a couple of albums to get me into in a new area of music). It wasn't Mezzanine, but rather picking up a copy of Blue Lines second hand while I was skipping some class in college one day that gave me the push I needed.

Anyway, very good post sir! Thanks for reminding me to get hold or Protection as well. I take it your not a 100th Window fan? If not, I can hardly blame you!

I find it fascinating that an electronic album that got you & bulldog, and some other into electronica, was one I hadn't heard up until a few months ago, anyways excellently reviewed Jackhammer, it was a good/interesting read :thumb:.

100th Window has become something of a grower for me and it deserves reappraising. Thanks for the comments peeps.

My story is similar. I was in a kind of musical limbo when I first heard Blue Lines back in 1991. I had spent decade and half broadcasting and dee jaying reggae music but the roots reggae scene was dying in Jamaica.

Things got even worse in the late 80s. Most of my cherished punk and post punk bands like the Clash, Gang of Four, Essential Logic, and the Slits were over and done with. The Mekons and the Fall struggled along selling almost no records. The New York and Boston scene was dead with all of the great bands like Mission of Burma, the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the New York Dolls all dead and gone. All of the great Mississippi delta and Chicago blues singers were dead. And Elvis Costello, the one musician who made consistent albums throughout the 80s was producing a string of baffling and incoherent albums like Spike and Mighty Like A Rose and the Juliet Letters.

Massive Attack changed everything for me and got me interested in popular music again. Blue Lines was a pastiche of nearly every kind of music I liked including pop music, reggae, dub, hip hop, dee jay style, soul, punk and experimental music. Massive Attack music was innovative, visionary and unprecendented. Massive Attack was ground zero of the current post-rock electronica movement and the most important band of the 90s.

Ivo Watts-Russell's recording group This Mortal Coil was doing a similar thing in the 80s but his approach was a narrower gothic, dream pop form of electronica. Massive Attack was important because they managed to fuse all of those diverse currents to create a new musical beast . They opened my eyes to a new world of musical possibilities by smashing all of the categories and genres and building a whole new kind of musical form.

I really like This Mortal Coil which was indicative of the 4AD sound over here which offered a pleasant alternative Pop sound to the mainstream but as you state, it certainly didn't encompass a huge array of genres and it took bands like MA to diversify further whilst still having a Pop aesthetic.

Mezzanine seems to be an album that has directed many of us who were unsure into electronic/ dance music. Because I had the exact same attitude as you before I had heard this album - dismissed any kind of electronic or dance music as empty and talentless. It wasn't until I came on MB and heard the worship this album had before I even considered it. But it made my views on what great music is do a complete U-turn as well. Fantastic album, definitely a masterpiece and one of my favourites of all time. Great post!

Gothic music is unfortunately a genre of music that is ripe for criticism. The monotone vocals, melancholic lyrics and unfashionable riffs. However FOTN stood out from the crowd from the beginning. Their first full length release Dawnrazor featured photography from Richard Stanley (film director- Hardware, Dust Devil etc) which capitalised on the bands spaghetti western look with dry ice and dirt encrusted weatherbeaten leathers that gave the band an almost farcical look which detracted from the music.

Despite the monotone vocals of Carl McCoy, the band played an epic blend of Post Punk minimalism coupled with a Pink Floyd like atmosphere that still sounds unique to this day and it's hard to truly compare them to any band. You had the superlative complicated rhythms of drummer Nod Wright coupled with a two guitar attack with heavier riffs under pinned by a constant, languid guitar lick that gave their music a dynamic sound that was rarely heard in the scene at that time.

The major problem with FOTN is mainman Carl McCoy's propensity for shrouding the band in mystery and imbuing lyrics with mysticism and nods to ancient forgotten religion. This caused the band to split up in 1991 with only 3 full length albums to their name.

So why are they important to me? Bridging the gap between anger, heaviness and melancholia, their sound was rich in atmosphere and menace yet laced with tenderness at times it fitted my frame of mind at the time.

FOTN have since gone on to become one of the U.K's most talked about and cherished cult bands who count Metallica and many Black Metal bands as a huge inspiration.

A band out of sync even in the late 80's they however earn a place in fans hearts and still have a sound that they can wholly call their own.

I really like everything about the song, the vocals are a little bit of a turn off for me, but nothing that would stray me away from listening to the band.
The first song is the one I listened to, I like when a band can play at a quick tempo but still have a chill feel to the song.
It's not too much to handle at one time.
Good review. [=

It's been a while and I actually enjoyed reading my own thread so let's continue.


Along with the previously mentioned Massive Attack in this journal, Underworld are another band that really opened my eyes to the extensive world of Electronic music and the fact that it CAN be timeless, full of invention, mood, atmosphere and quality songwriting technique.

Underworld really grabbed peoples attention in the 90's with the perennial (but overplayed) Born Slippy track that was released as a by product of the film Trainspotting. What is odd about this, is that the Trainspotting director Danny Boyle used their first album (classed as Underworld Mark 1 and the true beginning of the band according to them) dubnobasswithmyheadman as the film set soundtrack of choice which didn't include Born Slippy.

I originally first heard their second release (Second Toughest In The Infants) whilst working as a chef and clocking off late into the early hours playing chess and getting drunk (a lethal combo, the games would last for 3 hours + sometimes). It was one of those albums that you didn't notice immediately but you never found it distracting either. After a while the album seemed to burn into your brain and it was imperative that the album HAD to be played whilst challenging those members of staff who had enough staying power to drink to the early hours and still make it to work after 4 hours of sleep.

What emerged was a band that was heavily influenced by Electronic Krautrock, Prog Rock's more ambient moments and the present day Dance/Techno sound. A combination that defied the usual sound of the day (this was mid 90's) for 3 minute pop influenced dance tunes and instead opened albums with 7/8 minute plus layered tracks with a dance mentality and a progressive sensibility. The first two track on Second Toughest are both over 15 minutes long and whilst they both adhere to the sounds of the day (techno beats and heavy bass), they also swirled and swished through many tempo changes, instruments and vocal stylings that neither helped their commercial aspirations (if any) or bedded them to any particular fanbase.

Underworld are still making music 20 years on and whilst they are not on the cutting edge of music, they still are one of the very few electronic/dance bands still popular due to actually having lyrics and a vocalist and a sound that covers many bases but touches on few.

If Prog fans could get their head around beat based electronic music then they would be falling all over themselves for this band and if Dance fans delved beyond a certain BPM mentality they would hear music that would stretch them whilst still retaining aspects that they like.

Underworld remain one of my favourite bands of the last 20 years because they appeal to me on so many levels and those levels are hard to describe other than this is a band that makes music for themselves but are still not so oblique for the rest of us not to enjoy it.

Probably their most commercial track (but not successful- they don't really do singles):

Always loved "Born Slippy" but I have to confess my knowledge of these guys extends no further than the Trainspotting soundtrack. I'd love to hear more though. :)

Singer songwriters are a an acquired taste. Far too many bland broken hearted troubadours or far too many preachers out there. Far too many sad, lonely figures plinking away lamenting past failures who induce nausea instead of a sad sort of pity but what about the guy who sits there and says 'fuck it'?

I am a little older and wiser, made some mistakes, rued some missed opportunities but that's life. This is the sort of person I want to listen to. Tender enough to appeal to your melancholic need but not so wrapped up in spouting bleeding heart sentiment to make you vomit.

Fink has loved and lost, got drunk and messed up, said things he shouldn't have but rarely has seemed to regret any of it. It's life. It's growing older and all that comes with it.

The past is set. You can't change it. The present? Well I am trying to figure that out. The future? I have no control so why worry about it.

I don't want an artist to become a national favourite because he has a certain world view of the future and neither do I want an artist to constantly spout 'What if?'

Fink started out as a DJ/Trip Hop Artist in Bristol U.K (where else?) and began to write his own material for the Ninja Tune label (one of the U.K's rare independent success's in the last few years). He ended up going to Ninja Tune declaring that he had found a new artist and asked them to listen knowing that HE was the artist but worried that they would dissuade him from his DJ path so he recorded this in secret.

Ninja Tune were interested so he had to confess but such was the strength of his material that they forgave him.

Fink has become a 3 piece with the bass player and drummer playing an integral part of a sound that is at it's core one man and his guitar but incorporates a little Jazz and Blues along the way but that is really inconsequential in the grand scheme of Fink.

He is the archetypal man with a guitar sat on a stool but he is far better than that. Not technically or even emotionally. He is 100% himself. No need to create a hook to make lots of money and no need to create a perfect lyric to ingratiate himself into the mainstream.

His lyrics blow that apart. Referring to pubs frequented, beer drank, bar manager names and he is no better than me or no worse than me. He is an artist who just tells it like it is. Warts and all.

Ah such a conflicting band for many people. Are they a band that just chuck out huge beats to keep the party going and are musically stagnant or are they a band that have an amazing knack of making music that they themselves would like to listen to whilst still not adhering to the mainstreams insistence of friendly hooks and wholesome band image?

The truth is probably somewhere in between but what is almost certainly not in dispute is their live prowess.

The Prodigy work in the studio and play in the live arena and they play hard. Despite the numerous band's I have seen The Prodigy are a huge gap on that particular C.V because of their fearsome live reputation. Very few bands can straddle the genre between electronic and rock music and emerge as victors with fans on both sides whilst still having integrity.

Is it the fact that they are all the same age as myself and we are all in this to recapture the energy of youth or are we still sticking two fingers up to the doubters and enjoying ourselves and still remaining true to our roots? I fecking hope it's the latter I really do.

I adore intimate music, melancholic music, generically varied music but I generally want to see this live in a club or small theater. When I go to a festival I want to jump around like a kid but still respect the band onstage to not manipulate me with contrived sing alongs or putting a lighter in the air scenario. I want a band to kick me in the head and enjoy themselves as much as I am.

The Prodigy in the studio have made some outstanding music and have made albums that have stood the test of time in an age where technology is outdated constantly but they are also one of the finest live bands in the world and that is the ultimate barometer for me. If you can't do it live then I have been duped and I can see through it easily.

I would dearly like to play drums live for The Prodigy because I like to imagine stupid crap that I cannot do but also because even one gig would be the best party for me.

This is from their first live album and although the actual footage is not represented, the track is. Thunder (despite the YT vid saying otherwise) is a ferocious enough beast on the Invaders Must Die album with it's rat-a-tat bass line so when I first popped the new DVD in and whacked up the surround sound I was even more blown away with the fact that they chose someone's remix of the song to become the live version. When you expect one outcome and get another that is equally as good then I cannot help but sit back and smile:


and here is the track in it's original form:


I don't always want to be amazed or educated, I just want to have some fun, get drunk and dance my ass off. Wish I was there: