The incredible Sonic Boom Six are headlining Manchester’s Deaf Institute this Saturday as part of the #standforsomething Tour 2013. Also on the line-up are Save Your Breath and LTNT.
For your chance to win a pair of tickets to this unique one-off event, simply tweet me @DANHUDSON with the answer to the following question.
What is 6 x 6?
The deadline for submission is 12pm on Friday 27th September, and entries will be drawn at random!
I know they’re trying to wind people up. I know I shouldn’t rise to it. i also know that plenty of publications print complete falsehoods on a regular basis, often followed by a minuscule apology when the damage has already been done.
But seriously, have you read this article by Lucy Jones of the NME?
http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-
I understand that she doesn’t get ‘nu-metal’. A lot of people don’t. But there’s just so many poorly argued points in this article it beggars belief. To save boring you all to sleep, I’ve narrowed it down to a succinct Top 5.
1. Deftones have ALWAYS been high on festival line-ups, this is not just a recent thing. To claim a band as diverse as this is just ‘nu-metal’ and to discredit their longevity is lazy journalism.
2. The assumption that ‘rap + metal = crap’, by default, implies that Rage Against The Machine are ‘crap’. And I would seriously question any music critic who thinks that.
3. The Strokes did not ‘wash anything away’. I remember vividly Slipknot’s ‘Iowa’ beating The Strokes ‘Is This It’ to Number One in the same week, with 1/10 of their hype.
4. It is accepted by everyone, apart from it seems the NME, that the first rap/rock crossover was Aerosmith/Run DMC’s ‘Walk This Way’, not Anthrax/Public Enemy’s ‘Bring The Noise’ a year later.
5. The article resorts to petty insults about how a band looks to make its point.
However, the point, that REALLY gets my goat deserves a whole separate article. It’s Lucy’s throwaway comment that Limp Bizkit and System Of A Down are ‘sexist claptrap’. Yes, there’s an argument that Limp Bizkit are misogynistic and I accept that. But System Of A Down? Really?!?! I do worry in the wake of ‘Blurred Lines‘ that people can be accused of sexism without being questioned and it’s just taken as fact. But I cannot think of a single lyric, track, album, video, live performance or interview that SOAD have ever done which even has a touch of sexism to it. It is seriously unfair on the band, their fans, or the genre, for the NME to make such a bold statement without backing it up.
Anyway, I’m off to Break Stuff. Keep rollin’ baby, you know what time it is.
N.B I tweeted Lucy Jones last night and asked her to offer an example of System Of A Down’s sexism, at the time of writing I have received no reply.
Manic Street Preachers – Rewind The Film (review)
Their last album, Postcards From A Young Man, was their ‘one last shot at mass communication’, and the subsequent ‘National Treasures‘ compilation and mammoth 02 Arena show marked the end of an era for the band.
With a new era beginning, it seems the Manic Street Preachers are free of such commercial concerns and, on this, their 12th album, have turned off the amps and mellowed out – a lot. Within seconds of listening to opener This Sullen Welsh Heart (featuring Lucy Rose on vocals) it’s obvious this is a Manics album like no other. This is an album about growing up, growing old mourning, self examination, nostalgia, loss and old age, and in places is a very unsettling listen. There are guest appearances from Richard Hawley (on the title track) and Cate Le Bon (4 Lonely Roads – incidentally, one of the only tracks to feature an electric guitar) but in both of these cases, James Dean Bradfield steps back and lets the guest vocalists take the spotlight. It seems that everything about this album is unconventional.
It’s not all introspective though. Show Me The Wonder is an uptempo, brass-filled homage to living life and seeing the beauty in everything, and the anti-Thatcher 30 Year War is the closest we get to the Manics of old (‘And the endless parade of old Etonian scum line the front benches‘). On the whole though, Rewind The Film is much more restrained than anything they’ve done before.
After trying everything from ‘mass communication’ (Postcards) ‘heavy metal Tamla Motown’ (Send Away The Tigers) to ‘elegaic pop’ (Lifeblood) in recent years, it is refreshing to see the band do something completely different, throw away any sort of Manics rulebook, and, now in their mid-forties, take a step back, and examine themselves in such a personal way. This album is not going to drastically change their live setlists but it is the Manics in fine form, and on this, their 12th album, as relevant as ever.