• Mongol Horde – Mongol Horde

    Look, Frank Turner’s folk stuff is by and large really enjoyable. It’s nice, well meaning and at times quite poignant, but there does seem to be something missing. With so many songs about love, life and the road; a sojourn to the old fertile hardcore punk grounds which Turner left behind would not go amiss. A blast of 200 bpm noise to cleanse the pallet. With Mongol Horde, the big man seems to have given himself just that. Mongol Horde are a three piece made up of Mr. Turner on vocals, Sleeping Souls keyboardist Matt Nasir on baritone guitar and…

  • Cheatahs – Cheatahs

    Nostalgia is a curious thing. If you are to believe reddit, Buzzfeed and Facebook posts about the nineties, you’d be under the impression that the decade was a some kind of cultural utopia; a place where real artists ruled the airwaves, television was dominated by classic shows and everything was made of sunshine, rainbows and gleeful apathy. But, as is always the case, all isn’t what it seems. For example, if you are to believe the teachings of Bill Hicks as laid out on Arizona Bay and Rant In E Minor, it’s hard to ascertain why anyone would even vaguely…

  • Gardens & Villa – Dunes

    When surrounded by the cold on all sides, it’s important to find appropriate mood music; something to either blast away the cold with promises of Summer just on the horizon or to revel in the abject misery and desolation of the whole season. With Dunes, recorded in the near arctic US Midwest, California-based Gardens and Villa are trying to explore the season. Whether or not they’re successful is a very different story. Dunes operates on two primary settings: new wave/post punk- inflected electro boogies and slower tempo melancholic nuggets of ethereal emotion. Throughout the whole record the influences are apparent.…

  • Planningtorock – All Love’s Legal

    All Love’s Legal is the latest release from the Berlin-based Planningtorock, her first since 2011’s W. Owing as much to the likes of Burial and Brian Eno as her label mates from DFA, All Love’s Legal is a musically fascinating album. It’s a great example of late night music; the party has died down, but you don’t want to night to end just yet. Voices are heavily distorted and unearthly, the beats are distant and everything just seems to be filtered through the haze of intense lights, strong booze and cheap drugs. We are giddily lost within the post-club confusion.…

  • Pixies – EP-2

    Where were you the first time you heard The Pixies? I remember. I was fourteen years old, in the school hall talking about music with a friend of mine. He gave me his generic MP3 device to hear this strange and wonderful thing he’d just discovered. It was Debaser. There are very few things that can conjure the feeling that came over me when I first heard Kim Deal hammer those F notes into submission. For a brief moment, I seemed to have found everything I was looking for. First love is a thing of wonder. It’s been nearly a…

  • The Counselor

    Ridley Scott is not a great director. In the past the man has made great films such as Blade Runner and Alien, which represent some of the strongest efforts Sci-Fi has to offer. But having made eleven films in twelve years, the majority of which toe the line between mediocre and awful, Scott’s lack of  consistency showcases how fundamentally he is not a great director. But he can be. When given the right script, Scott can allow well formed story to transcend itself and become something  much more than the sum of its parts. When the news that Scott’s new…

  • Gravity

    It’s been over six years since Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children Of Men and Y Tu Mamá Tambien, stepped behind the camera and this is truly a shame for contemporary. The man is inarguably one of the great visual filmmakers working today. His long, handheld shots with their ambition and scope genuinely inspire awe; this is a man who managed to take us through a concentration camp with gunfights, explosions and stairs without cutting. Cuarón’s friend, collaborator and equal, Guillermo Del Toro, observed a similar albeit shorter absence. Both came back in 2013. Del Toro’s Pacific Rim was a solid,…

  • Future of the Left – How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident

    I think it’s fair to say that every now and then a person like Future of the Left frontman Andy Falkous is needed. He’s a man whose piss and vinegar vitriolic diatribes would fit comfortably with the George Carlins, Lenny Bruces, Charlie Brookers and Bill Hickses of the world. These are people who can stare into the unending abyss that we know as culture, see the gunk that halts the gears of progression and report back to us with details of the horrors from the underbelly that are steadily herding us toward the trappings of insanity, idiocy and incompetence. Plus…

  • Horror songs: The Intense Humming Of Evil

    There is no denying that the Manic Street Preachers’ third album, The Holy Bible, is a distressing listen. The album represents some of the final days of Richey James Edwards and gives us an insight into a mind that is as unsettling as it is compelling. Edwards penned songs about self-destruction, societal breakdown and the holocaust with a level of poeticism seldom seen in rock music. This poeticism gives way to terror on more than one occasion and is best typified with the gut-curdling holocaust themed ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’. We begin with the sound of clanging metal and gaseous release. We begin…

  • Interview: John Carpenter

    As movie directors go they don’t get more legendary than the pioneering, inimitable and boundlessly influential John Carpenter. From his 1978 landmark horror debut Halloween to innumerable other cult classics including Escape from New York, Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing, Starman, Big Trouble In Little China and They Live, his ever-increasingly legacy as one of the most important directors in the history of cinema is beyond refute. With Samhain lingering just around the corner, Will Murphy grab a few words with the man himself, touching on comics, composition and Kickstarter campaigns. Firstly, I’d like to ask about new…