Where Worlds Collide

The war against lazy music journalism continues. This time, the Guardian music blog has given space to another stereotypical NME hack, who cheerfully admits he don’t bother to actually listen to records but thinks it’s acceptable to write dismissive reviews based almost entirely on prejudices.

He reminds me of Gerald Ratner. His famously-reported quote about his cheap jewellery being ‘crap’ that’s worth less than a prawn sandwich brought about the downfall of his chain of shops selling cheap tat. Let’s hope this article does the same for the NME and their ilk.

Oh, and anyone still using the term ‘rockist’ in 2007 is a dinosaur who somehow thinks it’s still 1979, and doesn’t realise the punk wars are over and nobody cares about them any more. He’s like those WW2 Japanese soldiers found in jungles of south-east Asia in the 1970s.

Last resort when I haven’t got anything worthwhile to blog about - just list the last ten CDs I’ve listened to, and say a few words about each one.

• Opeth - Ghost Reveries: Swedish death-metal that goes “Grrrrrhhhh!”. It’s actually surprisingly melodic if you listen to it closely; it’s just the melodies aren’t Mikael Åkerfeldt’s growling vocals, but in the intricate twin guitar harmonies.
• Mermaid Kiss - Etarlis: A concept album of atmospheric keyboard-led female-fronted prog, based on a fantasy setting that sounds quite gameable. What’s not to like? Hopefully I’m going to get to see this lot live some time in the next few months
• Porcupine Tree - In Absentia: I can never quite make up my mind which PT album is my favourite. Sometimes it’s last year’s “Fear of a Blank Planet”, sometimes it’s “Lightbulb Sun”. And sometimes it’s this one, which marks the point where they started adding a metal influence to their sound. It was The Guardian Readers Recommend Songs about Mental Illness that triggered me to dig out this one. Not that I expect Dorian will pick “Blackest Eyes”, even when it got ‘donded’.
• Mostly Autumn - Storms Over Still Water: Every playlist of mine must include an MA album, it’s a rule. This one was the first of their albums I pre-ordered, and I think it’s one of the most underrated albums of the career. No album containing the magnificent ‘Carpe Diem’ can ever be written off as a dud.
• Fish - 13th Star : Yes, I had mixed feelings about this one when it first came out, but it’s absolutely brilliant; the big Scotsman at his angst-ridden croaky best.
• Gentle Giant - Octopus: I dug this one out following discussion of GG on the Mostly Autumn forum. This is real off-the-wall 70s prog, an eclectic mix of rock, folk and jazz, taking off in several random directions often in the same song. Nothing else sounds quite like them, although you can hear their influence in early Spock’s Beard a generation later.
• Muse - Black Holes and Revelations: From 70s prog to 00s prog, from the band that finally made prog-rock cool again. And I’ve finally worked out what that killer riff that ends ‘Knights of Cydonia’ reminds me of. It’s not Thin Lizzy’s ‘Emerald’. It’s MSG’s ‘Into the Arena’!
• After Forever: Self-titled album by the latest band from the European ‘Lady Metal’ genre, big epic operatic stuff.
• Ordinary Psycho - The New Gothik LP As far as I know, this band only recorded the one album in 2000. Vocalist David Gulvin is a bit on an acquire taste, but this viola-driven prog/indie/goth crossover was well worth revisiting. Whatever happened to them?
• The Mars Volta - Amputecture: They’ve been described as ‘completely bonkers’, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. This is their third and (in my opinion) weakest album, which seems to lack some of the manic energy and inventiveness that characterised the first two. I’m seeing them live in a couple of weeks, and must pick up their (reportedly much better) fourth before then.

So there you have it. All kinds of music, metal, prog and prog-metal.

This is the third year I’ve attended “Festival of British Model Railways” at Harrogate. Last year my visit formed part of a rather busy weekend, of which the exhibition was probably the least significant event.

With just the show, and no gigs in the evening, I’m afraid this years event was a little underwhelming, and I’m not sure this show is really worth a two-and-a-half hour journey across the Pennines.

Not that there weren’t some good layouts. Basingstoke is one of the largest and most complex N gauge layouts on the exhibition circuit, and it runs as well as it looks. It’s set in the mid-sixties before electrification when the main line out of Waterloo was one of the last strongholds of steam, and the four-track main line serves up a constant procession of trains, mostly steam-hauled, but with some “Warship” class diesels on trains to Exeter.

These two views show the whole of the scenic part of the layout.

Not all layouts are immense monsters. Steve Grantham’s 4mm scale “Heavy Traffic” is typical of the small shunting layout built my many modellers.

Again, these two photos show the entire layout. Layouts like this are inspirational in that it goes to prove you don’t need a huge space, or need a lorry to transport it.

This view of the layout and it’s operators (Steve is on the right) shows just how small it is. The crowd barriers are a reminder that this building is often used for agricultural fairs.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve written an RPG based on the setting I’ve been using for my long-running online game. I started a playtest using a yahoogroup about a year ago, but everything got rather put on the back burner due to real life becoming busy.

As I stated before, I intend to publish the game, probably as a .PDF, but there might be a dead-tree version if I think there’s enough demand. The system is based on a customised version of the Fudge rules, and the setting is my own, with a lot of the flavour of some of Jack Vance’s baroque SF worlds.

I’ve decided to move the playtest discussion to The Phoenyx, where the game already has it’s own forum. The ongoing game “KLR” on Dreamlyrics is also considered to be part of the playtest.

I previously had the entire game as a closed playtest, with the playtest drafts only visible to those that signed up to the yahoogroup. I’ve decided to make the mechanics-heavy part of the game an open playtest, so I’ve posted the first four chapters free for anyone to download and comment on.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Character Generation
• Chapter 3: Running the Game
• Chapter 4: Psionics

Yes, they are static pages in WordPress, and do currently use the same template as the blog, which means the sidebar is still full of adverts for prog-rock albums.

If you’ve got any comments on them, or want the actually try out playing the game, please sign up to the discussion forum!

The remaining chapters cover the game setting in more detail, and will probably be done in a semi-closed playtest (only available to those who sign up to the playtest forum).

Three weeks after they supported The Reasoning in Cardiff, Breathing Space played a headline set at Crewe Limelight. Turnout on a Sunday night wasn’t particularly good; I paid on the door and got ticket number 23. I’m bad at estimating crowds, but I think there were 70-80 there, an improvement on the 35 at Warrington six months ago.

As ever, the band gave same tight and impassioned performance as at Cardiff three weeks before. It was almost a year since the first time I saw them at the Roman Baths in York, and it’s still amazing how much they’ve improved over that time.

The setlist included (I think) the whole of their excellent new album “Coming Up for Air”, quite a bit of the first album, and closed with a Mellotron-drenched version of the Mostly Autumn oldie ‘The Gap is Too Wide’. (OK, it’s not a real Mellotron, but as guitarist Mark Rowan once said to me, “have you ever tried to lift a real Mellotron?). They’ve dropped all the covers now, with two album’s worth of original material, they really don’t need to play them any more.

Unfortuntely the band struggled with some serious technical gremlins, which got worse not better towards the end of the set, with some particularly horrible feedback. Not enough to totally ruin the gig, but enough to make it less than perfect.

It’s a pity that current musical fashions mean such a great band plays to such small audiences. They’re playing a lot of gigs in rock clubs up and down the country, mostly in the midlands and the north. If you like well-crafted music with good tunes, tight musicianship and a seriously talented female singer, go and check them out.

Michael Schenker, Manchester Academy 3, 9th Feb 2008

By all reports, his tour last year was a complete fiasco. There were reports of him shambling about too drunk to play properly, the tour came to a premature end when he injured himself falling off the stage. Many wondered if his career was over.

But this year, the blond axe hero was back, with something to prove.

Billed as ‘Michael Schenker and Friends’, the band were a bunch of unknowns (I’m told they were Swiss). They were more than competant most of the time, although the singer struggled with with the opening number ‘Assault Attack’, lacking some of the power and range that Graham Bonnet had in the early 80s. But he coped well enough with Gary Bardens’ and Phil Mogg’s songs, and anyway, it wasn’t the unknown singer what the 400-odd punters had come to see. It was the blond german playing that iconic Flying V.

And he was both sober and absolutely brilliant. It’s clear when he’s on form he’s lost none of his ability to reel off the incredible solos that blew me away when I first heard his music a quarter of a century ago. The setlist was a bit of a surprise; while I expected to hear ‘Rock Bottom’ and ‘Doctor Doctor’, I hadn’t expected half the set to be UFO numbers like ‘Let it Roll’ and ‘Too Hot to Handle’. The other half was early MSG material, mostly from the first two albums, including, of course, ‘Attack of the Mad Axeman’.

While Michael is still fighting his demons, he seems have them at bay for the time being. Let’s hope he stays that way, and continues to give performances like this one.

As has been widely reported in the media, Planet Rock, the digital classic rock station, is likely to close unless the current owners can find a buyer.

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with the station. When I first bought a DAB radio I used to listen to it quite a bit, but I gradually got bored with it as they seemed to play the same limited playlist of songs over and over again, so it got ignored in favour of the good old CD player.

In the last few years, Rock (as opposed to that watered-down genre of music called “indie”) has undergone a revival; there’s a huge number of recent bands producing the sort of music that sits comfortably alongside the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd that dominates Planet Rock’s playlist. Would have been nice to hear any of the bands I’ve blogged about over the past few years on the air.

Yesterday was the official release date (I think) of the retail edition of Fish’s excellent “13th Star”. So why did Nicky Horne play the hoary old “Market Square Heroes” rather than something off the new album on his show last night? Sort of sums the station up, really.

No definite release date for the album “Visionary Position”, but Panic Room are finally hitting the road.

• April 11th – Lydney Town Hall (support: Mermaid Kiss)
• April 12th – Classic Rock Society, Herringthorpe Leisure Centre,
  Rotherham (support: The Dreaming Tree)
• April 13th – The Point, Cardiff (support: Mermaid Kiss)
• April 17th – Bar Riga, Southend-on-Sea
• April 19th – The Peel, Kingston-on-Thames (double headline with Jump)

Time and finances probably mean I’m only going to be able to make one of these, not sure which of them it will be. Rotherham is the closest, but one of the two with Mermaid Kiss is looking tempting.

Charlie Stross has been driven to this:

I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.

As I’ve said before, there’s only one thing to do. Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. (Actually, Charlie’s plot summary sounds a little bit like the plot of Iain Banks’ Complicity)

Sometimes, you just do need to spend the whole of Sunday afternoon listening to Marillion albums. I got through this lot over the course of six and a half hours.

• Marillion.com
• Somewhere Else
• Marbles
• Anoraknophobia
• Afraid of Sunlight
• Seasons End

Some of those I hadn’t listened to for ages, and I’d forgotton how great those albums are. I still love the much-maligned Anoraknophobia (nothing containing ‘Quartz’ or ‘The is the 21st Century’ can possibly be considered a bad album), and even dotcom, which I used to hate, has got better over time. And the oldies AoS and SE (the last of which is 19 years old!) haven’t dated at all.