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Michael Bird

ALBUM: Hands Like Houses – ‘Dissonants’

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A handful of silly song titles on their Ground Dweller debut album aside, Hands Like Houses have never really fit in with the Rise-core breakdown-pop brigade. They’ve never been content to settle for the base elements employed by their colleagues, instead drawing on electronics that flesh out atmosphere (rather than fulfilling gimmick quotients) and lead […]

Cemetery Sun

Michael Bird 0
For Fans Of: The Neighbourhood, Bastille, PVRIS
Hometown: Sacramento, California

ALBUM: Panic! at the Disco – ‘Death of a Bachelor’

Michael Bird 0
Las Vegas, Nevada. One of America’s great havens of excitement, excess and entertainment, it’s become fertile ground for modern rock bands with The Killers, Five Finger Death Punch and Imagine Dragons all hailing from the city. Perhaps best characterising it was the carnival madness of Panic! at the Disco, who emerged in 2005 with all […]

ALBUM: Coheed and Cambria – ‘The Color Before the Sun’

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Some bands try and sound otherworldly; others construct entire fictional universes to place their songs in. Coheed & Cambria have proven over the course of seven LPs that they have more imagination and creativity than almost every other band under the sun, not only in the “Amory Wars” storyline that runs through their back catalogue […]

ALBUM: Parkway Drive – ‘Ire’

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Many are the bands that can’t effectively reproduce their studio sound in a live setting; few are those who excel live to the point they can’t recreate the magic on record. Parkway Drive might be the biggest single example of the latter – each of their gigs is a ceremony of sonic intensity, mosh nirvana. […]

ALBUM: Bring Me the Horizon – ‘That’s the Spirit’

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We’re a long; long way from Count Your Blessings. Deathcore, once upon a time appearing poised to infect the mainstream, is now all but banished to underground purgatory, Suicide Silence its sole surviving genuine heavyweights. But while the genre they’ve long since abandoned decays around them, its one time poster boys Bring Me the Horizon […]

ALBUM: Crossfaith – ‘Xeno’

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Considering the furore surrounding Babymetal, it’s a wonder more people haven’t taken notice of Japan’s far more serious recent metal export. Coming to the attention of the Western world via their killer Zion EP, Crossfaith stood out among the electronicore masses thanks to the strikingly organic fusion of the heavy and the synthesised, and the […]

ALBUM: The Weeknd – ‘Beauty Behind the Madness’

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2011 was a weird, weird year for music. Its best rock record was released by a band that wouldn’t exist fourteen months later; Adele went from recognisably gifted soul songstress to the biggest artist of the 21st century. A young man named Abel Tesfaye, meanwhile, would dub himself The Weeknd and put out three – […]

ALBUM: Ghost – ‘Meliora’

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There isn’t enough mystery left in music. The internet handily killed it for the most part, and while the 21st century fan takes relish in discovering their favourite bands’ Netflix preferences on Twitter and absorbing daily photos of their pets when they’re not on the road, it’s a process that’s helped to destroy some of […]

ALBUM: Stray From the Path – ‘Subliminal Criminals’

Michael Bird 0
At what point did modern metalcore morph into the hardened remaster of nu metal that now dominates the vanguard of heavy music? Its biggest hitters – Bring Me the Horizon, Of Mice & Men, Motionless in White – are embracing the nu as scene godfathers Slipknot and Linkin Park make steps back to their earlier […]
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