Cherry Red [Release Date : 24.04.26] Compiled by Scottish film director, cinematographer and writer, Grant McPhee, Something For The Longing is a deep dive into “Scottish Independent Pop”. A 15 year, widescreen snapshot taken as the 20th Century was coming … Continue reading
The post Album review: SOMETHING FOR THE LONGING – Scottish Independent Pop 1985-1999 (3 CDs) appeared first on Get Ready to ROCK!.
Dan Byrne has unveiled his new single Home, taken from his forthcoming debut album This Is Where the Show Begins, due 22 May via Frontiers. The track closes the album on an emotional high, combining cinematic guitars and soaring vocals with deeply personal lyrics about connection and distance.
Dan Byrne explains that Home reflects life on the road, where distance is balanced by emotional connection. The song explores themes of belonging, love, and finding peace despite separation.
“Home closes the album on a grand and emotional scale,” Dan Byrne says. “Musically, it’s vast – cinematic guitars, soaring vocals, and a sense of release that makes it feel like the light breaking through at the end of a storm.
Lyrically, Home is about connection that transcends distance, the kind of love that grounds you no matter how far you roam. It was born out of life on the road: hotel rooms, long drives, and late nights spent under unfamiliar skies, but knowing that somewhere out there, the person you love is looking up at the same stars.
“No matter how far away I am, my partner is my home. We might be on opposite sides of the world, but we’re still under the same sky, the same stars, the same universe. Home is about sitting with the weight of loneliness and finding comfort in the thought that someone is part of you, even when they’re not near. It’s a song about peace, belonging, and gratitude.
“As the final song on the record, Home acts as the emotional resolution to everything that’s come before: the end of the storm, if you will. After exploring conflict, self-sabotage, anger, and pain across the album, this song represents acceptance, stillness, and clarity. It’s a love letter, a homecoming, and a moment of still light in the aftermath of noise.
“Home is where the journey finally lands – not in a place, but in a person.”
Following a successful headline tour with multiple sold-out dates, Dan Byrne will embark on an acoustic record store tour across the UK, as well as appearing at Steelhouse Festival and a full electric show, playing album in full at Jacaranda in Livepool.
His debut album promises a blend of powerful rock energy and emotional depth, marking a significant step in his career. Pre-orders are available from ffm.bio/thisiswheretheshowbegins.
May 22 Glasgow Assai Records (Matinee)
May 22 Edinburgh Assai Records (Evening)
May 23 Newcastle Beyond Vinyl (Matinee)
May 23 Bury Wax & Beans (Evening)
May 24 Sheffield Arundel Emporium (Matinee)
May 24 Oxford Truck (Evening)
May 25 Portsmouth Pie & Vinyl (Matinee)
May 25 Swansea Derricks (Evening)
May 26 London Fighting Cocks (Evening)
May 27 Nantwich Applestump Records (Matinee)
May 27 Leeds Crash Records (Evening)
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Six Feet Under have a, shall we say, contentious reputation. Recent years haven’t seen them at their best; they’ve got their fans but there’s a reason Metal Blade Records turned the comments off on the singles from their last few albums on YouTube.
For me there are two primary problems with Six Feet Under’s output:
1. Barnes inarguable decline as a vocalist
2. A lot of their previous songs are just boring. Rudimentary riffs built with the most obvious note progressions possible, more often than not played at this stultifying mid-paced slog. Whole albums bogged down in molasses of trudging filler.
It’s frustrating, because there are moments within Six Feet Under’s career demonstrating better things that could’ve been. “Haunted” is basic but heavy and broods with sullen menace, “Maximum Violence” has some vile, gritty cuts like “Bonesaw”, “Undead” boasts some livelier, more technically astute riffwork and “Unborn” – especially on it’s front half – is disgustingly malevolent at points like opener “Neuro Osmosis”. While none of those albums are close to perfect, they’re all leagues more inspired than “Next to Die” – and given the calibre of talent at their disposal, it really does feel reasonable to wish the band would do something more interesting.
Let’s start with the good. I’ve read that Barnes has given up smoking – if so, it’s paid dividends because he sounds better here than he has in years, eclipsing the almost unlistenable performance turned in on “Nightmares of the Decomposed”. It’s no “Tomb of the Mutilated” 2.0, or even really on par with the lows attained on, say, “True Carnage”, but he is at least serviceable now, provided he stays within a somewhat cramped range that frays the further he strays from it. And I’m glad about that – the man has had an awful lot of flack regarding his vocals over the years, so hearing him make steps back towards the beast of former repute that carved such a mark into death metal on those early ‘Corpse classics is welcome to an almost absurd degree.
Additionally, Six Feet Under have had some great production jobs in the past – “Commandment” is a rather mediocre album on the whole, but Erik Rutan’s production does at least make repeatedly checking your watch sound crushing, and “Bringer of Blood” sounds immense despite otherwise falling flat. I like the production on “Next to Die” as well – there’s a bullseye between gravelly abrasion and clean legibility, and Six Feet Under land a dart right there, with a burly guitar tone skinned in sandpaper, audible bass warm and arterial below it, and drums popping to the surface like ingrown hairs finally bursting through the skin. While I felt their last album (“Killing for Revenge”) pushed Barnes a bit further back in the mix for unfortunately obvious reasons, he’s more prominent now – befitting of a legend even if this isn’t his finest hour.
But if Barnes is a bit better now, that still leaves the other main malady that besmirches Six Feet Under: their songwriting. There’s not been great strides made. Songs stroll past with leisurely passages of alternate picking at pedestrian tempos, every note and chord progression timeworn in its predictability. All of these men have contributed orders of magnitude more to metal than I have so maybe I’m not best placed to judge, but between the sauntering pace, the simple, conventional riffs, and the unadventurous nature of everything about the album, there felt to be a palpable absence of passion here that became a bit hurtful after a while. Repetition is a serious issue, “Mutilated Corpse in the Woods” being dominated by essentially one drum beat for the entire song (fills and a brief slowdown in the middle aside) and a clutch of brief, humdrum riffs that don’t lack for similarity either. So many songs have individually enjoyable moments but struggle to figure out what to do with them; “Approach your Grave” has two solos herein, the second of which I really liked – but that can’t save a song otherwise built of lithified, lifeless beats and riffs so locked to the 1 and 3 of the 4 count that it’s hard to even call them a groove. If ever a song becomes too interesting, it is brought back to earth and asked to calm down. So it is that “Destroyed Remains” can open with a feisty terrier of a riff with an interestingly necrotic harmonised section, only to then mob it with more lethargic, moseying riffs at half the speed.
It’s a damning form of credit, but the album isn’t generally bad enough to raise passions – up until “Ill Wishes” tries to go all spooky on you with these awkward whisper-growls over echoing acoustic guitar. It really does sound very silly, and while I’m not averse to bands experimenting with their sound, Six Feet Under have tried incorporating vocal styles beyond death growls before with typically unfortunate results (marble-mouthed warbling on “4:20” from the “Warpath” album and a horrific Ice-T feature on a total car crash of a song called “One Bullet Left” from “True Carnage”).
The problem seems to come down to the fact that there’s a need for a spark here; some energy and inspiration to shift this thing out of first gear. These aren’t young guys any more, fine, but Karl Sanders is in his 60s and that last Nile album killed. Cryptopsy’s last was phenomenal too, and Immolation just released “Descent” – surprise, surprise, it rules. Plenty of bands are writing amazing death metal and worrying about their pension at the same time. Six Feet Under on the other hand have always struggled with this dogged lack of impetus that characterises so much of their back catalogue. It’s not that I can’t imagine anyone liking it – apparently they’re the 4th best selling death metal act in the U.S so clearly a fanbase exists – but I personally struggle to see the appeal when, in a tracklist of average-at-absolute-best and narcoleptic at worst material, they still manage to find room for filler in the form of “Skin Coffins” – a compendium of all the most played out, simplistic, tired groove riffs you could ever think of.
There’s a certain lack of inertia that plagues even the best of Six Feet Under’s work; “Undead” notably runs out of steam at the back end for one example. But this album, even if I’d take it over their last two, feels as though it exemplifies that inertia. It feels tired. It feels downtrodden. It’s highlights – a spunky riff here, nifty solo there, a brief fun drum fill – are fleeting and typically can’t make up for the demerits accumulating elsewhere on the songs. Scanning back through the album, the closest I come to a sort of appreciation is probably on “Wrath and Terror Takes Command”, which flows from a morbid doom intro through a number of snaking rhythmic chicanes. It’s still too reliant on stock standard chugging riffs that always go exactly where you expect them to, but I’ll take what I can get on an album that otherwise did very little for me. Still, there is an upward trajectory of a sort going on here; we’re much improved over the dark days of Nightmares of the Decomposed after all. Hopefully Barnes continues to improve, and maybe – just maybe – the band could write some of the true barnburners that are clearly within their collective talents. Until then, I’m sorry guys. I love your legacies. But this isn’t for me.
The post Album Review: Six Feet Under – Next To Die | Death Metal appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
To start, let’s acknowledge that you and I don’t really know each other. This means, among other things, that I can’t say what “war metal” means to you. To some extent, maybe you just throw your hands in the air and say, hey, if it looks like Sarcófago and sounds like Blasphemy and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck playing war metal. But as a genre, it’s a bit slipperier, right? Is it mostly black with some death? Death with some nice blackening? Grind with one too many Ken Burns documentaries and a severe attitude problem? Of course, trying to put boundaries around any musical genre is an abstraction at best, a kind of Saussurian nightmare where a word points not even to what we are currently hearing, but to whatever supposed Platonic ideal we are to assume subsumes the individual expression while also being nothing if not constituted by it.
A revision is necessary: you and I don’t really know each other, but I do know you are already tired of this. Friend, same. Shall we invite Ignobleth to join the conversation? If you just cried aloud, “No! I want to talk more about Ferdinand de Saussure!” kindly leave the hall (but gimme a sly high-five on the way out). So… Ignobleth! They are three people from Italy and on this their debut album, they make a whole lot of fucking good noise! To further tarnish my already-suspect writerly credibility, I don’t even particularly think Ignobleth is playing in the war metal sandbox on Manor of Primitive Anticreation! So, what the fuck, right? Well, try this on for size, toots: whatever style they might be playing, Ignobleth’s excellent album has got me thinking a lot about… visual art.
Just like music, visual art is a big tent, and it’s also just as rife with asininely arcane microdistinctions in lineage, technique, influence, intent, and style. But just to wrap our arms around a more manageable comparison, let’s think about drawing as death metal. Think of a kid fat-fisting a set of crayons in brownish reds and sickly yellow-greens, tongue poking out the side of the mouth while a waxy sheen gathers on the side-heel of the hand. Imagine an evocative, abstract monochrome of charcoal shadings, and then picture a sharp, stark geometry of ballpoint lines and scaffolded angles. All of these are death metal, so of course war metal can be, too, but… it’s mostly scribbles, right? Like, if I listen to war metal while thinking about drawing, I can easily conjure the smell of pencil shavings, the pile of broken graphite tips, the garish and glossy furrows delved into fibrous paper. The point is, all these expressions belong to the same basic artistic idiom, but often the only true way to parse them is to point your perceiving apparatus at them and… see if it moves.
Manor of Primitive Anticreation is satisfying and magnificently destructive across its 44-minute runtime, but of course it is hardly sui generis. When I listen to Ignobleth’s persistent racket, my busted ears mostly hear a kinship with bands like Embrace of Thorns, Blasphemophagher, Demoncy’s Joined in Darkness, Ascended Dead, Archgoat, and Ectovoid. Where some listeners likely find the rough stylistic ballpark that we’re mapping out with that constellation to be relentlessly frantic, in truth the best acts in this milieu are the ones that balance fast, frantic intensity with a relative economy of songwriting. So yes, Ignobleth spends plenty of time mashing their strings and bashing the drumkit with the fervor of an industrial meat grinder on PCP, but within each song, they are moving between a relatively small number of distinct sections with a clear, internal logic.
It is true that hundreds of bands can nail the general sound and aesthetic that Ignobleth displays, but in listening somewhat obsessively to Manor of Primitive Anticreation, the things that set the album apart as a real gem in this crowded and often undifferentiated black/death/war slop scene are: the clarity and intensity of the drumming; the rich, clear production that retains its power even when the band kicks the velocity to 11; the lurching, sometimes aquatic atmosphere of the album, both in its proper songs but also in its well-placed and highly effective interludes; and the robustness of its songwriting. The whole thing works wonderfully as a violent torrent of pure id, so if you want to just let these lashing waves batter you, it’s a feast of raw feeling. But the band’s songs are so smartly written that you can also enjoy it on the level of individual riffs, rhythmic change-ups, and well-mapped arcs.
“Obelisk of Deformity” starts things off with a massive death-doom heft and a patient lead-in before things whip into a full-on frenzy at 1:30 in. “And the Lunar Mass Shatters” is one of the least forgiving tunes on the album, but even here it pulls back for a (heavy) breather midway through and adds some extra layered octave guitar. Elsewhere, at around the 2:30 mark in “Warped Abyssal Architectures,” the band drops into a surprising, nearly funky half-time bridge with some slight guitar bends, and then again just before the 4-minute mark of the album’s closer, I could swear they’re having some fun (especially in the drumming).
The two-part “Proselyte Pig” might be the album’s finest section, though. Part I is a six-minute marathon of various hypnotically rhythmic sections of slipstream-quick drumming and head-nodding low tones, but as it burns out into Part II, the band pivots to an incredibly sparse drum and distorted bass opening, which patiently re-amps up to a core menacing tone. They string you along as if the whole piece will sit in an almost Blut Aus Nord-queasy churn, but then kick the chair out from under you. Listen carefully at about 2:27 for the album’s snakiest, most sneakily melodic riff, but then after that quit worrying about being careful about anything, because you know where you are? You’re in the [manor], baby. And you’re gonna [be anticreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeated].
Bryan Maita’s excellent artwork for Manor of Primitive Anticreation is instructive. At first glance, you might almost mistake it for something in the style of Gustave Doré’s famous wood engravings, especially with the winged figures in the sky. But then the eye settles into the squish factor, with mouths and tentacles and pustulated tree roots, and you consider how the composition could almost lean towards Seagrave-ish architecture. There’s dotting, curling, sideways slashing marks, and if the top leans mystical and ominous, the foreground seethes with playful malevolence. Doesn’t that tell you more than enough about the sounds behind the scenes? Be better than me: shut your trap and listen to Ignobleth. Grind your teeth, bang your head, coat the earth in the penstrokes of your intent.
The post Ignobleth – Manor Of Primitive Anticreation Review appeared first on Last Rites.
As the record celebrates its 20th anniversary—and with an Australian return long overdue—the timing feels significant. It’s been more than a decade since the band last toured down under, and this run isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about bridging the past with everything they’ve become across eight albums and years of evolution.
We caught up with frontman Paul Smith to talk about revisiting A Certain Trigger, the emotional weight of those early songs, and what it means to finally bring this milestone moment back to Australian stages.
RP: Paul, it’s been nearly two decades since you last toured Australia. What does it feel like to finally return at such a milestone moment in the band’s history?
Paul: It feels like a case of now or never! Apparently, our last time in Australia was 14 years ago, which is far too long. We will slip some songs into the set from the albums we have made in the interim years.
RP: A Certain Trigger turns 20 this year — when you revisit those songs, what memories or emotions hit you the hardest?
Paul: Well, the songs are bursting with emotions, so there’s a lot to deal with on stage each night! Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to inhabit the same feelings that the songs were invested with in the first place. With the extra time that has passed, they become quite poignant, and I end up thinking of the person that I was back then. We were young people dealing with a fairly unusual situation, so there were frequent highs and lows. I think about our time on the road, and the people we met along the way. I also have distinct memories of making the record in London with Paul Epworth, which was a voyage of discovery in itself.
RP: The album was Mercury Prize‑nominated and produced some of your most iconic singles. Why do you think Apply Some Pressure, Graffiti, and Going Missing still resonate so strongly with fans today?
Paul: We hoped the songs were both a document of their time and also timeless in some way. Time has thankfully proved that to be the case! I think there’s something very direct and urgent about the songs, both lyrically and melodically, but they also have reflective, thoughtful undertones. Of course, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and we were lucky that the music was deemed acceptable by the mainstream media despite its eccentricities. For some reason, the Zeitgeist was on our side! I think many of our other songs have the same potential for making a deep impact on people, but we have no control over how the music is disseminated, ultimately.
RP: Paul you mentioned that compiling the anniversary reissue felt like stepping into a time machine. What surprised you most when diving back into the archives?
Paul: I think it surprised me how much of the archival material, especially the songs, felt so fresh, like they were made yesterday. It’s quite an unusual feeling to not remember a lot of what went on (due to the 20-year timespan) when other things feel so present.
RP: You’ve described the anniversary tour as both thrilling and a bit scary. What aspects of revisiting your early work feel the most vulnerable or revealing?
Paul: Some of the lyrics are extremely angst-ridden, but I’ve come to terms with it, feeling that it was okay to be like that in your early adulthood. It’s not as if our songs have become less emotionally-driven, but there are perhaps more textures at play these days.
RP: Maxïmo Park has always balanced punk urgency, pop precision, and literary flair. How has that creative identity evolved across eight albums and twenty years?
Paul: Thanks – you’ve summed us up very well! I guess that’s the blueprint for our music, even now, although we’ve tried to evolve with each record. Sometimes the shifts in our music have been subtle; at other times, they’ve been more extreme. We entered the public consciousness fully formed, to some extent, after working away up here in Newcastle before getting signed to Warp Records. Each album has its own character, but it builds on that original blueprint. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes and push ourselves a little bit further out each time.
RP: This tour promises a mix of nostalgia and fresh cuts. How do you approach building a setlist that honours the past while still showcasing who you are today?
Paul: Our drummer, Tom, is in charge of the set list, which he then presents to us for any minor tweaks. I think we always try to find a balance between the well-known songs and a few curveballs that keep both us and the audience on our toes! We’ve always seen ourselves as a pop band at heart, and we want to please the audience by playing songs that they want to hear, but we also think pop music is art and therefore we need to express ourselves and play in a way that excites us, too.
RP: Playing live has always been central to Maxïmo Park. How has your relationship with performing changed since those early, explosive years?
Paul: It’s not as purely hell-for-leather as it once was, but we tend to write songs full of energy, so we’ve made a rod for our own backs! We still see it as the best opportunity to connect with people because there’s something unique about the communal experience of a live concert.
RP: Paul you said the band still feels the same exhilaration stepping on stage as in the beginning, what fuels that energy after two decades together?
Paul: The music itself! Having a real love for what you do is the best fuel for a performance. We do different things outside of the band and that’s always kept it special and fresh. We really appreciate our audience, especially after two decades of people turning up again and again to see us live and continuing to buy our records.
RP: Australian fans have waited a long time for your return. What do you hope they take away from this anniversary celebration when the final song rings out?
Paul: Quite simply, I hope they take away a feeling of joy from the experience!
Tickets On Sale: https://www.destroyalllines.com/tours/maximo-park
The post INTERVIEW: Paul Smith on Maxïmo Park’s Long-Awaited Return to Australia appeared first on The Rockpit.
