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
Årabrot are a very welcome counterbalance to meat and potatoes hard rock acts with nothing to say and the desire to keep saying it blandly.
The sheer ferocity of the band’s attack, combined with a broad range of influences means BlackLab have real crossover appeal.
Friends of mine frequently mention the good times to be had catching the band in action and no doubt their corpsepaint and tie-dye look makes them hard to forget, once witnessed.
There was only one place I wanted to be on Sunday of Desertfest, and that was The Roundhouse for the what was festivals biggest venue and suitably starry cast list to date…
Happy punters connecting and discovering great new music: Desertfest your work is done!
An impressive introduction, full of strong performances, promising songs and just enough individuality to mark High Priestess out from the metal hordes.
Sunflower Bean have no right to be making music as accomplished and ravishing as this at such a tender age.
Dave and the gang have decided to put out an album of no-nonsense, hard rocking crowd-pleasers.
With ‘Sentinels’ they still show more promise and display more ambition and creativity then nearly all their peers, no question.
If you like stoner and psych and plan on still being alive in May then why the hell wouldn’t you go?
Buffalo Tom don’t do anything unexpected, flash or controversial here, but what they have done is make a beautifully simple and simply beautiful rock album. A career high.
There’s an undeniably pleasing, ramshackle ambiance throughout as the band invent their own kindergarten krautrock and post-pub pop.
Both bands bands do enough here to make you wish there was another side of their music to flip to, but Windhand edge it for me.
Black Moth… have developed a darker, more sophisticated sound whilst retaining much of what made them interesting in the first place.
I suspect they have the potential to pen dozens more indie-disco floor fillers, the likes of which this debut is undoubtedly packed.
‘First Offense’… will carry you along on a speed rush of caveman riffs and screaming sirens.
Gold Key apply the rigors of hard core and rock to their songs whilst still packing in more incident, flash, daring and emotion than most bands manage in an album.
Quicksand deserve your attention, deserve another chance. Not out of sentimentality, loyalty, hipster revisionism or any other misguided motivation, but because they have made a really excellent new album.
A great pick n mix of groovy oddities and raging, underground lost treasures.
It’s more than rock a show, cult-ish but inclusive, a celebration of otherness and the mysteries of the universe.
