LTW newsletter 107

Hail warriors,

It’s been getting a touch moody and autumnal around these parts as the damp season encroaches on summer. 

Those long summer days and longer festival nights are about to be returned to the cupboard and become fond and distant memories of being the islands of joy in a world gone insane. 

In music terms this has been a great summer and there have been many highlights which we have documented and the endless run of festivals we have been to have finally ended only two weeks ago when we were at Krankenhaus which was the last of our summer festivals. 

It was sunny summer vibe then but suddenly it’s like the gods of outdoor high decibel were ready and waiting and it’s been wam bam and the rain has returned and the nights are darker….still that means we are closer to October and gig season so our diaries will fill up again with all kinds of action.

Early autumn onset also means that some big hitter albums are getting released, like Suede, whose remarkable comeback continues at a high rate of productivity. The band have had a career of two halves, and without the precious mantle of being precious, they have kicked out the Jams and turned into a very fine rock n roll band, albeit with their own flair for a theatrical grandeur.

At LTW this week we have been enjoying all manner of weird and wonderful sounds including Witch Club Satan from Norway who have given black metal another twist with their self styled ‘Haunting Norwegian black metal by three resurrected witches’’. Their music is thunderously dark but also glacially melodic and they are not afraid to add some musical twists and turns into their dark forest soundscapes.

The Humanist project put together by guitar player Rob Marshall have been delighting us for their last couple of albums of post punk electric skree and their art of darkness has seen them build up a cult following which they will be taking to the USA this autumn. It will be a great chance for the Americans to see this fab band and also a chance to see a smaller cult level British band who have actually managed to negotiate their way into America past the expensive and prohibitive visas that have crippled so many British acts in the past few years.

In the mid-nineties, it wasn't all Britpop around these parts. From Northern Ireland, Ash delivered a thrillingly melodic punk rock rush into the top end of the charts and are today sharing a new double A-side single ‘Which One Do You Want?’ / ‘Fun People’ (feat. Graham Coxon). They are the latest pair of songs to emerge from the band’s forthcoming album Ad Astra, which is set for release on October 3rd via Fierce Panda.  

Wolf Alice hit Liverpool’s Camp and Furnace like a neon comet, with a rush of energy that set the tone for a night of brilliance. Tickets for this tiny show evaporated in four minutes flat, proof of the hunger to snap them up. This album launch party for The Clearing feels like a celebration. It’s their fourth album, hugely ambitious and crowned No.1 in the UK charts. What follows is a 15-song victory lap, a mesmerising storm of old fire and new flame stitched together in one unstoppable set.

Don’t forget to grab your tickets for the inaugural Louder Than War festival held next March in Manchester. Headlined by Sea Power we expect to announce more of the bill in the next couple of weeks.

It’s great to see the return of Prolapse. Yours truly produced their first two singles decades ago and has fond memories of Mick the singer working himself up into a method acting fit of rage to deliver his spiel. The band were a hypnotic powerhouse and their very dynamics should have seen them implode even then yet somehow they are still with us and somehow still sound great…we interviewed Mick and Linda from the band about their current plans and so much more.

CMAT releases her third album today and it’s a work of career-defining glory. Think that country-pop is not your bag? Think again!   https://louderthanwar.com/cmat-euro-country-album-reviews (Abre numa nova janela)

Lemonheads have had a long and strange career that has seen Evan Dando stagger from the pin up of the post grunge years to a chemically battered slightly fruit da loop entertainer of the now. His erratic nature somehow does not prevent those quicksilver moments of genius slipping through which our reviewer hoped to hear at the recent show in London.

Queens of the Stone Age somehow remain one of the most inventive of the big rock bands and recently delivered a brilliantly intense celebratory performance as they triumphantly closed their European tour at Sheffield’s Rock N Roll Circus.