Band of the Week: Sleepbringer, Silver Loves Mercury and more!

Why hello thar, lovelies. Sorry Band of the Week's been a bit AWOL the last few weeks - blame revision and my parents' poor internet connection. To make up for it, let's have a nice big BotW feature, shall we?

Let's kick off with some doom metal in the form of Canadian band Sleepbringer. Check out the only music I've been able to find by them, Compendium:


Next up,Texas-based hard rockers Silver Loves Mercury. Wonderfully dirty, female fronted sleaze. Just a Facebook link for these guys - HERE. Well, there's some videos too, but they're not the best quality, so that'll have to do.

Then, because I finally got round to looking them up a few weeks back, let's have the delicious Alice In Chains. Grungy goodness. Streams of some tracks can be found on their site HERE. Let's also have a video. Here's Would? from the album Dirt.

Following on, Ivyrise - pop rock loveliness from the main support band on McFly's recent UK tour. Here's latest single Line Up The Stars from their self-titled debut album.

And finally, the most awesome With Knives, a new(ish) project from Josh Newton (of numerous bands, including Every Time I Die) and Joe Trohman (yes, that dude from Fall Out Boy). Stoner rock? Probably. Not an area I'm overly familiar with, but I've just seen a comparison (from a trusted dude) to QOTSA and Baroness. I'm going to take that as a good sign. Here's their just-released debut EP, Schadenfreude:


Will that do, or would we like more scrumminess? More?

One more. Not exactly a band, but this is from the guys at Hat Films who do gaming videos on YouTube. They make pretty much all of the music for their vids and this materialised out of a recent Minecraft video.

Hopefully Band of the Week should go back to being regular now I have a decent net connection again.

Randomness: 20 years since Nevermind

I think we can safely say I am not the biggest Nirvana fan. That said, I do have a bit of a soft spot for them and this Saturday 24th September marks 20 years since the release of their iconic album Nevermind. So I thought I'd just share some of my favourite bits of Nirvana. Let's start with this gem of a performance on Top Of The Pops.



On the off chance that the story isn't as well known as I think it is, bands had to "play" to a backing track at the time - the only live element was the vocals. So Kurt Cobain decided to sing in the style of Morrissey (of The Smiths). It's probably worth pointing out that several years prior, The Smiths had been in the same situation, so Morrissey had taken to the stange with a bunch of gladioli and proceeded to wave them about while sort of taking part in the song.

Next up, Heart-Shaped Box and In Bloom, my two favourite Nirvana tracks.

And next, I highly recommend checking out Kerrang!'s Nevermind Forever CD (it's on the front of the magazine this week). The entirety of Nevermind covered by a variety of bands. It's pretty good - some have worked better than others, obviously. Frank Turner's take on On A Plain is one of the best, while We Are The Ocean's Sliver (which was released in between Nevermind and In Utero) is pretty weak, but overall, it's just a good fun album. No, it's never going to live up to the original, but it's decent in its own right.

And then I think we just have to finish with what is probably Nirvana's best known track and the one that catapulted them to superstardom. Finish as we started with Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Band of the Week: super-mega-awesome feature... again

Yeah yeah yeah, blog neglect. But anyhoo, I has music scrummies to share.

First, earthtone9 and particularly their new EP For Cause & Consequence. I don't think it's available digitally (and legally) anywhere outside of PledgeMusic, but if you can find somewhere to listen to it, DO IT. And you can always get hold of a physical copy. I only started listening to them after getting their greatest hits compilation free sometime last year and I've still not got round to properly checking out their material, but they're a pretty great British alt-metal band.

Next... hmmm... choices. How's about There For Tomorrow. I only know a couple of songs by them, but they're a decent alt-rock/pop band. Lovely stuff.

That'll do on the artists front. Now for some songs.

Japanese Voyeurs just released their new video for Cry Baby. Awesomeness as always.

Then, there's this epicness, which I already posted yesterday, but it's awesome so I'm posting it again.

And then this, because I think I've fallen in love with the Wicked soundtrack. I should probably point out that I usually hate musicals. Something about them just grates on me, but I love this. And I just had it stuck in my head all the way through my Tasmanian Fauna exam.

Anything else... Lady Gaga's Judas has become a bit of a guilty pleasure. Although, I wouldn't exactly call it a guilty pleasure - I try not to feel guilty about anything I listen to.

And this. I've never listened to Yellowcard and then I got a free sampler from Hopeless Records last week. This track's pretty cool.

And to finish, one of my favourite videos of all time to go with one of my favourite tracks of all time. I'm not much of a fan of Avenged Sevenfold but this is just epic.

For some reason the official video doesn't show up when I search via Blogger. How odd...

Band Of The Week: One-Eyed Doll

Having recently rediscovered the awesomeness of bandcamp.com, I made the mistake of having a random hop through their catalogues. I came across a band by the name of One-Eyed Doll, thought their album art looked interesting so had a listen. I fell in love within two tracks. So, despite telling myself I wouldn't buy any more music for a while (not counting MATM's EP, because I've been looking forward to that for ages), I went ahead and bought 3 albums of scrummy One-Eyed Doll material.

One-Eyed Doll are kinda hard to define. They're female-fronted, that's obvious - vocalist Kimberly Freeman has a brilliant, distinctive voice that puts me in mind somewhat of Romily Alice of Japanese Voyeurs. Style-wise though, there's hard rock, punk and some sort of metal. I mean, some tracks show a very definite thrash metal influence. Not actually thrash metal themselves, but there's that feel there. There's also quite a strong grunge feeling on some tracks. Right old mash of influences, which is wonderful.

It was Freeman's voice that really drew me in - deceptively sweet and yet sometimes so harsh (which is probably what reminded me of Romily Alice). But what caught my attention was the track Be My Friend on the album Monster. It actually made me laugh out loud, which isn't that common a reaction from me with regards to music. It's such a sweet, funny and yet sinister song. It's that that made me fall in love. I didn't need to listen to the rest of the album - I downloaded it there and then, checked out a few of the tracks on their other albums and promptly downloaded Break and Hole as well. Then I discovered this little wonder.

How can you not enjoy that? There's that same fun take on things as there is in Be My Friend. So of course I had to download the You're A Vampire single too. Ahh, new music overdose.

What's wonderful is that on the band's bandcamp, you can pay whatever you want for their albums, including nothing. However tempting it may be to download it for free, I strongly suggest paying for their music - it's well worth the money, and they're the sort of band that actually need your cash.

Damnit, I wish I could see these guys live, but I doubt they'll be coming over to Australia any time soon. I will make do with their awesome albums and the "rockumentary" I found on YouTube. An hour and a half of awesomeness, including bits of live shows. Which look like total epic awesome. When I finally get my arse over to the States, I am totally hunting down at least one One-Eyed Doll show.

So, check 'em out, let me know what you think and pass it on.

Assorted One-Eyed Doll links:
Official site
Myspace
YouTube
Facebook
Last.FM
Bandcamp

Recommended tracks:
From Hole: Scapegoat, Hoochie Mama, Hole, Recipe 4 Success, Wheels On The Bus
From Monster: Be My Friend, Brief Candle, UFO, PAO!, Monster
From Break: Airplane Man, See Jane Run, Cinderblock, New Orleans, Resurrection
You're A Vampire/Battle On! (single/b-side)

Current love: Japanese Voyeurs

So, after that lovely ramble of an introductory blog, I thought I should write about something slightly more interesting. MUSIC! After all, that's why I created this thing. Here goes.

I came across Japanese Voyeurs a few months back. February? March, maybe? Sometime near the beginning of the year, anyways. They were in Kerrang!'s Introducing... article one week and for some reason I decided to check 'em out. Turns out, I pretty much fell in love at first listen. And I'm still not entirely sure what I love so much about them. Romily Alice's vocals are amazing - swinging between an atonal drown and an ear-splitting shriek and yet in between those two extremes, she has such a sweet voice. And the music itself - definitely grunge sounding, but definitely not grunge as most people know it. Most tracks follow the whole "quiet verse, loud, heavy chorus" pattern, which is pretty normal for grunge, but Alice's vocals, combined with some of the more unusual moments of music definitely put them slightly outside of "traditional" grunge. I found one article online which described them as spaz-grunge and as yet, I think that's possibly the best tag I've found. Doesn't apply to all of JV's music, but it'll do for now.

Anyway, having gorged myself on the tracks that were on their myspace page, I decided I needed to download a few tracks, so I headed over to the UK iTunes store, hoping. Bearing in mind, the UK store is notoriously bad at actually having the music I want, but considering Japanese Voyeurs are English, I thought I was in with a good chance of finding something. And I did - That Love Sound/Blush, a double A-side single. Happy times for me. So I played that on repeat. A LOT. I then discovered that the band had the song Dumb available for free download. More happy times. And then I realised that Dumb actually came from an EP - Sicking and Creaming - that was released in 2009. Try as I might, I couldn't find a download for the other two tracks anywhere. I gave up after a while.

A few months later, I set up a group on deviantART for music reviews. A couple of weeks after setting it up, I decided I wanted to review something by Japanese Voyeurs. I looked again for the rest of the Sicking and Creaming EP and once again only came up with physical format - vinyl at that, which is useless because I have no record player. It got to the point where I was posting on Twitter about how annoying this was. It's a good job I did, because their manager got in touch and kindly offered to send me the mp3 files. I could've hugged him. Suffice to say, the review was very positive - you can read it here.

Several months down the line, I discover the band have made Smother Me available for free download ahead of the release of their debut album. This caused a major flailing moment for me, in which there was much squeaking and waving of arms and general hyperventilating. I should point out this is my normal reaction to music. So, now I'm just waiting for the album. And hoping madly that I'll be able to find some way of getting it in Australia.

Smother Me is available for free download via JV's myspace page. As far as I'm aware, no release date has been given for the album, but I'm guessing before the end of the year. Check 'em out, let me know what you think and pass it on.