It’s never a good thing when a new edition of a classic album expands a previous reissue, and fans who already shelled out for a smattering of extra material have to buy the same stuff and then some, with this … Continue reading
The post THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT Reformat “Tales” For The 50th Anniversary appeared first on DMME.net.
Silence has a talent for passing itself off as peace. Two people can share a room, exchange the necessary pleasantries, and conduct an entire argument without troubling the air between them. Inside, every withheld accusation is already gathering speed. Given enough time, even “How was your day?” can begin to sound like a contact sport.
Milan quartet October take that condition onto the ice in their video for Universe. The fourth single from their debut album, Dancing Like an Idiot, out now through Waddafuzz! Records, follows the uncomfortable distance between what a relationship looks like from the outside and what its participants are putting themselves through within it. A frozen surface can conceal considerable commotion, and October have enlisted a hockey team to give those private collisions a public airing.
The song itself has a supple, sophisticated swing. A rhythmic bassline brings the new wave funk of Roxy Music and Japan to mind, its firm articulation keeping the groove grounded as sustained guitar tones stretch above it. The snare lands at deliberate intervals, leaving generous space around each strike. There is a progressive streak in the arrangement, a willingness to let the instrumental passages stretch and change shape without losing the underlying rhythm.
Gianluca Villa sings in a silky upper register reminiscent of Peter Gabriel, his measured delivery building to increasingly impassioned peaks on the line “A Message from the stars.” A gentle guitar jangle carries the song forward, lifting some of its emotional weight. A string interlude zigzags through the arrangement as the vocal rises into a high croon, and tension builds until the full force of the performance comes crashing back.
Directed and edited by Fabrizio Grasso, with concept and production by Davide Debenedetti for Filmico, the video makes that division visible. October perform on the rink beneath bright backlights, framed against rows of empty seats, while members of Sgularat Hockey Club Milano skate around them in yellow and black. The musicians hold their positions as the players accelerate, compete, and cut across the space between them. Pads, helmets, and sticks give anger and frustration a physical vocabulary; the ice supplies the emotional temperature.
There is something both funny and painfully apt about bringing protective equipment into a love song. Here, the action surrounding the band becomes the argument nobody is having aloud: misunderstandings, thwarted attempts at connection, and the helplessness of trying to reach someone who has become difficult to recognise. Grasso lets the rink carry the metaphor, its broad white expanse accommodating all that activity without offering much warmth.
Watch the video for Universe below:
October formed in Milan in 2024, bringing together musicians whose backgrounds include Grandi Animali Marini, Il Fieno, NOA, and Egokid, alongside collaborations with Veracrash and I Ministri. Villa handles guitar and vocals, joined by bassist Dario Giordano, drummer Paolo Soffientini, and synth player Davide “dEbE” Debenedetti. Their debut was recorded at Casamedusa with Francesco Campanozzi and Frigo Studio with Francesco Ferrari, then mixed and mastered by Paolo Mauri.
Released on March 30, 2026, Dancing Like an Idiot is available digitally and on vinyl. Listen to Universe below and order the album here.
Follow October:
The post “A Message From the Stars” — Milan Art-Rock Quartet October Put Love on Ice in Their Video for “Universe” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone
There is a particular corner of heavy music where dream and nightmare become hard to tell apart, a place where the shimmer of shoegaze and the fury of post-black metal sit uneasily side by side, and it is there that Cloudy Skies have pitched their tent. Four years on from their debut they with Bury Me Beneath The Stars.
This is very much a self-contained vision which honestly plays as one continuous after-dark odyssey rather than a collection of songs. Fluffy Darkness opens proceedings with a deceptively soft title for a song so steeped in unease. Inspired by the French science fiction writer Daniel Walther, it follows a sleepless passenger aboard a ghost train hurtling through a darkness that feels almost alive, and the music mirrors that motion, its rhythm more angular and propulsive than you might expect from a band so in love with texture. Clean, chiming guitars ring out over the top like lamplight flickering past a carriage window, while Forest’s vocals shift from hushed confession to ragged howl. It is a striking first impression, at once disorientating and strangely comforting, and it establishes the push and pull that defines everything that follows. Putting something this restless up front is a bold statement of intent.
Depth Spell, the album’s lead single, and at over ten minutes it is the record’s longest and most fully realised piece. Drawing on the myth of the siren and, rather wonderfully, on a childhood fixation with Smoke City’s Underwater Love and the Levi’s advert it soundtracked, it imagines drowning not as tragedy but as a kind of willing surrender. The song builds with real patience, glistening clean passages slowly darkening as the weight accumulates, until the full force of the band’s post-metal heft crashes in like a wave breaking overhead. Pettersson’s drumming is crucial here, steering the shifts in intensity with precision rather than bombast. When it finally recedes, you feel genuinely submerged, which is surely the point. A magnificent piece of slow-motion storytelling that justifies every one of its minutes.
Living Inside A Dream follows directly on from that descent, an ambient instrumental penned entirely by Simon that drifts on layers of hazy synth and sampled pedal steel. In lesser hands a track like this might feel like filler, but here it works as a vital moment of decompression, the listener left floating in the aftermath of the previous song’s undertow before being gently nudged onward. The pedal steel in particular lends a faintly Americana-tinged melancholy that is as unexpected as it is effective, evoking the vast, cinematic end of post-rock. Understated, beautiful and entirely necessary.
Lights Of The Night is where things take a darker, more cinematic turn. It was the second single to emerge, and a bold choice it was too. A love letter to the enigmatic women of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch’s films, it casts its muse as a figure who might be spirit, siren, or something stranger altogether, luring the narrator off course through the small hours. Rotten Sound’s Keijo Niinimaa is the album’s wild card, and his raw, throat-shredding contribution is a jolt to the system, dragging the song into far more abrasive territory than its dreamy surroundings might suggest. The accompanying video leans fully into its Lynchian inspiration, even nodding to Twin Peaks: The Return, and the song itself has that same unsettling quality of something lovely slowly turning sinister.
Bury Me Beneath The Stars is easily the albums emotional core. Telling of a wandering soul, steered through the night by neon and phantoms, who asks to be returned to the heavens once their journey is over, it is the record’s most affecting moment. Nature Morte’s Chris Richard brings a ghostly, anguished edge to the vocals, his presence adding extra gravity as passages of delicate, shimmering atmosphere give way to bursts of genuine black metal savagery. It is the clearest demonstration of what Cloudy Skies do best: making fragility and ferocity feel like two sides of the same coin.
Birdsong was Composed entirely by Forest on synthesisers, it is a gentle, airborne piece in which the call of a bird leads the listener through old-growth woodland, carrying a wistful longing for the kind of freedom we can only ever admire from below. After the emotional intensity of the title track, its arrival feels like dawn breaking after a long and troubled night, a moment of quiet restoration rather than a grand finale. Some may find it an understated way to end, but it fits the album’s dreamlike logic perfectly.
A Room For Dreams. Built around circling melodic figures and gauzy textures, it offers a sanctuary for the mind, a place where the weight of the preceding songs can finally lift. In many ways it feels like the true ending, bookending the journey that Fluffy Darkness began and easing the record’s sadness into something gentler and more hopeful.
The guest appearances are deployed with real intelligence, each adding a new colour rather than simply grabbing a headline, and Forest’s production gives both the clean passages and the eruptions room to bloom. It is not a record for those who want their heaviness delivered in neat three-minute parcels, but for anyone willing to switch off the lights and give themselves over to it, it offers a genuinely transporting experience.
A haunting, hypnotic and quietly devastating second album that drifts between reverie and ruin. Cloudy Skies have found their voice, and it is one well worth getting lost in.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
The post Album Review: Cløudy Skies – Bury Me Beneath The Stars appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone
Belgium has never been short of death metal muscle, but few of its bands have climbed as steadily as Carnation who spent their early years building a fearsome live reputation, touring Brazil alongside Pestilence, and landing a deal with Season of Mist along the way. That partnership yielded Chapel Of Abhorrence in 2018 and Where Death Lies in 2020 before 2023’s Cursed Mortality took a bold left turn, its sprawling title track flirting with synths and even clean vocals. Now, with no label in the picture, comes Symphony In Flesh, a self-released fourth full-length and pitched, quite deliberately, as a homecoming.
After the detours of the last record, the band have made no secret of wanting to rediscover what first lit the fuse and Blackmouth wastes no time on pleasantries, booting the door off its hinges with the churning, tremolo-laced aggression that has become Carnation’s calling card. Lyrically it takes aim at the ceaseless criticism and negativity of social media, and Duson spits the subject out with real contempt, his gutturals sitting low and thick in the mix. The twin guitars owe a clear debt to the Swedish and Floridian schools without ever sounding like a tribute act. A ferocious opening salvo.
Flesh-Eating Frenzy is the shortest track and appropriately, the most feral. Driven by a pummelling D-beat and littered with frantic lead work, it follows a killer who eats his victims in a bid to borrow their thoughts and memories, subject matter that would have Chris Barnes nodding approvingly. Vincent Verstrepen is the star turn, battering away with punk-fuelled abandon. Over before it has begun, and all the better for it.
Title Track Symphony In Flesh keeps the bloodletting going, the title track crawling inside the head of a serial killer and lingering there with uncomfortable relish. At barely three and a half minutes it is lean rather than grandiose, lurching between crushing mid-paced sections and bursts of blasting fury, with riffs that carry genuine hooks beneath the grime. Compact, nasty and, crucially, memorable, it is a fine example of the economy this record prizes.
Kingdom Of Dreams was the album’s opening single back in April, and it remains a solid choice. Rather than leading with speed, it rolls in on a lumbering, head-nodding gait, its central riff the sort you will be humming against your will by the third play. The weight here comes from heft rather than velocity, the band happy to let the song stalk rather than sprint, and it shows a group comfortable enough in their own skin not to rush. Bolt Thrower devotees, take note.
Labyrinth Of Silence drags the listener deeper underground. Its twisting structure lives up to its name, riffs doubling back on themselves as the tempo shifts between suffocating crawl and full-throttle assault, while Heylen’s production keeps everything clear enough to follow yet filthy enough to feel properly rotten. The bass provides a grimy undertow throughout, and the result is one of the album’s most shadowy and enveloping passages.
Towards Death is as blunt as its title suggests and every bit as effective. A straight-ahead bruiser built for the pit, it marries a galloping, almost thrash-inflected rhythm to some of Duson’s most venomous delivery on the record, a reminder that for all the talk of growth, Carnation have never lost sight of the primal joy of a riff that makes your neck ache the next morning. Expect it to become a live staple.
Twisted Visions turns its gaze to the grip of modern addiction, and there is a fittingly queasy, nightmarish edge to the music, the band toying with discordance before snapping back into lockstep brutality. Verstrepen and Vervoort weave harmonised leads through the chaos, producing some of the most impressive guitar work on the album: old-school death metal played by musicians who have picked up an awful lot of craft along the way.
Boundless Pathways offers one last short, sharp blast before the grand finale, laden with chugging menace and sudden acceleration that keep the momentum up rather than winding things down. It may be the least heralded track here, but it does exactly what the record needs at this point, bridging the compact brutality of what came before and the epic that follows.
Legacy Of The Forefathers is where Carnation truly stretch out, and at well over eleven minutes it comfortably outstrips even the title track of Cursed Mortality. Rather than padding, it unfolds patiently, brooding passages giving way to surges of familiar savagery, the band shifting gears with real confidence. If the rest of the album is about getting back to basics, this is proof that the ambition of the previous record has not been abandoned, merely hammered back into shape. The closing minutes are the heaviest and most dramatic on the album, and they leave you sitting in the aftermath, slightly winded. A towering close.
Symphony In Flesh is not the sound of a band clinging nostalgically to the past but of one using their foundations as a springboard, and the result is the most assured and well-rounded Carnation record to date. Going it alone could easily have produced something compromised; instead, it sounds like freedom, five musicians answering to nobody but their own instincts. It is lean, mean and gloriously ugly, with enough craft beneath the carnage to keep you coming back. It may not reinvent the wheel, but it was never meant to; it simply rolls that wheel over you, repeatedly.
A savage, self-assured homecoming that keeps one eye on the old ways and the other on the horizon: brutal, bloodthirsty,and built to last. Carnation have never sounded more like themselves.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
The post Album Review: Carnation – Symphony In Flesh appeared first on The Razor's Edge.
Queen have released a live video of Crazy Little Thing Called Love, filmed just two weeks before Freddie Mercury‘s final show with the band.
The clip comes from the 4K version of Queen’s 1987 concert movie Queen Live In Budapest, which has been restored from the original 35mm footage by Sir Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production facility in New Zealand.
Now titled Queen: Budapest, the film is currently enjoying a limited run in cinemas worldwide, and will be released on double CD, DVD, Blu-ray and triple vinyl on October 30.
Queen: Budapest was filmed in July 1986 at the Népstadion in Budapest, Hungary, and was the first time a Western rock band had taken a stadium show behind the Iron Curtain.
“We were so tight by then, we were able to signal to each other subconsciously where we were going to go,” guitarist Brian May tells Classic Rock. “We were at the absolute peak of functioning as a band.”
Over the following fortnight, the band would play in France and three shows in Spain, before Freddie Mercury’s grand finale at Knebworth in Hertfordshire, UK.
“I distinctly remember backstage after Knebworth, Freddie with a drink in his hand, saying: ‘I can’t do this any more after this,’” May tells Classic Rock. “We all looked at him as if to say ‘Okay,’ because that was the kind of stuff Freddie would always say. But I think at that point he knew his life was going to change radically and he wouldn’t be able to do it any more.”
“Knebworth was our last show with Freddie, and it was flawless,” adds drummer Roger Taylor. “I remember thinking: ‘God, it’s so easy!’ But nobody thought to record it.”
Brian May and Roger Taylor are interviewed at length about Budapest and Knebworth in the new issue of Classic Rock, which is published tomorrow (October 9) and available to order online now.
Queen: Budapest is available to pre-order now. For cinema screenings, visit queenbudapest.com.
The sonic drip-feed has begun.
The post A Perfect Circle Confirmed For 2027 ‘Sonic Temple’ Festival appeared first on Theprp.com.
Due out in December.
The post Bush’s “Razorblade Suitcase” To Receive 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition appeared first on Theprp.com.
There is a particular kind of youthful ambition that treats a synthesizer’s limitations as somebody else’s problem. If the arrangement feels crowded, another drum track might settle the argument; if the equipment begins to struggle, perhaps it needs to be programmed harder. Baltimore’s Pygmy Children remember their earliest recordings with the affectionate candor of two people who have since learned exactly what they were putting their machines through. More than thirty years later, those experiments are getting a fresh listen.
Out now through Re:Mission Entertainment, Malignant: Redux revisits the electro-industrial duo’s 1994 debut album, Malignant, and the preceding 1993 EP, Facedown. Released October 2, the collection brings brothers Pete and Brian Roper back to the recordings that introduced them to the American industrial underground, with the digital edition collecting both releases in full.
Originally recorded at Hit and Run Studios in Rockville, Maryland, with engineer Steve Carr, the material has received its first official remaster from Jeff Mortimer at JM Mastering. Brian Roper supplies the Redux artwork, completing a return to a period when the duo’s appetite for dense arrangements regularly outpaced the resources at their disposal.
The brothers describe those sessions with refreshing frankness:
“Admittedly, the record sounds pretty raw. We were novices trying to create something multi-layered and frenetic, working with what we had and probably not fully knowing what the hell we were doing, just going for it. Some of the synths were being pushed to the point of voice exhaustion, while multiple drum tracks pounded away simultaneously. Looking back, some editing was probably in order, but the intention was always there. We may not have hit the target exactly, but the aim was definitely there.”
That willingness to admit the excess is part of the appeal. Their account describes two musicians learning through accumulation, pursuing an idea until the equipment itself began to object. The early titles suggest a similarly restless approach: Core moves between Resistance and Meltdown, while Facedown appears in Reflex, Manic, Bootstamp, and Dead versions across the digital collection. Even the track listing seems reluctant to leave an experiment alone.
For Re:Mission founder Wes Turner, the release also carries a personal connection. Pygmy Children helped shape his taste in dark electronic music during the 1990s; three decades on, his label is releasing both their new work and these formative recordings. Turner now gets to put the records that helped educate him back into other listeners’ hands.
Listen to Malignant : Redux below:
Pygmy Children first surfaced with Facedown on Noname/Noslogan Productions, following it with Malignant before moving on to Deconstruct, released by Cleopatra in 1995, and Low Life Dream, issued through Sub/Mission Records and Out Of Line in 1998. After years away, the brothers returned in 2025 through Re:Mission with Coincidental Strategies, accompanied by singles including I Have No Name and Signal Unknown.
Their recent single Proof in Lies, which we covered in August, leads their forthcoming fifth studio album, Into The Silence. With new material underway, Malignant : Redux offers a timely return to the duo’s beginnings. The brothers can now afford to smile at their early excesses, though the synthesizers they used back then may still be entitled to an apology.
Malignant : Redux is available digitally and on CD via Re:Mission Entertainment. Order here or find additional listening options here.
Malignant : Redux digital track listing:
Follow Re:Mission Entertainment:
The post Baltimore Electro-Industrial Duo Pygmy Children Revisit Their Earliest Recordings on “Malignant : Redux” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.