ALABAMA SHAKES – American Dream: TRACK OF THE MONTH

Posted on by
Reply

Not many tunes in this Rewind, just because nothing will get written and finished – again – so we have no actual words on cool new sounds like the noisy new mclusky EP or Dublin noisy bastards Bucket or Massive Attack with Tom Waits – but then again, Boots on the Ground is too intense to put words to anyway, like Terrace Martin’s Pig Feet. Sobering stuff, mandatory viewing. The shock of the news.

OK, before we get to Alabama, we’ve got another big A to check. Attack of the killer As? YES. You know who.

ANTHRAX – It’s for the Kids

Anthrax are BACK, on fire at speed. It’s for the Kids is a pristine crack of thrash whiplash which shows they can still cut very sharp (how does Charlie Benante do it? Phenomenal). Nothing radical innovation-wise here obviously, just all your old fave ‘thrax bits (chugs and speeds, hooks and leads) tastefully done in exactly the right ways at exactly the right times with a shit-ton of energy. Pure old-school joy. There’s even an Indians-themed wardance breakdown, FFS. Thrashers’ delight.

But it’s the Madhouse-homage video that triggers a full-on blur of old and new and it’s a sweet touch. If you saw the Madhouse clip over and over and over, as a kid 40 years ago, It’s for the Kids is the best triggering experience of your week, guaranteed. All those deep memories you never knew you had – drools, straightjackets, grins, gurns, pliers, hi tops, headbanging freeze frames – come bubbling up immediately, so much that you have to check the Madhouse original. A good-times double whammy. And Joey Belladonna still seems to appear from nowhere at the start.

ALABAMA SHAKES – American Dream

Allow us a Led Zeppelin divergence, just for a minute. Just for the slow blues.

Since I’ve Been Loving You tends to be cited as a Led Zeppelin blues meisterwork – and maybe it is, if you’re a blues-er. If you’re not then Loving You’s histrionic take on trad-blues can be a bit much, perhaps made more palatable by context (side one, Led Zeppelin III) or live status (The Song Remains the Same).

But Tea for One has always been the Zep blues benchmark for me. Tea for One kills: a near 10-minute downer that chokes time and slows it right the fuck down, not just because of the tempo-dragging triple-time but because that’s what the song is about – time. Stretched over one of John Bonham’s tastiest drum performances, Tea for One tackles a human condition and its desperate frustration could only ever find a home on the darkly intense Presence. It’s not Led Zeppelin playing the blues, it’s Led Zeppelin feeling despair. And the music is at one with that. There is no flash.

American Dream by Alabama Shakes has the same, deliberate, time-warping power. Stripped down, sparse and very much not afraid to use space/ambience as a lead instrument, its downbeat lack of pace mesmerises. But instead of a blues-ish backdrop, we get psyche-soul and gospel power. For any non-Alabama Shakes devotees – like me, familiar only with past singles – this track is a heavy duty revelation, dripping with Curtis Harding funk, Algiers fire and masterful restraint. When the band drops out to leave a seductive drum shuffle, it snaps your attention. You can feel the echoes of instruments stopped. There is presence

which is kinda where we came in. Stunning. Check American Dream right here.

And that’s it for this month.

’til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

CONVERGE – We Were Never the Same: TRACK OF THE MONTH

Posted on by
Reply

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, CONVERGE AND WHITE DENIM ARE BACK – BUT SAVAGES ARE NOT, EXCEPT FOR PARANOID

How are we supposed to find and listen to new bands when all these old bands insist on cranking out the heavy goods without losing a step?

Next month we’ve got The Melvins with Napalm Death collaboration Savage Imperial Death March – and if anyone typifies ‘not losing a step’ after decades of pioneering brutality and out-there intensity, it’s these two. Cannot wait to hear it (self-imposed embargo until the CD lands).

And check the timing – another April release by The Melvins, as is their recent wont.

So, we’re celebrating vital new sounds by the old guard, starting with Massachusetts noiselords Converge.

CONVERGE – We Were Never the Same

It’s a given that Converge will slash and jab with jagged riffs and meters while Jacob Bannon’s vocal abrasions sandpaper your skin, it’s all part of the Converge deal. But one of things that really flies on this track and shifts it from neck snapper to full body-and-head banger is Ben Koller’s piledriver groove behind the chorus. His beats are exceptional anyway, no surprise there, but that particular flash is absolute killer – holding down the chaos just enough, like the very end of QOTSA’s Song for the Dead where you lose your shit to the locked-in fury. We Were Never the Same – mature, lived-in ferocity at its best.

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY – Gimme Some Moore

Speaking of lived-in, who saw new Corrosion of Conformity material coming our way this year? In The Arms of God drummer Stanton Moore is back for the band’s first album since Reed Mullin passed away in 2020 and lead single Gimme Some Moore is on the high-energy side of CoC’s rep. A choppy, prog-bass riff kicks it off before switching to a straight-ahead punk thrasher’s tempo – subtle it is not, andrenalised stomper it is, and Pepper Keenan is on aggressive vocal form. Great to have them back, let’s just hope that the new album is varied enough to showcase the mid and down tempo stuff they nail best.

WHITE DENIM – (God Created) Lock and Key

Must admit, I’ve not been tuned into White Denim’s albums since D – didn’t they veer down a Lite Denim path? – but if the muso-psyche fires of Fits and Workout Holiday was what first turned you on then the thicker, saltier riffs and semi-voodoo slither of (God Created) Lock and Key will definitely pique a re-interest. James Petralli rubs grit into his vocals and there’s a distant Beefheart vibe (the looping lilt of Her Eyes Were a Blue Million Miles) underpinning the heavier, swampier groove. Great video too.

SAVAGES – Paranoid

To mark the 10-year anniversary of Adore Life, Savages shared their version of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which they recorded in the Adore Life sessions.

It fckn smokes. Slow reworkings of Paranoid are often way more compelling than the OG Sabbath arrangement and this gothic, piano-led haunt is no exception. Every player brings it but special mention goes to Gemma Thompson whose howling, moaning guitar conjures the inner turmoil you’d associate with paranoid the state, not the original song … Savages, what a band. Video here.

And for more Sabbath covers and left field interpretations, check the Freakzone Sabbath Special.

’til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

JIM GHEDI LIVE @ OPEN HOUSE, HATHERSAGE

Posted on by
Reply

NEW SHEFFIELD FOLK DESCENDS ON HATHERSAGE, 17/1/2026

“Tonight we’re going to transcend Hathersage,” says Jim Ghedi, “and unleash a vortex of hell.”

Bloke in row 2: “That’s not was I hoping for.”

“Well, there’s no refunds. So strap in.”

LAUGHS. Right? Of course, there is no hellish vortex because this is too friendly a setting but Wasteland, the 2025 album by Sheffield’s Jim Ghedi released on the Basin Rock label, could easily explode into sprawling, riotous dissonance with the wrong (right?) band behind it. This is robust, heavy folk. Which probably explains why my introduction to it was The Metal Show on Bandcamp Radio when Brad Sanders played Sheaf & Feld (first impressions right here, after the Pigsx7 live wordage).

So, the vortex is for another day. Tonight we have Ghedi on voice, electric/acoustic guitars and keyboard drone and Owen Spafford on fiddle in Open House, a new 50-capacity grass roots music space.

It’s a spellbinding hour and a half. Much of the set is pulled from Wasteland and none of the studio versions’ power is lost in live, stripped down translation. Old Stones, Wasteland, Newtondale/Blue John, Hester, The Seasons and Wishing Well all get played, as does Ah Cud Hew and others that I have no clue about – no doubt they’ll show up on a trawl through Ghedi’s back catalogue. Here though, with the fiddle up front all the way, we get hints of The Proposition soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: rustic, bleak, intense.

But the songs Ghedi writes and interprets are very much rooted in regional and the socio-political working class lives, intensified by a vocal delivery that belongs to the Old Ways of folk. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just that the way he twists the pronunciation and shapes the words suggest a delivery that belongs to a different time or place or both – it’s an accent, but who knows from where or when. I’m not versed in folk tapestries, just a new fan digging the whole thing and already reaching back to Electric Eden to supplement Ghedi’s song stories and histories. In his hands, the old tunes sound very now while the new songs feel familiar already, like they all exist on the same timeline … but not quite ours. The cover artwork of Wasteland does a similar job of subverting the familiar. It’s spectral, both of person and of landscape.

Trafford Road Ballad was written by Ewan MacColl in the middle of last century. It’s the last song on Wasteland and is as devastating an anti-war lyric as you’ll ever hear. It stops you dead – because nothing has changed. War-maker pricks still run the joint.

This track closes the set. Transcendence complete. NO VORTEX.

links:
Basin Rock record label
Jim Ghedi on Bandcamp
Brad Sanders and The Metal Show on Bandcamp Radio

CHARLIE XCX with JOHN CALE – House: TRACK OF THE MONTH

Posted on by
Reply

WUTHERING HEIGHTS SUMMONS WINTER STORM

It’s the year’s last gasp for new sounds so we’ve got a small but suitably wintry batch to cram in before 2025 disappears. And, as we well know, nothing says deep winter darkness like … Charlie XCX?

Damn right. Let’s get straight to it. Links to tracks are all at the end.

CHARLIE XCX and JOHN CALE – House

Some songs land out of nowhere and own your essence so squarely that you don’t play them too often. You don’t need to – a single listen goes a long way and the intentional underplay prolongs the fresh mystery that slammed you the first time. There’s no rush. It’s all there, waiting. Special.

House is such a track. Being caught out by a Charlie XCX and John Cale collaboration – the day after a chance hearing of Velvet Underground’s European Son (to Delmore Schwartz) unknowingly primed my Cale antennae – is one thing. But the song itself, a charged descent into blizzard hex, is another. Cale narrates with vulnerable yet commanding authority:

“Can I speak to you privately for a moment?
I just want to explain
explain the circumstances I find myself in.”

Doom-heavy cello surges and retreats. Violin slashes squeak and edge your nerves. It’s ominously bleak and supernaturally intense, like the Pennine winter itself. For the first two thirds, it’s Cale solo. When Charlie XCX enters the fray, House implodes in a swollen storm of beats and pained distortion

and then it drops, as suddenly as it rose. Pure dark magic.

[for more spoken word and heavy string, check The Dictator by Catherine Graindorge with Iggy Pop]

SMOTE – Snodgerss

Invader music. That’s what this is. An instrumental soundtrack to an invasion by beasts of the sea. Seriously. Not from the very start, obvs – because a flute dance is never the sound of an imminent attack – but as soon as flute gives way to tidal drones and push, Snodgerss veers towards GY!BE territory and lays on the feedback. No groove, no flow, no funk, just heavy symphonic reps and industrial psyche for a pounding, escalating tension and, presumably, obliteration.

TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS – Vaster than Empires

Not quite new, but only a year or so old, is this alternate version to a Reznor-Ross piece from their Queer soundtrack, the 2024 William Burroughs biopic. Hear it out of context and nothing screams Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. Instead of piano, synth or pulse, it’s vocally led – by Reznor, but other voices multiply while the distortions and layers and volume and mass increase over a hypnotic swell.

Then it hits you: it’s a little bit Low, this. Shapeshifting a Double Negative, building a HEY WHAT.

Vaster than Empires: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Sparhawk, BJ Burton.

Come taste the electro divine.

PETER HAMMILL – Fogwalking

Not quite new but only 45 years or so old … WTF, how am I only hearing this genius throb of 80s avant electro mist-icism for the first time in 2025? Get me A Black Box and start fixing that long-broken promise to check Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator.

The title tells you what’s going on – walking in fog on city streets – but there’s a seediness and hallucinatory threat at play, like you get from Iggy’s Funtime and Nightclubbing, that ups the unease. This isn’t soothed by collage-style sax shrapnel panning left and right, nor the heavily treated riffs that are sticky with gloom. It’s the anti-slick and the gothic, drenched in post-punk synth experimentation. Paranoia via machine prog, Fogwalking is of the time yet way ahead … the genuine article.

Tracklisting:

House – Charlie XCX and John Cale
Snodgerss – Smote
Vaster than Empires – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Sparhawk, BJ Burton
Fogwalking – Peter Hammill

’til next time!

Blank tape and xmas lights
Tracks that totally sleigh

BATS, BEASTS AND BEEF HEARTS

Posted on by
Reply

HALLOWEEN VOODOO WITH THE CAPTAIN, ANYONE?  

It’s not a massive stretch, or even a tiny one, to imagine Captain Beefheart as a jester-like storyteller but, on his final three studio albums, an extra gothic tone streaks the magic. Tracks starring bats, crows, ghosts, mummies and witch doctors are ripe for Halloween IF they’ve got a gumbo bizarro groove and voodoo flow – and these three definitely add a little swampy sauce to the Hallows’ Eve jukebox.

With a hypnotic, trance-inducing beat that replicates windscreen-wiper motion, Bat Chain Puller (Shiny Beast) is smeared with abduction vibes. Let your imagine flow and it’ll soon soundtrack a ritualistic fire dance stumbled on by some hapless rural wanderer … who will never be allowed to leave. Sax blowouts amplify the carnival bizarre and time slows to a paralysing taunt from a conga train of freaks and face masks, primed to assimilate any accidental observer.    

When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy is the very next track on the same album and you couldn’t get a better follow-up if Santa fell into the wrong season and delivered it hiss-elf. Rhythmically, this track takes some beating – surely one of the band’s best. Everything is so locked in but so playfully loose as well. Don’t be taken in by Mommy Mummy’s immense catchiness, though – not today. It’s a trickster move. The oompah-ish rhythm signals jauntiness but when the sax and trombone squeal, like victims in your mangled mind’s eye, you know the lunatics have taken over. Cue a fade to black ending and a Wicker Man style fate. Doomed.

The final short arterial squeeze of this Beefheart triple is The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O. Same sideshow, peoples. Try NOT imagining an incessant lurch of the undead. Impossible. A stuttering spiralling riff and whacked-out gang chorus are your captors while the Captain lords it up as the aloof MC.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, rock freaks!

Captain Beefheart Shiny Beast back cover image
Shiny Beast: the backside

Want more seasonal chills and thrills? Check this Celtic Frost oddity

A HALLOWEEN CHILL … A CELTIC FROST

Posted on by
Reply

A DESCENT INTO THE PANDEMONIUM

Early Halloween greets! Ready for a seasonal resurrection from the metal crypt?

Good – because Celtic Frost‘s 1987 meisterwork Into the Pandemonium is a dead cert Halloween enhancer. Here’s why. 

First, the artwork – that hellish extraction from Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch – is pure badass badness that lays out the goth factor before you even hit play, especially if you’re eyeing the cassette artwork where the zoomed-in crop brings more proximity to flames, falling bodies and all-round damnation. 

Second, Celtic Frost always fits the ‘ween vibe and that’s a cold-bodied fact. But this album, when they went full tilt for orchestral strings, horns and operatic duets after To Mega Therion’s dabble, is a Halloween double-good. Avant garde was the descriptor of the day and whether or not that’s fully accurate, Pandemonium IS experimental and does smash genre orthodoxy and listener expectations so, for that, we salute. Art metal, progressive metal, experimental metal, maybe even death metal – as in, death hangs in its damp air – are all fair game, label-wise.

Looking at some reviews on Metal Archives though and we see that Into the Pandemonium isn’t universally loved. Lowest rating = 17%. Plenty of bile is hurled at One in Their Pride for its programmed beats, NASA samples and general non-metal spirit but it’s always sounded good to me, working like an oddball interlude where dashes of horror-suspense strings still manage to connect it to the rest of the record. Sure, it’s primitive tech-wise but this was 1987, FFS. What were electro-metal supremos Ministry doing back then? 

Becoming Ministry, that’s what. They sure as shit weren’t doing Stigmata. Not yet.  

Tom G Warrior’s voice draws plenty of criticism on the Archives – much bemoaning of the moaning. It’s almost a fair point but his style is essential to the Pandemonium mood and, surely, he’s gunning for an effect: the translucent nearly-dead. Hence the Halloween allure.

The first track is a cover of Mexican Radio (never checked the Wall of Voodoo original until today – decades of shameful oversight right there, it’s ace) and it rocks metally, but it’s the following Mesmerized that introduces the gothic undertones, un-thrash pace drag and wobbly spectrals that come to define Pandemonium’s tone. Claudia-Maria Mokri takes the backing vocals and Warrior’s guitar is, as ever, cloaked in mausoleum chill even when it flirts with 80s pop rock (anyone else getting a blinky flash of Steve Stevens’ pre-verse Rebel Yell riffing halfway through?). All the while, Martin Eric Ain’s rolling bass hollows the earthly life out of it.

Skipping past Inner Sanctum just for a sec, we get our first fully-fledged case of the non-metal avants. Tristesses de la Lune, all cold vapors and morose orchestration, is voiced entirely by Manu Moan and drips moonlit melancholy over dancing strings and buried buzzsaw grind.

But Rex Irae (Requiem) takes it further. This track, a full-on duet between Warrior and Mokri with an oddly groovesome meter, is the fullest realisation of orchestral haunt. String stabs, scrapes and accents alongside Warrior’s nearly-dead vox pitch into sweeping overtures that make it the goth standout of the album – and the first part of the Requiem triptych that took more than 30 years for Warrior to complete. If there’s one track to nab as a standalone Halloweener, this is it. Might as well add Oriental Masquerade while you’re at it, given that it shuts the album down with doomy ceremonial grandeur.  

So, there’s no shortage of graveyard atmospherics on Into the Pandemonium … but that doesn’t mean it lacks blackened metallics either. Inner Sanctum predates thrash metal’s move towards the mainstream four years before the Black Album but with more diabolus in musica, and I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) fucking MOTORS with anthemic cool and unbreakable beats.

Really, for Halloween, you could pick pretty much any Tom G Warrior record and it’ll fit. Sticking with Celtic Frost, Monotheist‘s bleak pitch-black brutality and To Mega Therion‘s gothic thrash energy are both right up there. But for seasonal spook in sound and vision, Into the Pandemonium just about has the edge – more wayward, irrational, mercurial and over-reaching.

It’s just that bit more vamp, don’t you think?

Into hell, Into the Pandemonium

Cassette tracklist:

Mexican Radio
Mesmerized
Inner Sanctum
Tristesses de la Lune
Babylon Fell
Caress Into Oblivion
One in their Pride
I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient)
Rex Irae (Requiem)
Oriental Masquerade

(Sorrows of the Moon does not appear on the original tape but does appear on other formats. Tristesses de la Lune features Charles Baudelaire’s poem in French. Sorrows of the Moon is the English translation but has different music. Running orders vary depending on release and format. Confusing, I know…)

Want a nightmare soundtrack? Try this Sunn O))) for size. Or search Halloween for old-school metal playlists, creepsome cover versions, Mike Patton, Type O Negative, you get the gist

BLOOD INCANTATION LIVE @ ALBERT HALL, MANCHESTER

Posted on by
Reply

FEROCIOUS DISPLAY OF ULTRA PROG DEATH METAL AND SPACE TRIPPING PSYCHE

Last night, alt pop legend Edwyn Collins played Manchester’s Albert Hall – his last ever UK gig. In a few days, 90s indie stars Sleeper move through its arches. Sandwiched in between is Blood Incantation. The place is jammed.

It’s a magnificent venue: the former chapel brings a historic elegance that fully enhances the totemic props and cosmic-ancient energies central to Blood Incantation’s philosophical quests through their chosen medium of time-bending, mind-expanding death metal.

We get latest album Absolute Elsewhere in full from start to finish – The Stargate and The Message. We get The Giza Power Plant. We get Starspawn. Stunning, every last blast and beat. But what this whole gig really feels like is 75 minutes of death metal orchestra. We know from the albums that Blood Incantation are vast and expansive, but tonight delivers such a technical, visceral and telepathically locked-in performance of extreme metal and prog dynamics that you wonder if such intense heavy fusion can ever be repeated, never mind topped. Where can Blood Incantation possibly go from here? Has this path peaked?

When Paul Riedl introduces The Giza Power Plant as a track “…from our second album Hidden History of the Human Race“, you remember that they’ve only made four. The pace of the band’s development to this gig right now seems exponential, even though they started from Starspawn’s already high bar.

Writing here as someone who’s not really into death metal but who has gone for this band in a big way, this performance went beyond all expectations: a supreme mix of aggression, blast beats, DM churn, post-metal soar and speed metal hooks with Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream pushing through. Clear sound, crystal. Lasers and lights, a spectacle. It’s theatre without theatrics – a show where the body of music took centre stage as a massive, singular force.

Forgive the hyperventilating gush. Am still mesmerised, really. At their first ever Manchester gig, Blood Incantation damned near performed death metal levitation.

Date: October 8th, 2025.

Lights, camera … incantation

JASSS – It’s a Hole: TRACK OF THE MONTH

Posted on by
Reply

BERLIN BREAKBEATS, LONDON PROG, PHILADELPHIA SHOEGAZE – AND PULLED APART BY HORSES HIT BUXTON

Who’d have thought it? Pulled Apart By Horses, on stage, in Buxton.

Honestly, it’s a shock – but a welcome one. Being a Buxton newcomer (moved here just under a year ago), it was my understanding that noise-and-sweat-style rock gigs by name bands wouldn’t really be a fixture. So, Sheffield and Manchester have been beacons for riff-heavy fixes by the likes of the Melvins and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs.

Then Pulled Apart By Horses posters started popping up around town. What???

And here we are at Buxton Trackside, gearing up for a Pulled Apart gig more than 10 years after seeing them rip it up in Oxford.

Having not followed the band since Tough Love, the line-up changes and recent albums escape me but, really, it’s the live Horses experience that’s the draw and one thing that time hasn’t dimmed is singer Tom Hudson’s willingness to get off the stage and into the crowd. This happens in the very first track and doesn’t stop all night. It sets the tone and ups the energy right off the bat.

The awesome V.E.N.O.M. gets cranked out early, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? catches everyone out and High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive pretty much shuts the set down before a final thrash through I Wanna Be Your Dog makes for a predictably raucous send-off. Job done. Very little has changed from all those years ago – whether that’s good or bad is up to you – but it feels great to be among some noise on a Buxton Friday and huge props to Buxton Trackside for making such an ace gig space. Let’s hope it becomes the venue for live action round here.

Right, what else has caught the ears this past month? New records by the godlike Robert Plant and in-shape Nine Inch Nails are the big specials but there’s always room for small curios. Here’s a just-heard new sound or three fished out from murkier waters.

THEY ARE GUTTING A BODY OF WATER – the chase

Lumbering guitar mass pounding, not a zillion miles away from Mogwai at their earliest unpolished, starts the chase. Then the clean breakdown and spoken storyteller narration. Then the return of the guitars, steamrollering everything. This – the oversized guitar fuzz and feedback – leapt right out of the radio the other night and set expectations of a band dealing in noise-heavy post-rock.

But their other tracks have undermined those expectations a little. Is there enough here to keep us hooked? Not sure yet. Curious, though. Next album LOTTO out soon and the chase is on it.

JASSS – It’s a Hole (feat James K and Alias Error)

Deep bass drives this dense, ultra shadowy soundscape by Berlin-based multimedia artist JASSS. Though not loud or showy, It’s a Hole is rich with information that slow-drowns you in disorienting intoxication … faint dread meets the hypnotic ebb of a dark Boards of Canada warping. Tense comforts.

THE ORCHESTRA (FOR NOW) – Hattrick

London prog, the band call it. Jazz-flamed rock with violin, cello and noise-prog ambition is a less pithy tag. Probably less usable, too. But you know how Maruja’s Look Down On Us climbs into a crescendo of communal euphoria that threatens to transcend? Hattrick kicks that kind of dust. Rage and beauty and loud and quiet and wild orchestral swings – and a drummer to drop jaws everywhere.

’til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

MELVINS LIVE @ THE FOUNDRY, SHEFFIELD

Posted on by
Reply

NO-ONE ROCKS HARDER. END OF.

When Melvins take the stage at 9pm on Saturday 16th August, half the band have already played for an hour. It’s no surprise that Steve McDonald doubles up on bass duties with Red Kross supporting but Dale Crover behind the Kross kit? Bonus. I know zilch about Redd Kross beyond the name – I guess they hung out in a grunge-adjacent strand of the alt-rock rainbow in the early 90s but no tunes come to mind. Not like it matters – their alt-punk energy, power pop hooks, vocal harmonies and rippingly to-the-point solos are catchy and breezy. Tight band, great set.

FUNN FAKT: Sheffield is the first place in the UK that Steve McDonald ever slept. It was in 1992. He told us.

Melvins are a different animal – not just different to Redd Kross but different to every other band out there. This is not news. But seeing them live on such imperious form – which they definitely are tonight – is a reminder of just how potent and ingenious a one-off force they still are and we really, really shouldn’t take them for granted.

With Coady Willis setting up next to Dale Crover, Big Business-era killers like Blood Witch and Evil New War God land with all their original double-drum intensity and, for my tastes, are worth the price of entry alone. With Revolve and Working the Ditch also working their way into the set, it’s game over – Melvins win. Cannot remember now what else got played (did Kicking Machine make it? Hooch?) but that doesn’t matter. What we got was an hour and fifteen minutes of twisted, non-stop riffage that only Melvins can deliver.

And to watch Buzz Osborne is to watch a guy consumed by what he’s doing. Not once does he address the crowd between songs – that’s McDonald’s job, he’s the connector – and not once does he step off the gas. He rocks out, sings hard and plays hard. Ridiculously fckn hard. They all do.

Been on a Melvins binge ever since. Just how it should be.

Melvins CDs
A stack of one-offs

BLACK SABBATH: BEYOND METAL (A JAZZ ODYSSEY)

Posted on by
Reply

EVER HEARD BLACK SABBATH SOUND LIKE THIS?

On July 6th, the day after Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning sign-off at Villa Park, Stuart Maconie broadcast a Sabbath special Freakzone on BBC Radio 6 Music.

It was an inspired slab of radio – a wild selection of Black Sabbath covers, bands inspired by Sabbath and, of course, Sabbath originals. But it was the covers that really made it work because none of them were rock or metal. Not a single one.

Instead there was fictional jazz (eh?), medieval folk, Ethiopian brassy scuzz, Scandi-fied indie pop, contemporary classical and plenty more … countless left turns in a fascinating trip that hints at just how far and wide Black Sabbath reached.

The programme is no longer available on BBC Sounds but, because it’s too good not to rave about, here are a few words on some of the tracks that blew my tiny mind, followed by the tracklist for your fullest explorations.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne. Long live the Summer of Sabbath.

Far beyond metal

What, no guitar? Better get used to it with French/Ethiopian hybrid uKanDanZ because they lead into War Pigs with a screaming sax blast and it RIPS. After that, they lock down a tough keys-bass-drums groove punctured with brassy bursts.

Soreng Santi throws out a very loose take on Iron Man. It’s a track that’s always lumbered in the best possible way but here the sticky fuzziness of the riff stumbles and wavers and just about stays upright. In contrast, the drums dance with clarity and full command of spacial awareness. If you watched White Lotus, this track appeared in an episode somewhere. Apparently.

Hearing some radical reworks of Paranoid makes you realise that the chugging riff captures the paranoia of the title – it’s a bit nervy, edgy, restless. Take that signature element away and the song can be transformed, as Black Bossa Sabbath Nova show with a gentle, swinging shuffle that glides so smoothly it barely touches ground. Beautiful vocal too.

Sticking with Paranoid, Hellsongs do a similarly non-monolithic breakdown. Like Susanna and the Magic Orchestra’s minimalist, heartbreaking version of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Hellsongs strip a robust original down to its barest essence and redress it lightly – here with whispered gusts and string-backed Americana. Hellsongs Paranoid is roomy and calm, the very opposite of Sabbath’s anxious riffing. And while we’re on a Paranoid reimagined trip, check Type O Negative’s version for a transcendent goth metal overhaul.

If the idea of Jazz Sabbath (listed below) excites more than the lighter-touch music delivers then Iron Man by The Bad Plus is the place to get a proper jazz-does-Sabbath experience. THIS is jazz Sabbath. Piano chords take the place of Iommi’s riff, the tempo is slowed a fraction and the inventive combined muso talent makes more notes, more melodies and more dimensions without ever losing the heavy essence of the original.

Keeping it jazz, Brad Meldhau‘s Sabbath is not a cover but a tribute. Doom piano and shit-hot drumwork conspire to fashion a downer earworm from Sweet Leaf’s cloud. Bulletproof and nicely weighty.

At the risk of turning this into a jazz odyssey, the final highlight – for now – is more jazz. From a metal legend. War Pigs by The Alex Skolnick Trio. Swingy as fuck. Do not expect Testament-al thrash riffage. Do expect clean, warm tones, sublime phrasing, blistering jazz runs and a drum masterclass … how much musicality? Unreal.

As promised, below is the full Freakzone tracklist minus the Black Sabbath originals. Sleep and Electric Wizard are familiar enough but all the covers here are, to me, a new adventure and every single track is worth checking. Credit to Stuart Maconie for putting it together – radio at its best.

Let the Black Sabbath story continue.

Freakzone: Black Sabbath Special

Cindy und Bert – Der Hund Von Baskerville. Ultra catchy German pop-psyche Paranoid via Haight Ashbury

Les Baxter – Main Title (from the film, Black Sabbath)

uKanDanZ – War Pigs. See above

Jazz Sabbath – Electric Funeral. Soft shuffle and brushes from Adam Wakeman’s invented concept. If the nightcap fits… drink it. Late-night bar vibes

Rondellus – Rotae Confusions. Wheels of Confusion, sung in Latin, haunting and medieval

Soreng Santi – Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng. See above

Vitamin String Quartet – Into the Void. Strings, innit?

Cardigans – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Light and dreamy retro drift-pop with incredibly cool funk drums. Genteel detachment you can almost dance to.

Black Bossa Sabbath Nova – Paranoid, see above

Sleep – Holy Mountain. No description required

Apocalyptica – Spiral Architect. Full bodied orchestral instrumental

Hellsongs – Paranoid, see above

Brad Meldhau – Sabbath, ditto

The Bad Plus – Iron Man, ditto ditto

Electric Wizard – Funeralopolis. See Sleep above

Free Nelson Mandoomjazz – Black Sabbath. Melancholy sax, horror scream squall sax, max-tension dynamics – this song was destined to be doomjazzed

Meatdripper – Homegrown. Blackened stoner with Pigsx7 slam riffage and questionable vox, you decide

Alex Skolnick Trio – War Pigs, see above and listen and weep

Black Sabbath Vol 4
Back to the Beginning, back to the font: Vol 4