Review: Shinedown – EI8HT Atlantic Records – May 29th, 2026 Reviewer – Jason Hopper Shinedown return to the scene with ‘EI8HT‘, an eighteen-track release that, based on the singles thus far, sounded very promising. Single releases these days are bizarre to my old school sensibilities. ‘Dance Kid Dance’ and ‘Three Six Five’ were released sixteen […]
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If any contemporary guitarist can be said to wear a lot of hats and wear them well, it is John 5. Indeed, the former Marilyn Manson and current Mötley Crüe guitarist has not encountered a genre or style of music he cannot seem to play effortlessly.
Words: Kahmel Farahani
Photography: Aggie Anthimidou
The last time John 5 graced the UK with his presence was during The Crüe’s last stadium show at Wembley. They also played a secret warm-up show in The Underworld, and it is here that he has returned for a highly anticipated solo show.
The Underworld is packed tonight, and the venue putting on a Marilyn Manson playlist over the PA before the show is a nice touch.
From the opening shredding of Wicked World to the superb Mötley Crüe medley at the end, tonight’s set was a masterclass in guitar playing, showmanship, and pure musical versatility. On stage, it’s only John 5 and his drummer, and the sound stays flawless even when it gets loud.
The way John 5 transitions effortlessly between crushing riffs, country-inspired chicken picking, bluesy jazz and full-on speed demon shredding is astounding.
He even attempts some open tuning before breaking a string and laughing. “I never break strings,” declares John 5 with a big grin. Switching from one Telecaster to another, he is right back at it.
Highlights included the speedy tapping and shredding of The Ghost, the insane precision of Six Hundred And Sixty Six Pickers In Hell, CA, and a surprisingly beautiful take on Georgia (On My Mind) and How High The Moon.
If anything, it is reminiscent of somebody like Les Paul himself, moving between the beautiful melodic and deceptively fast and complex, with only the guitar between himself and the crowd.
In John 5’s case, there is also a dollop of brilliantly schlocky horror movie tropes thrown in. From the changing Frankenstein monster masks, one pulled back to reveal the next, to the mini guitar and skull on a mic stand, it adds a tongue-in-cheek joy that stops the night from turning into anything self-indulgent.
John 5 tips his hat to Queen, jamming Crazy Little Thing Called Love, and also to his time with a certain Mr Manson. Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) only goes for a few notes before the entire crowd sings along.
It is over all too quickly. Those songs sit easily next to his own songs like Fiend, Deviant, and You Me And The Devil Makes Three. When John 5 wants to shred, there are very few who can keep up.
John 5 takes the microphone briefly and thanks the crowd for being here. “I’m enjoying this so much, even with the jet lag,” he says with a smile.
The atmosphere at The Underworld is electric, intimate enough to really appreciate the technical brilliance on display, but loud enough to keep proceedings thrilling. John 5 takes a bow and decides to end with a crowd-pleaser.
The Mötley Crüe riff medley (Live Wire, Too Fast For Love, Shout At The Devil, Home Sweet Home, Girls Girls Girls and Dr Feelgood) is worth the price of admission alone, and it is the perfect way to end on a bang.
Let’s hope John 5 starts making the UK a regular part of his touring schedule, as tonight’s show was nothing short of superb, and a ghoulishly good time to boot.
Testament – Practice What You Preach Remastered (Nuclear Blast) [Simon Black]
Wir fliegen immer weiter
Wie zwei Schatten durch die Nacht
Auf der Flucht vor dem Morgengrauen
Wir fliegen immer höher
The newly anointed Kalte Steine come out of Leipzig like cold breath rising off its foundations: cellar air, frozen memory, and German syllables striking cobblestone and concrete. It is a fitting birthplace for such music, an old city of stone, history, and black-clad pilgrimage, where Wave-Gotik-Treffen turns the streets each year into one of the world’s great gatherings of the gothic faithful. Across four singles — Shattered, Dysthymia, Wüste aus Beton, and Kinder der Nacht — the project sketches a world of private fracture, nocturnal flight, and civic numbness, where romance curdles into ruin, and the outside world feels like a machine learning how to forget the people trapped inside it. These songs move through darkwave with their coats buttoned to the throat: lean, glacial, severe, and lit by the small, doomed glow of people trying to feel something before morning comes.
Kalte Steine’s world is isolation, inner struggle, and emotional detachment rendered in stark monochrome: sleepless nights, quiet inner collapse, that ugly little private cinema behind the eyes where every mistake gets a midnight rerun. The mood carries the chill of distance; of a society gone numb around the edges, of people speaking from behind glass, feigning connection.
“Kalte Steine is a way for me to externalize my inner world – a mix of personal struggle and the atmosphere of a society that often feels distant, numb, and almost unreal,” he says. “The songs live somewhere between inner conflict and a cold, dystopian outside world, where both begin to blur into each other. Even when the songs are written from a third-person perspective, they also reflect parts of myself.”
Shattered depicts a woman broken by old wounds, bodily scars, unanswered questions, and the feeling of having no escape. She retreats into dreamlike darkness, where pain briefly disappears and life feels whole again. Waking returns her to collapse, fragmentation, and the fading remains of her inner light. The song walks the corridor between private fracture and public decay, where the self starts to resemble a necropolis. Sung in alternating German and English, the song carries some of the glacial absurdity and deadpan chill of Grauzone’s Eisbär, though stripped of that song’s strange new wave mischief and pushed toward something more inward and severe. There is a little Joy Division in the way the bass seems to walk ahead of the body, dragging the rest of the song through a room with no windows, and a familiar bloodline running through Lebanon Hanover, She Past Away, Molchat Doma, and French Police, but Kalte Steine has the sense to keep the arrangement lean. The guitar draws its thin silver line, the rhythm moves with the steady resignation of a train leaving a city in which you have already failed.
The other songs deepen the record’s sense of private catastrophe and nocturnal escape. Dysthymia, a taut, minimalist post-punk track laced with post-punk gloom, studies a woman sealed within a cold interior life, where consolation remains visible yet unreachable. Its imagery is spare and severe: empty rooms, distant candles, bodies moving like husks through the street. By the end, feeling itself has hardened, and what once carried warmth has become mineral, mute, and almost beyond rescue.
Wüste aus Beton, with its almost piano-like guitar strumming melancholia, brings the horror back to the city like a somber dream. Smoke, rain, concrete, tired neon, and blank faces form a civic purgatory in which the individual is gradually absorbed into the greater machine. The deep vocals guide a bleak journey through a place drained of color and purpose, one body among many, lost in the gray arithmetic of modern life.
The haunting Kinder der Nacht, with its ascending, cobwebbed melodic motif, turns from inward collapse toward gothic flight. Two figures move through the night as companions and fugitives, bound by affection, hunger, and exile from the daylit world. The song gives them the grandeur of doomed creatures in an old horror engraving: hunted by emissaries of light, sustained by moonlit motion, and destined to perish together when morning arrives.
Listen to Kalte Steine’s singles below:
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The post “Wir sind Kinder der Nacht” — Leipzig Darkwave Project Kalte Steine Wanders Through Collapse, Decay, and Gothic Bleakness appeared first on Post-Punk.com.