Scratch any literate songwriter – Win Butler, David Bowie, PJ Harvey – and beneath the surface you will find a debt to TS Eliot The New Yorker critic Louis Menand, reflecting on TS Eliot's transition from radical modernist to arch-conservative, wrote in a review of the poet's letters: "He tried to shut the door on modern life. It was too late of course. He was the author of Prufrock and The Waste Land. He was already inside." Eliot would not have loved pop music but pop music loves Eliot. Ninety years after the publication of The Waste Land , he remains ...

Cleveland's Millennium, who are a relatively obscure N.W.O.B.H.M. act, came to prominence in the early part of the eighties. The five-piece band was formed in 1983 and managed to score an appearance on the "Pure Overkill" split the same year. Playing alongside the bands Risk, Spartan Warrior, Incubus (who we recently covered in another NWOBHM WEDNESDAY feature) and Tokyo Rose helped boost the band's presence on the English heavy metal scene. The three cuts that the band laid to tape ( "Steal Your Heart", "Rock Was Meant For Me" and "Magic Mirror") for "Pure ...

"I feel like nothing", Stephen Immerwahr deferentially proffers on the standout title track to the  Barely Real  EP and although NYC dreamweavers  Codeine  may never have made the seismic splash their featherweight, if stylistically and thematically hefty back catalogue – here remastered – indubitably ought to have, the very release of this here thing intimates a greater cultural relevance than perhaps initially envisaged and with it, a subsequent longevity extended beyond that which they may once have deemed. It's like an artist whose canvases skyrocket in value in the wake of premature demise although quite thankfully, the band still scuff heels ...

America : A Horse With No Name [ purchase ] Back in the early 70s,   America was three kids whose fathers were US military stationed overseas: Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek.   They came together in the London area towards the end of their high school years.  Their 70s hits also included Ventura Highway and Sister Golden Hair. Today Bunnell and Beckley still tour (Dan Peek passed away last year). Story has it that Dewey wrote A Horse With No Name with thoughts of the desert around Vandenberg AFB, one of the temporary places his family lived and one he would surely ...

Sacrilegious or sardonic as it may be on behalf of the bookers of Brighton or elsewhere (re: the latter tonight's spotlights are of exclusively satanic hue), whether ardent believer, agnostic or outright atheist there's incontestably no better venue than your local House of the Lord. Yet a four pack ring strewn before the altar and a bar at the back demonstrate a slight disregard for location and indeed this divine setting ensures the unshakably uncomfortable sensations of any given Sunday are immediately imitated upon entrance. That hideous gut-wrench signalling an imminent return to the institutionalised authority education provides ...

The “folk noir” of Ruby Throat’s 3rd album , o’ doubt o’ stars weaves it’s quiet desolation along North London’s forgotten canals, through an industrial wasteland of wild flowers, arctic foxes and broken down factories, under the thunder of the M25 motorway, returning again to the ghosts on Green Lanes, the given way threads of an [...]

Las Cruces, Protistas Cazador, Chile Rating: 84 by Pierre Lestruhaut It’s 2012, and what has there been to be genuinely excited about in Latin American indie rock these past couple of years, outside of Bam Bam’s ambitious venture into interstellar psychedelia, and–at the diametrically opposed corner of indie–Piyama Party’s absorption of pop culture consumerism into sluggish indieist desolation? My experience writing and listening to Latin indie rock records for over a year can be summarized in the unvarying initial reaction I have about most records. It goes something like: “not bad, maybe something around 72 ...

Canada&aposs; Moonlyght has issued the following update about recording a new album: "The recording process for the third Moonlyght album &aposReturn; to Desolation' is taking form. All guitars are now recorded. We are doing a pre-production for the album with drums and all the other instruments at the moment. "One of our original members on the very f... Read More/Discuss on Metal Underground.com

Krzysztof Penderecki / Jonny Greenwood Threnody / Popcorn / Polymorphia / 48 Responses [Nonesuch; 2012] by Carlos Román Rating: Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), prominent figures in music from different generations, traditions, and cultures, meet in the blurring epistemological circumscriptions of the two mega-genres of Western music — popular music and so-called classical music — by means of this set of concise, non-chronological, complementary compositions for string instruments. The album, officially titled Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia , is not ‘new’ as in being ‘groundbreaking’ music for 2012, and therefore it does not fall into the trap ...

Whilst a gig in a church may no longer be the revelatory experience it once provided, certainly to frequent one outside of Union Chapel and its clunky stone trunks, as it just so transpires, still feels rather novel and to a lesser extent like some minor betrayal. St Stephen's Church is a rather more slight and slender construction; its rustic beams and subdued hues an ideal fit for the sepia melancholia for which Montreal bumbler Patrick Watson  has long since been revered. He bursts past an ever-evolving queue for the disabled facilities, chirruping: "I'm gonna pee my pants ...

Chelsea Grin have re-recorded some material from their 2010 album Desolation of Eden , which will see a digital release via iTunes. A release date is to be announced. The reworked tracks are in addition to the band's forthcoming Evolve EP.

Australia&aposs; Woods of Desolation has checked in with the following update about working on a new EP and recruiting a guest musician: "Secretly planned for some time, I can now confirm the next Woods of Desolation chapter shall be a very special, conceptual EP featuring guest drums performed by Vlad of Drudkh/Old Silver Key! "Further news and i... Read More/Discuss on Metal Underground.com

Imagine my excitement when I looked on my wife's laptop the other day and saw a folder called "best prog" and I jumped up saying, "finally, you're into my music!" Her laughter was my disappointment: it was the best programs she (as psychologist) had designed for her work in the IBI therapy of autistic children... Well, you know by now what my wife's comments are about this music: "it all sounds the same to me-- are you sure you're not just getting the same record over and over again?" Needless to say this statement drives me ...

This may be less a story about a solid band than about a great city close to my heart.  And it’s not because the band is less deserving.  It’s because the story of the city is tightly interwoven with the raison d’etre of the band. The city is Detroit.  The band is KNIFE. You’d have to be living under a rock to be oblivious about the incredibly hard times D’town’s endured over the last several years, even before the bottom fell out of the auto industry in 2008.  Boarded up factories.  Boarded up schools ...

Photo via Furthur’s Twitter Furthur nodded to the RMS Titanic during their show at New York’s Beacon Theatre last night. Partway through their first set, the group busted into Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” which contains the lyrics “The Titanic sails at dawn.” Furthur then moved int...