The Prodigy

This was the band that dragged me out of the guitar angst exile of my youth and made me realise that good music is good and that it should be listened to frequently, at high volume.

Of course it probably helped that my local metal club would frequently spin the likes of Poison and Out of Space; making it definitively okay for metal kids to like bleepy dance music, even before the crossover masterpiece that was/is Fat of the Land.

The sheer quality of their first three records has meant that The Prodigy have struggled at times to live up to their own fearsome reputation. Album number four Always Outnumbered... has some great tunes on it, but also a lot of filler; and whilst most recent effort Invaders Must Die is more of a return to form, it still doesn't set my world on fire (my favourite track is the dub-steppy Noisa remix of Omen on the bonus disc).

That said, it sounds fucking amazing through headphones; and although The Prodigy's inclusion on the line-up for this year's Download festival still isn't enough to make me want to buy a ticket, it means that I won't pity the fools that do buy tickets quite so much.

So in conclusion; festivals are rubbish, genre nazis are fools, The Prodigy are awesome.

Website: http://theprodigy.com/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/theprodigy

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Prodigy/18452288248

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prodigy

Helmet

When it transpired that my shoddy work ethic had resulted in another five "missing" posts by the end of last year, I ended up cobbling together a collection of brilliant tunes from crappy outfits. But prior to that, I had very seriously considered putting together a post with a title along the lines of "Five of the Greatest Bands in the World That Quite Incongruously Haven't Featured on This Piece of Shit Blog Yet" - and Helmet would have been jostling for position at the top of the list.

I got into them around the time of their third album, Betty; so for me, that will always be their defining record against which all others shall be judged. But for most, Helmet's definitive masterwork is the previous 1992 release Meantime, for which they happen to be embarking on a 20th anniversary tour, for which I happen to have purchased tickets, which is largely why they have popped back to the front of my musical consciousness again.

Helmet were, and are, awesome. They are of an age that many modern bands are now citing them as a huge influence, and many have covered their songs - from Pig Destroyer to Deftones.

They are a seminal hardcore band, and you should most definitely give a massive shit about them.

Website: http://www.helmetmusic.com/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/helmetrocks

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/HelmetMusic

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_(band)

Twin Zero

A little while back, the very excellent earthtone9 announced that they reforming to play some shows and put out a record and stuff.

And there was much rejoicing.

Sadly, before they could reform it was necessary for them to split up. This made me very sad, and for a while the world was a bleak and uninviting place. The only slight glimmers of hope came in the form of the various other musical projects that kicked off featuring members of earthtone9; but by and large these could all be filed under the heading "Not earthtone9". It's not that they were particularly bad; it was just hard to listen to stuff that sounded a bit like earthtone9 and not want to be listening to earthtone9 instead.

Twin Zero were the one exception. Even though frontman Karl Middleton's distinctive vocal was an obvious reminder of the earthtone9 glory days, the twin drummer twiddly guitar sprawling space prog of Twin Zero was quite a different proposition.

Twin Zero are apparently still a going concern, although little has been heard of them since the release of the epic The Tomb To Every Hope almost six years ago; and if there's one downside to earthtone9 reforming, it's that it may take even longer for new Twin Zero material to appear.

Website: nope

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/twinzero

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Zero

Free Swim

You can generally tell who was last using the kitchen in my house by the station that the radio is set to.

The Pixie tends to go for Absolute 80's/90's, a dizzying array of forgotten hits that by and large smash all modern music into sequinned dust.

The Frenchie is more of a Jack FM kinda guy. Nice and safe and mostly harmless.

I like BBC Radio 6, a station with so few listeners that it has no target demographic and hence tries to please nobody. The neat thing about that is that they usually play stuff that you've never heard before; and even if it's a bit shit, it's still better than the mundanely familiar. Sort of.

And every so often, you'll hear something that you've never heard before that is really quite splendid - like Free Swim, for example. As far as I can tell, Free Swim are a London-based indie band consisting of at least one person. They have a number of EPs that can be downloaded for free from Bandcamp. Each seems to tell some kind of story; for example, Dennis is about "A budding bromance... inadvertantly derailed by an undeniably lovely girl girl called Sophie Buttercup", while Two Hands is OK is the tale of a man who decides to graft an extra pair of hands to his chest so that he can deal with paperwork more efficiently. Yolanda the Panda is about a panda.

It's all very smashing and whimsical, and utterly the sort of thing that I shouldn't like at all.

Website: http://freeswim.bandcamp.com/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/freeswimswimfree

Wikipedia: nope

All Pigs Must Die

All Pigs Must Die are a band composed of fellows that play in other bands. The traditional term for such an outfit is supergroup.

The trouble with this term is that it kind of has an all-stars vibe to it; there is an implication that each of the aforementioned fellows is already a world famous virtuoso in his own right, and their combining of talents is the kind of earth-shattering event foretold in Sumatran prophecies and heralded by the death of planets.

Which is almost bang on, except that pretty much no-one has ever heard of the bands that these guys usually play in (Converge, The Hope Conspiracy and Bloodhorse). So supergroup perhaps isn't quite right...

But mundanegroup makes them sound kinda boring, splendidgroup sounds sarcastic and prettycoolgroup is a bit non-committal.

I'm going to go with fuckingsavagefacepeelinghardcoremergeforthekillgroup.

Website: http://shirtsanddestroy.com/all_pigs_must_die

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/allpigsmustdie

Wikipedia: nope

Lafaro

These noisy bastards are single-handedly responsible for making my housemate Dom believe that he didn't like And So I Watch You From Afar.

A ridiculous concept, clearly. But as the opening band for their fellow countrymen, Lafaro were so loud that my Dom's delicate ears were annihilated; and he spent the rest of the gig with a pained expression on his face, whimpering about the noise.

This is possibly more indicative of my housemate's desperately low volume threshold, rather than Lafaro's thunderous output; but there's no denying that these guys smash out some pretty hefty riffs.

Maximum rock, minimum fucking about.

Except for all the fucking about.

Website: http://www.lafaro.co.uk/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/lafaro

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafaro

Blak Nite

I first stumbled across this chap a few months back, when the good people at Holy Roar records were kind enough to chuck in a free Tangled Talk label sampler with a load of stuff I'd ordered. There was a whole bunch of cool shit on there, but Blak Nite stood out mainly by virtue of being a great dirty spike of electronica sticking out of a swirling mass of hardcore.

Naturally I forgot about it almost immediately, until some absent-minded trawling through the internets revealed that Blak Nite had released a 10" remix album during the summer. It is of course very splendid indeed; a dark slab of glitchy, sinister electronica that doesn't resort to the sort of dubsteppy wob-by-numbers that seems to be all the rage these days.

Behold!

Website: http://music.tangledtalk.com/album/versionen

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/blaknitemusic

Wikipedia: nope