Has it been a good weekend? Hell, yes! Has it been ‘tenth anniversary special’ good? Yes, I believe it has. Lots of good new bands, and some quality returnees. It’s hard to see how it could have been better. Stewart and the team have, I think, outdone themselves this year.

Well, there it is. I said at the beginning that I was going to take a close-ish look at the first StrangeForms, and then just wing it from there, and that’s what I’ve done. . . I think you should seriously consider spending a relatively small number of your Earth Pounds on a ticket, or tickets, for StrangeForms 2025.

STRANGEFORMS FEST will be 10 this spring. That, I think, deserves some kind of retrospective thingy. A look back, if you will. I have no idea whether or not anybody else is going to do it but somebody has to, even if that somebody is me. So, yeah, here it is.

Core Fest 2023 – Day 3Maryhill Halls • Hug & Pint,  Glasgow, 20-08-2023 Photos by Bruce Cowie

Core Fest 2023 – Day 2Maryhill Halls • Hug & Pint,  Glasgow, 19-08-2023Photos by Bruce Cowie

Core Fest 2023 – Day 1Maryhill Halls, Glasgow, 18-08-2023 Photos by Bruce Cowie

Safe to say, however, that this is not a record that will be troubling the Ibiza dancefloors next summer. It’s a thing for solitary enjoyment.

DVNE have been utterly spellbinding. Majestic. They have become something very special. Absolutely, ridiculously, immense.

It’s as if someone else has taken all of my frustration and helplessness and screamed it away into the void for me and has left me cleansed.

This is a damned fine sludge/doom/drone record, and inarguably one of Lovely Wife’s best.

Each and every live gig, good or bad, is a unique experience. It CAN’T be background music, because you are IN it as much as IT is in YOU. I miss the gig scene terribly, and I want it back.

That’s the thing about post-rock. It doesn’t tell you what you should be feeling, it lets you make up your own mind.

The show’s not over. As expected, they’re back, and take us right back to their very beginning with ‘Hurry on Sundown’ . . . and then the quintessential Hawkwind riff-monster, the incomparable ‘Master of the Universe’. This is it. This is what made me love Hawkwind forty-odd years ago, and what is likely to keep me coming back from time to time.

It is unlikely that you will step away from this record humming one of its merry tunes. This is not a party record.

Before I start, I’d like to make a short statement. I have long resisted writing anything about Calla. Not because of them, but because of me. They deserve better than me, more than I can give. My writing is, and always has been, frivolous. My analysis …

Yes, it’s cheesy and yes, it’s sleazy but, dammit, Metaltech are just so much FUN. Mind you, I’d hate to have to clean the place up afterwards. . .

There’s been bands I loved, bands I really didn’t, and a lot in between, and it will have been exactly the same for everybody. Let’s hope that the Damnation philosophy never changes.

Do yourself a favour, check this out, close your eyes for a while and let it carry you off to weirdy-beardy space-land for a while.

I come to see Wren, and Wren are magnificent. I get two top class supports in Sapien and Haar. And, to top it all, I get to see the fabulous Death Engine, my new favourite French shouty harcore/noise band.

Languid and slinky and prone to sudden bursts of feral violence.

It’s Independent Venue Week, y’know . . . So, let’s go to Leith Depot for a gig. It’s a venue, it’s independent, and RM Hubbert is playing. . .