Music, Metal

Aerosmith and Rage Against the Machine join Download 2010 bill

The final two headliners for this year’s Download festival have been confirmed with Rage Against the Machine and Aerosmith joining the previously announced AC/DC to head the hard rock and metal festival. The organisers also state vocalist Steve Tyler…

Rob Zombie - Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool

(Roadrunner) Rob Zombie is certainly one of the most enigmatic figures in modern metal. He’s evolved from rock star to a full-blown, gore-loving stage persona (a feat last pulled off by Marilyn Manson to increasingly lacklustre results). Taking a…

Mastodon to showcase Crack the Skye at Barrowlands

Huge, multifaceted progressive metal as the mighty Mastodon return. Rumour has it they are still playing their latest album, Crack the Skye (a complex masterpiece detailing the astral journeys of a paraplegic), in its entirety for the first half of…

AC/DC, Them Crooked Vultures, Motörhead and Megadeth set for Download 2010

Metal festival Download is celebrating 30 years of rock at Donnington (the first ever Monsters of Rock took place on the site in 1980) in style with a massive coup as AC/DC are announced as their first headliner for 2010. The Aussie rock legends are no…

Lostprophets line up Glasgow and Edinburgh dates

One of Britain’s big rock success stories, Lostprophets are one of the few UK acts to break in the US with their catchy, crunchy guitar hooks. The Welsh nu-metallers latest album The Betrayed continues the theme including anthem in the making ‘It’s Not…

Killswitch Engage

‘This is the Taste Of Chaos tour, not the Taste Of Tampons tour’, says Killswitch Engage guitarist and general oddball Adam Dutkiewicz, before requesting that the now pungently perspired crowd pogo up and down and side to side again once…

Gary Numan

Genuine innovators who also become successful in their own lifetime are pretty hard to come by. Gary Numan not only wrenched the synthesizer from the grasp of the neo-classicist aesthetic of prog and retoolled a generation of artists disillusioned with…

Slayer

In 2009 what do people really need from Slayer? This is a band who set the bar at a breathtaking high over 20 years ago, releasing intense, condensed concrete slabs for albums, if concrete slabs can be dripping in blood and goat entrails. The quartet’s…

Taste Of Chaos

RRRRAAAAAARGH! That’s the sound of metal coming home, baby! The Rockstar Energy Drink Taste Of Chaos tour kicks off in Glasgow this month, featuring headliners Killswitch Engage, with additional rockage coming from Swedish melodic metallers In Flames…

Slayer - World Painted Blood

(Mercury) Being pretty much the complete package when they started, California’s Slayer are attributed with inspiring an entire generation towards replicating their heads down, relentless thrash riffage. The problem with that is that over the years…

Halloween Guide: M - S

Yet more spooky goings-on

M is for Movies Perhaps only rivalled by the upsurge in the plastic horn industry around 31 Oct, the annual economic boost for the horror film industry ensures that, every Halloween, there is a fresh crop of dismembered corpse-filled flicks to satisfy…

Dream Theater - SECC, Glasgow, Sun 11 Oct

Prog rockers entertain

Progressive metal godfathers Dream Theater are here tonight for their Progressive Nation tour, and they bring with them some buddies who share their insatiable love for odd-timings and guitar wankery. Sub-headliners Opeth impress with their melancholic…

Music In The Digital Age

Technology's impact on the artform

To paraphrase the Creme Egg adverts, when it comes to music, how do you hear yours? Streaming over the internet? Nicking stuff from torrents on the web? A bag full of goodies from Fopp? Crates of obscure vinyl from your local specialist…

Hitlist: Music

Your fortnightly feast for the ears

Noah and the Whale, Mudhoney and The Vaselines, Invasion, Scarce, The Big Pink, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Music Like a Vitamin, The Dead Weather

Mudhoney and The Vaselines

Grunge legends team up with the recently reformed Scots

Back in early 90s the music world turned its eyes on Seattle. And Mudhoney were there right at the start, they were first band to have success on the seminal Sub Pop record label with their Superfuzz Bigmuff EP in 1988, featuring the classic ‘Touch Me…

First word - Stix Zadinia of Steel Panther

Stix Zadinia from glam parody rockers Steel Panther flexes his muscles to talk sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll

InMe

Essex rockers show off their new album

InMe have had a bit of a rough time in recent years. The alt.rock band went from being the poster boys of a teenage generation – with tracks like the brooding ‘Firefly’ regularly on music television in the early 00s and helping to win an army of devoted…

Part Chimp - Thriller

Imagine a supernova collapsing into a super-gravitational black hole, sucking in whole star systems, then eating pies and doughnuts for all eternity, and that still wouldn’t be as heavy as Part Chimp. This third album from the London…

Faith No More

Massive shots of musical adrenaline that have the crowd and band pumping

Surely the crowning glory in this year’s Edge Festival - the reunited Faith No More returning to Scotland after a long, long absence. Firstly, Manchester youngsters Oceansize kick things off in suitably fuzzy prog metal style, reminiscent of oor ain…

Kerrang! The Album ‘09

Since 1981 weekly metal mag Kerrang! has been waving the flag for hard rock charting the rise and fall of thrash, nu metal, grunge and emo. This double album exemplifies the dichotomy at the heart of any commercial magazine: do you cover what’s popular…

Mach Nausea - DIY noise festival

As church fetes go, this second edition of this DIY noise festival was an appositely unholy resurrection. Lit from an archway behind them and playing on bare floorboards, the 18 acts on show tapped into industrial metal roots, surrealist slapstick, an…

Exposure: Growing

Unlike, say, The Lemonheads, Growing are a band with a literal soubriquet: their evolutionary noise and experimental rock exploits provoke a sense of advancing ambience, metal progression and, well, growing. They’ve recorded for Mogwai’s Rock Action…

T in the Park - Saturday

Having utterly failed to 'tweet' from T in the Park, Brendan Miles is given a second chance to voice his thoughts on some of the best acts to grace Scotland's biggest music festival

Dream Theater: Black Clouds & Silver Linings

The phrase ‘prog-metal’ might not be the most alluring, but bands like Mastodon, Muse and The Mars Volta are helping to rehabilitate this most over-indulgent of art forms. Dream Theater have been in the game for longer than most, creating dense, complex…