Alex Loveless

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Following Blogs: 14

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Regeneration

Alex Loveless posted an article on - May 28, 2011, 11:46 am
It’s a bit quiet around here innit? Unfortunately the pressures and distractions of the real world have rendered me with little time to maintain a decent blog. Running a blog is an order of magnitude harder and more time consuming than I ever dreamed it could be (Cosmo Lee put it far better than I...
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Trippywicked – The Bleak

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Sep 9, 2010, 11:23 am
I’m never one to begrudge a band spreading their wings and embracing new styles. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just sounds like a genre band ‘doing styles’ – a hideous habit that should be left to the pop shitteratti with their legions of production-line songsmiths. Trippywicked’s pervi...
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Enos – Chapter 1

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Aug 10, 2010, 4:20 am
So you’ve got a mate in a band that are a lot of fun live, but really, you think they’re a bit rubbish. He asks you to write a review on your blog, what do you do? Tricky. Thankfully, when Chris from Enos sent me their new album, this wasn’t a concern, as it’s really quite good. So, if you ...
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Scorched-Earth – Mars

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Aug 9, 2010, 8:17 am
Almost falling fowl of my OCD scythe (get your ID3 tags set properly guys, please!) I found myself in a charitable mood and gave this album a chance, and boy am I glad I did. ‘Blackened Thrash’ they call it, the ‘blackened’ prefix is a bit of needless bandwagoning if you ask me, as this is o...
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Sticky labels

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jul 22, 2010, 6:47 am
Metalheads do like to label stuff. The proliferation of metal subgenres is nothing sort of staggering. According to the Encyclopedia Metallum – The Discordance (basically a big old database of metal based information mined from the Encyclopedia Metallum – thanks to Cosmo at Invisible Oranges for...
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Interview – Griftegård

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jul 18, 2010, 5:08 pm
Griftegård’s album Solemn.Sacred.Severe was one of my favourite releases last year. Saurated in religeous imagary and existential gloom, it sets a new standard for the Doom genre. Griftegård are the real deal. Musically, they are both cinematic and claustrophobic  whilst being oppressively dark...
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The last.fm straw part 2: The road to recovery

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jun 30, 2010, 12:32 pm
…has this changed me permanently? What exactly is my taste in music? How will I know if the stuff that thought I liked was not just a product of my addiction? Only time will tell I guess… I wrote those words the better part of a year ago referring to my taste crippling addiction to my last.fm p...
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Don't play hard to get!

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jun 28, 2010, 7:02 am
Fail. Bands are getting more and more enterprising and are increasingly seeing the value of giving their early releases away free of charge. Anyone who’s spent any time reading this blog will know that I approve. Every week I get sent, or stumble across, free releases from independent bands, and ...
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Numbers of the Beast #2: A skew loose?

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jun 24, 2010, 11:17 am
Lemmy - a skew loose? So we’ve learned that some bands have pretty obsessive fans. It’s nice that they’re listening to a lot of Opeth’s music, but are they just getting gooey over one album or even a single track? Let me demonstrate what I mean at its most extreme – the one hit wonder. Th...
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Absence makes the heart grow…

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Jun 12, 2010, 4:19 am
It’s been a few weeks since I last posted, largely because I went on holiday, and I’m still recovering from the mental fug that left me in, and a mild case of writer’s block. A few things have transpired since I posted here. So, time for a short retrospect. Pavement, O2 Brixton, Wednesday 12t...
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In Myspace no one can hear you stream

Alex Loveless posted an article on - May 13, 2010, 9:12 am
My PC hates Myspace You can not have fail to notice that Myspace is in terminal decline. Barely an update in a year, it has become largely redundant as a social platform as the ubiquitous Facebook outstrips them on every level. And everyone hates it! It’s cluttered with ugly, heavy designs an...
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Sweaty Palms #4

Alex Loveless posted an article on - May 11, 2010, 6:13 am
What I spent my hard earned cash on recently. The Ocean – Heliocentric On releasing Precambrian, The Ocean had a whiff of the future about them. Delivering punishing post-metal reminiscent of Cult of Luna but stretching into more old school prog territories, referencing the likes of Pink Floyd. ...
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It's all about the music – musings on the business of music in the digital era

Alex Loveless posted an article on - May 7, 2010, 4:48 pm
You gotta do it all yourself these days It’s all about the music, isn’t it? No-one needs to make money to make music, but it certainly helps. Modern music begs to be created by and channeled through increasingly advanced technology, to be heard on multifarious shores. Music is global, dispersed...
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Numbers of the Beast #1: Love you long time

Alex Loveless posted an article on - May 3, 2010, 8:27 am
Since my bout of rampant music stats geekery I’ve been getting a tad OCD over the last.fm listening habits of you metal heads. So much so that I wrote a PHP application that queries the API and pulls back lots of lovely data (I’ll unleash this on the public when I’ve had the chance...
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A long tail of a critical discrepancy

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 23, 2010, 11:04 am
last.fm's top metal artists In this digital age of seemingly infinite choice of music that’s easy to access and at low cost (or free) it would easy to assume that the music listening masses would broaden their horizons a little. The Long Tail economy surely applies to music as much if not...
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Celeste – Morte(s) Nee(s)

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 21, 2010, 6:57 am
The French scene appears awash with technicolour crossover Black Metal (is that an oxymoron?) seemingly emerging as one of the most vibrant geographical musical entities anywhere in the world at the moment. Celeste’s Morte(s) Nee(s) delivers unrelenting sludgy BM that’s comparable to Cobalt with...
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Chimp Spanner – At the Dream's Edge

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 14, 2010, 5:48 am
Gone are the days when a solo guitar virtuoso could woo the masses, fingers ablur over fret board weaving magical, note hungry spells. Sometime in the early 90’s (thanks in no small part to Mr. Cobain and chums) it became distinctly distasteful to peddle your talents in such an overtly self-aggran...
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The NME of musical progress?

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 13, 2010, 7:20 am
Dignified? Luke Lewis’s blog post on NME.com has got me a little hot under the collar. It’s typical of NME to come out with elitist bollocks like this. I think this, like many other arguments I hear against the new musical economy and the digital culture is based on a rosy view of a pas...
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Alcest – Écailles de Lune

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 13, 2010, 5:23 am
It’s perhaps typical of the gung-ho Gallic approach to Black Metal that some of the most exotic forms of this embattled genre derive from France. On one hand, you have the musically ultra-progressive and philosophically zealous Deathspell Omega (either the saviour or soiler of the BM artform) and ...
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The next big thing?

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 12, 2010, 5:28 am
Trends and scenes come and go with metronomic regularity like the waxing and waning of the moon – one minute the light side, in full view of the world and worshipped from afar, the next out of sight and ignored along with the inhabitants that dwell there. And thus the procession of shallow *co...
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Opeth, Royal Albert Hall, 5th April 2010

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Apr 9, 2010, 7:56 am
What stately surroundings to celebrate the grand conjurors of extreme metal’s 20th anniversary! As the ever sardonic Mikael Åkerfeldt so gleefully pointed out, they are probably the most extreme band ever to play there, and almost certainly the first band to call their audience “c*nts” in thi...
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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Part 2

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Mar 31, 2010, 9:46 am
The good Spring 2010 What a marvelous season Spring 2010 promises to be for live music. I’ll personally be attending gigs from 3 bona fide legends: Opeth’s 20th anniversary show where they will be playing Blackwater Park in its entirety in the regal surrounds on the Royal Albert Hall. ...
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Hummune – EP

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Mar 24, 2010, 11:44 am
Hummune is a contraction of the words human and immune, meaning immune to humans. Perhaps this British trio should have called themselves Trendmune as their retro post-hardcore is a galaxy removed from most other hardcore derived dross saturating the scene these days. The most obvious influence acr...
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High on Fire – Snakes for the Divine

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Mar 23, 2010, 7:37 am
I’ve no doubt that Matt Pike and team occasionally partake in the odd herbal pleasure, but stoner band they ain’t. Yes, Snakes for the Divine may contain monstrous, dowtuned riffs aplenty and an obvious debt to Sabbath but there’s so much more here. Largely eschewing the progish meanderings o...
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Taint – All Bees to the Sea EP

Alex Loveless posted an article on - Mar 18, 2010, 10:03 am
I’ve spoken about those “why didn’t anyone tell me about this band before?” moments that are actually, “I was told, but I just wasn’t paying enough attention”. The last time was Baroness, this time it’s a band very much of their ilk – Welsh rockers Taint. It’s perhaps a symptom o...
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