Chris Ball
I’m an ageing rocker who has been going to concerts and buying records for over 30 years. I used to write for Metal Hammer, then briefly another magazine that went down to the bottom of the ocean with that fat crook Robert Maxwell.
I gave up for a while. Experimented with listening to dance music, hip hop and indie rock. It broadened my horizons and I had a lot of fun, but when I reached my late 30’s I realised I was living a kind of cultural lie. I love rock music I realised, much of it deeply unfashionable, but fuck it, I’m old enough now not to care. In the meantime I’d become a father, I now have two boys, and accumulated several more tattoos, middle-aged spread and a healthy dislike of modern pop music and the facile celebrity obsessed industry that fuels it.
So I’m an Essex geezer who’s returned to his roots in more ways than one, I live on the coast after having spent 20 years living in East London. Don’t let the tatts and West Ham shirt fool you though. I love Japanese ukiyo-e art and haiku poetry, impressionist art, the works of Alan Moore and Salman Rushdie, botany and bird watching. I still go to gigs as often as my family, liver and bank balance will allow.
My all time favourite bands and artists are Tom Waits, The National, The Drive By Truckers, The Who, Wilco, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Thin Lizzy, Celtic Frost, Slipknot, Public Enemy, Warren Zevon, Queens of the Stone Age, The Handsome Family, AC/DC, Lykke Li, Laura Veirs, Monster Magnet (obvs) Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath.
Recent faves include Bo Ningen, Windhand, Witch Mountain, St Vincent, Lana Del Rey, Public Service Broadcast, Ghost Poet, Triptykon, Matthew E White and Courtney Barnett.
Tell me yours.
Articles by Chris Ball
Ripley Johnson is a superb, unflashy but technically gifted lead player – quicksilver runs and bucolic plucking is all accomplished with seemingly no effort whatsoever, that beatific grin, scarcely leaving his face.
I grab a coffee then head over to catch Corrosion of Conformity, at the Ballroom. . . there’s a celebratory air in the room, people swaying, grinning and grooving in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere all day. Yee, and indeed, Haw! See you next year DesertFest!
Something great is going down in London, this Saturday, and it’s not at Westminster Abbey. It’s Day Two of Desertfest and Camden is heating up. Chris Ball navigates the clouds and the craft beer to give us his ten top-picks.
An absolute triumph, this album is a true work of art and deserves all the plaudits it is bound to receive.
Second album ‘Communion’ shows the band’s growing mastery of progressive song writing.
As profound as you’d ever want a party band to get, Viagra Boys are the drinking man’s thinking band and right now they seem unstoppable.
With no backline, no intro tapes and no dancing mascots, hoods aside, this is as stripped down and unfiltered as metal gets.
With song titles like ‘Party March’, ‘Stöner’s Theme’ and ‘A Million Beers’ you know this album is about bringing the big, hedonistic vibes, and it does that in fine style.
Thankfully we know where we are musically, with this Chicago four-piece…who at times, unashamedly hark back to the golden age of U.S. alt-rock bands of the 1990’s.
Fountain’s music is lush, unknowable, subtle and finely crafted, but it’s also danceable, inviting, catchy and commercial
Born of frustration and misanthropy with the intent to provoke live communion, viciously uncompromising whilst strangely addictive, La Mort Du Sens is typical GNOD music, whilst not sounding quite like anything else they’ve ever done.
Jesse is always looking to the bright side, to the future, to ‘Greener Pastures’ as he does on this record. There are absolutely no duff songs here at all.
Reissued on vinyl, a chance to hear one of the UK’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll outfits at the top of their game. . .
I initially had this album down as a headphones-on-and-eyes-shut, blissed out type of slow burner, but then I played it loud on a proper stereo and it sounded huge! It is huge.
In what is becoming a signature move, Murry’s songs swing, rock and bop, whilst the lyrics remain extremely violent, hyper literate, full of wide ranging references and name drops.
Deathchant are certainly onto something, but at this point it seems too mercurial for them to take a firm hold off, constantly slipping through their oily mitts.
Seems like the more stressful times get the more music Ripley Johnson supplies to counteract them.
You wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t a rock connoisseur, so I urge you to go check out what is definitely Vokonis’ best album to date.
A classier and more mature release than you would expect from only a band’s second release…and it still rocks. Of course it does, it’s on New Heavy Sounds!
Don’t expect it to sit cosily next to your Candlemass records. This music is strange, sometimes difficult. It’s thrills are small, the songs are little secrets, slowly revealed.
