Teenage rant (found it, wrote it a while ago)

A seamless transition from geekprat to geektennis prat in 14 days. The water diluted his soul, fuck all else. Filtered through six layers of volcanic rock to give deep hydration..read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre to fix that little spurious and entirely impossible feat..maybe if we rip out the intestines of Gillian Mckeith for a day and use that as a non-permeable water hose and feed that deep into the adverting thinktanks bodies at the same time they may gain think of something different to say about "water??" than the same old baseless outpourings that adverts of this type always say. Same with all these health promoting adverts, a yakult a day helps your body and protects..blah blah..no it doesn't, if you have the good bacteria, you just got it, having more doesn't make you healthier or unhealthier, it just allows your body to..well...do what its meant to and does pretty well without yakult..shit, you can drink a bottle of vodders a day for about a decade before your liver kicks it..dont listen, dont take it in. All adverts are a lie. And as for adverts aimed at women with the "added fruit extracts for improved split ends developed in our hair laboratory...oh fuck this, i could go on for hours..as Bill Hicks said, if you work in Marketing or Avertising, do us a favour and kill yourself, dont question it, suck a tailpipe and kill yourself, seriously..."and as for Kellogs making your kid 12 percent happier on a morning, what is this measure of happiness they use to gauge happiness to a precise degree of 12 percent" (sic) Ben Goldacre speaking on Screenwipe. Volvic Man, you can fuck off, and i dont think im being cheeky in asking for that.

Top 20 Albums

If you fancy a look, Soundshock have done the great feature comprising the best akbums of 2010 as voted by all the contributers, please take a moment to have a look

http://www.soundshock.com/index.php/breaking-the-waves/2672-soundshocks-top-20-albums-of-2010

Nails-Unsilent Death

Southern Lord

Someone’s been keeping a secret.

Deep from the depths of the internationally revered Godcity Studio, where Kurt Ballou of Converge fame, responsible for producing and engineering such prime works as the much lamented Beecher, has been helping craft a work of dripping spite. It’s not yet known how you hold the album, let alone endure the band’s renowned violent live performances.

Glancing at the credentials of this band, you’d expect it to follow the vein of the ‘verge or associated works and it does this, but it's a work that has one foot planted firmly in the past and one in an unknown future. Where most hardcore bands tend to take from and forget their roots, Nails have thrown up a memoriam to the past and shown that not everything about it should be forgotten. Enforced messages without browbeating ferocity. Staccato riffs without that atypical Hatebreed sound. Rhythm that holds you for a second, then kicks your face through. It’s not oft that a band can contain so many pointers to well trodden ground and produce something so fresh.

Unsilent Death as an album is an absolute fist. For a moment close your eyes, listen well and it eviscerates Nasum at their most inspiring. Stay safe at home and listen to Unsilent Death in safety…or get out and find Nails play live and enjoy catharsis in its purest, unadulterated form.

9/10
You’ll like this if Ed Gein are your chums and Hatebreed are too chummy.

Sam Rhodes

ATP

All Tomorrows Parties Festival ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’

Butlins: Minehead

Very rarely is a festival so aptly named. This stalwart gathering, always evolving, ever changing but justifiably clinging to its independent musical ethos has provided to be a nightmare in both sonic terror and abominable snowy weather.

For those unaware of ATP and its unassailable credentials, for the past decade it’s been the provider and benefactor of the most awe-inspiring and far reaching musical vision to spill forth from that most comforting moment-the inspired idea. Imagine for a moment, that you could call upon your most adored artist to headline a festival, then that artist has a convocation with like minded and admired artists and gets them to play said festival, until you harbour a veritable feast of aural ingredients. (Just to veer into the concise, it’s essentially akin to a DJ selecting songs for a set, but upon a grandiose scale)

This then is ATP…select a defining band, allow them to curate the line-up, warm gently over a completely independent event without sponsorship, finished off with the accoutrements of approachability and a total lack of pretence, no person having a precedence over another, to the point that bands cohabit with attendees in the chalet blocks (it’s held on a Butlins) so always say hello to your neighbours…It just may be Mastodon.
This year’s curators are Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a progressive orchestral rock band which to the cry of many, imploded many years ago. So for ATP to get them to reform was a coup d’état veering heavily to the epic!! You knew instantly this year’s rostra would be bursting with choice cuts.
Nobody was disappointed. Not a drop.
You wouldn’t be argued with if you thought previous to hearing the line-up announcement that the majority of sounds would be placed in the “post” (choose you genre here) camp, expectantly so when Godspeed were choosing the line-up, but in reality there’s always something for everyone from Shoegaze and Freeform Jazz, juxtaposed against Eastern Bloc Gypsy Brass bands, to your more traditional digital noise manipulators fighting it out against through and through dyed in the wool Black Metal.
The introductory night brought artists across a multitude of stages, several having to have their times rearranged due to bands caught short due to the frankly ridiculous weather conditions. This in turn brought an element of unwanted surprise. Arriving to watch a band to be greeted by a sign saying they had played three hours earlier can bring a diehard fan to tears or outright rage. Impromptu lies rife within ATP this year.
However, at the very least Godspeed and Neurosis were playing more than once, saving us the sight of grown humans weeping under a ‘cancelled set’ poster.
First up is Godspeed you! Black Emperor. An anticipatory silence falls over the crowd as they introduce the first notes played together on a stage for many years. These notes coagulate and clot, forming a pulsating wave of bass and drum, low at first, each member aware of each other, each member aware of the causation and effect they bring. This is the antithesis to the compression age, the reaction to the action of constant exacting attack. They suddenly spring out of the sound system, every sensory part of your body alert to the nuance delivered, then calm, the sails let down and you’re left to drift with them lulled into a lucid dreamlike state, only to again explode upon you and you are left shaking and breathless as strings and bows and coiled wire and stretched string unravel you and what you knew as musical dynamic and replace them with new peaks and troughs. Privy to only a few, looked over by many, those who stood for any one of their sets knew what it was to be alive once more.
Worthy of note on this night was the follow up Tim Hecker, moved forward two hours due to…It doesn’t warrant the word count. Fucking snow.
Tim Hecker’s set should be properly called ‘How to breed a feeling of melancholy in one hour.’ Tim is a world renowned sound artist, a true original sitting between Fennez and Pierre Schaeffer. His exploratory journey through sonic artefacts and the abstract notion of the sound between sounds has led him to receive accolades throughout the world. Dissonant sparks and cross faded bass rumble out of the P.A and such is the fine mastering of his music that every part of the perceivable (and I suspect the unperceivable, delving into what is known as infrasound, look it up) frequency range is delivered in abundance. There lies a contradiction within sound artists such as Hecker, in that they lurch their music forwards and build towards a crescendo, but as where a traditional band or artist would resolve the scale or crescendo, Hecker takes it away. This method wholly splits the audience. Some wanting that elusive reward, others content in the knowledge that in this film, the bad guy wins, you don’t find out who killed Cornel Mustard in the hall. Not being rewarded isn’t always gratifying, but it always makes you think.
Emboldened by the previous night’s gratifications and surprises, many go in search of a chance encounter, seeing bands they’ve never heard of, nor would ever encounter. However the word being uttered from everybody’s lips is Neurosis. The band is so influential I think it most likely that the brevity of coverage in mainstream media of metal and psychedelic music as a whole wouldn’t exist were it not for this timeless band. Most writers would go on to say how they are carved from aeon aged granite, woven with grief, delivered through cosmic power blah blah blah. They’re not, these superlatives always pop up in association with them, because there just seems a need to give them a sense that they are intangible that they cannot be of this world, such is their influence and epic scope. In actuality, they are very human and people forget just how vast the human condition is. However, they’re one of the rare bands that have managed to retain a sense of distance from their fans. See them live; you’ll shorten that distance without having to disturb your own harboured accolades.
Anyway, before that begins, we’ve a few treats centre stage. First off the bat is Bardo Pond, The Dead C and Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Each of these artists has one finger in each others pie. That being a blueberry and bastardization pie of the progressive genre. Each seamlessly binds their set to the next, these three being a truly inspired piece of music positioning and a joy to behold.
So, Neurosis time. It’s prudent to review both sets together, todays and tomorrows, to assess and briefly explore the differences between them. The sense of time in the room is excruciating, everybody straining for a view of what’s being wheeled on stage, everybody checking the time, everybody expecting…Neurosis must have this feeling with all their gigs. They must have feet this weight of expectation upon themselves a thousand times, but they visibly feed on it like a virus. The first sounds of sample and drum, guitar and vocal push the crowd back, an instantaneous reaction to the brute force being manoeuvred by the masters and there is no attempt to assuage the fury. Unrepentantly, they don’t even play to the crowd in terms of satisfying them with album openers etc, they go for the monoliths, the drawn out growls of songs. When the opening riff to Given to the Rising is exploded out, the crowd erupt into a swaying mob, all separate, all working as one. The ninety minutes pass by in an instant and there’s suddenly an empty hollow feeling that just perhaps life isn’t ever going to feel that real again. Solace is found in friends and bonds made anew over a shared experience and then you remember...it’s happening again tomorrow.
The second set is a much less attended affair, partly due to Weird Al Yankovic who is an absolute pearl of a booking, a parody of a parody, an opposition to all that claim on fame and is playing on the pavilion stage (The worst of the stages, placed under Butlins cavernous tent building, reverberation and standing waves can destroy a set here, as it did for the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s the previous year) and partly because of Clusters Krautrock excellence, but mainly because many people simply have partied too hard and are sleeping it off, or are leaving early to return to work the next day. This is a terrible shame. Although it wasn’t fully realised, though suspected, the sound engineer wasn’t up to his game on the previous night, though this night all lessons are learnt and the band are out to please the crowd. As Neurosis come to play Burn, the title track of ‘The Eye of Every Storm’, the place is still, moved but unable to move, as the moment comes when the song pulls back to deliver the growling prose of ‘This world of cold stone gives nothing in return to those who sleep whilst the restless burn’ there’s not a voice to be heard in the venue, a first for any gig? Every soul is intent on soaking up the message and the waves of emotion drawn from the fingers and mouths of these men when suddenly ‘the Neurosis moment’ comes from Steve von Till as he screams out ‘Don’t let it steal your’ and in that sonic conflagration, that auditory scream of voice and guitar becomes aflame and sets alight every single vehement voice in anger, every sorrow, all the moments that you’ve cared so deeply that it left an indelible impression upon your soul is fully realised...you feel so deeply that your heart hurts and your blood pumps so hard your chest feels like a storm and through this power, you know that nothing in this world can ever hurt you again.
It’s testament to ATP and Godspeeds excellent curating that they have managed to find a band that can follow Neurosis. They can’t beat it, but they can follow and help regain some sense of balance within. This band is Wolves in the Throne Room who are playing on this final evening. They’re a band whom seeing is a reverent one, reserved for those wanting a cathartic experience.
Wolves envelop the festival, blasting out dual guitars heavy with minor scale progressions, backed by a seamless drummer, absolutely finished with the piercing scream now expectant within the neo-black metal scene. Wolves have a deep mythology, seeking inspiration from their heavy environmental awareness and green attitude, living within the Appalachians Mountains, drawing upon the same elemental powers as their Norwegian predecessors did. It’s easy to see how Wolves came to be, when exploring their story. What’s unexpected is how soulful and joyous this music is. To the uninitiated, that is, somebody who has never listened to heavy music, they wouldn’t understand, nor would they have a care to. But were you to sit them down, explain the story, and show the inspiration, the link with nature and its reflection in the music, you just may produce a convert. Tonight, they made many.
ATP. It’s never failed. This year was the tenth year of its existence. Now, its puts on at least three unsponsored ‘tuborg'less’ festivals, a host of gigs across continents from bands you just don’t expect to see gigging very often and championing that which is so rare in music, the fact that there are only two types of music, good…and bad. Pigeonholing artists leads to arguments and admonishments.
As Steve Albini put so perfectly “There’s only three things I endorse, ATP Nutter Butter sandwich cookies and Abbey Road”

Sam Rhodes

ATP Review

Atp Review coming soon!!