Where Worlds Collide

It’s that time of year again, when model railway companies announce their products for the coming year.. Modelling Swiss outline in N gauge, two new models announced by Fleischmann are naturally of great interest to me.

First, the classic SBB Ae6/6. The full-sized locomotives are now in the twilight of their careers, but last time I visited Switzerland there were still plenty of them about. The first livery will be the Epoch III dark green dating from their introduction in 1952, but many of the survivors still carry this colour scheme in 2008. While there has been a Minitrix model of this loco available for many years, that model now very crude and dated by today’s standards. This iconic locomotive now looks like having the state of the art model it deserves.

And for something much more modern; they’re doing the BLS Re485, a relivery of the DB 185, which they’ve also done as an SBB Re482. This model is a limited edition for 2008; I can see I’m going to have to reserve one from my local model shop. It appears to be a repeat of a special edition they did a year or so ago for a Swiss dealer. If you model the BLS mainline, it’s an essential model.

It’s going to be an expensive year, I can tell.

When The Reasoning announced that Breathing Space would be the support at the Cardiff gig of their spring “Cabin Fever” tour, this gig became a ‘must see’ for me even though Cardiff was a long trek from Manchester. Around a year ago I saw both bands for the first time playing pub gigs in Swansea and York. They’ve both come an awful long way since then.

Cardiff’s The Point is a redundant church converted into a rock club, and had great acoustics and atmosphere. On a wet Friday night they attracted a fair-sized crowd. I wasn’t the only person who’d travelled a considerable distance; I met people who had come down from Birmingham, Cheshire, Durham and even The Netherlands.

Livvy Sparnenn of Breathing Space

The first couple of times I saw Breathing Space, I thought they were an impressive live band held back by a lack of material that worked really well on stage. All this changed with the release of their much stronger second album “Coming Up For Air”, and almost all of Friday’s 45 minute support set came from the new album. Their mix of uptempo rock numbers and big soaring ballads has a bit of an 80s feel, only without the cheese. The sound is defined by Iain Jennings’ cinematic keyboards, Olivia Sparnenn’s fantastic voice, and Mark Rowan’s tight and economical guitar work. The band played at least as well as I’ve ever seen them play, the musicianship extremely tight thoughout. Olivia Sparnenn is getting better and better both as a singer and as a frontwoman. This is a band that deserve to be a headline act at this size of venue before very long.

Lee Wright of The Reasoning

Headliners The Reasoning carried on where they left off in 2007. They blend melodic hard rock with elements of prog-rock, but without ever descending into the sort self-indulgent widdling that gives prog such a bad name. The twin guitar attack of Lee Wright and Dylan Thompson rocks hard, while the triple lead vocals of Rachel Cohen, Dylan and Gareth Jones make some complex vocal harmonies making extensive use of counter-melodies.

Rachel

When it comes to tight musicianship, high energy and emotional intensity, it’s usually a case of ‘pick any two’. For too many bands, you only get one of the three. On top form The Reasoning can give you all three, and they were on top form tonight.

They started the set with the Karnataka oldie ‘Talk to Me’. Not the obvious choice for an opener, but it worked remarkably well. They followed with most of their debut album “Awakening” interspersed with some new numbers from the forthcoming “Dark Angel”. If they don’t do self-indulgence, they don’t do po-faced either; quite a few jaws dropped when ‘Chasing Rainbows’ suddenly cut into a note-perfect version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ with vocals from Gareth and Rachel. The new numbers came over well, even though their complex multi-layered sound often takes a few hearings to fully appreciate. ‘Dark Angel’ itself sounded a lot like a Reasoning song called ‘Dark Angel ought to sound, ventured into prog-metal territory, and reminded me a little of Dream Theater. They ended with their barnstorming cover of Deep Purple’s ‘Stormbringer’ they’d played at quite a few gigs last year.

My 2008 gig going certainly started with a bang. It’s a pity music as good as this is so marginalised in indie-dominated Britain.

Update: I’ve uploaded 31 photos from the gig to my photo site on Fotopic.Net. I’ve had complaints from Mark Rowan that I took lots of pictures of Livvy and didn’t take any of him!

That awful NME-school hack scribbler is at it again.

Is there a sadder site in the world than a teenager stood on the fringes of a moshpit with his mum? First gigs shouldn’t be in the company of trendy uncles. They should involve forged ID, underage drinking and the sheer thrill of knowing you shouldn’t be there.

Oh dear…

You get an email reciept for the pre-order of Mostly Autumn’s new album “Glass Shadows” 49 minutes before getting the email from mostly-autumn.com announcing the pre-order of said album.

Yes, I’m taking a gamble that they’re taking on board my constructive criticism on the official forum.

I have now officially lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to, and I’m not totally sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.For those of you that haven’t read my writeups of previous ones, Stabcon is a games convention that meets two weekends a year in Manchester. When I started attending a few years back the venue was Woolton Hall, but the last few have been in the convention rooms at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.

Stabcon is billed as a small and friendly convention, and more or less does what it says on the tin. Most of the faces are familiar from year to year. The RPG side of things is very informally organised; GMs turn up with games, and decide when and what to run based on whatever other GMs are and aren’t doing; players then sign up on a first come first serve basis, and it all works quite well. It’s settled into a pattern of games sessions running for three to five hours, with one slot Friday night, three on Saturday, and one on the Sunday.

As well as some Games Orkshop Space Marine stuff (Eat hot plasma death, green things!), and an awful lot of Chez Geek, I played three RPGs over the weekend.

The first was GURPS Transhuman Space, run by Phil Masters. I always find the central problem with this 100 years in the future SF setting is that there are so many options, it’s difficult to decide what to actually do with it. Phil set this one (like all but one of his I’ve played in) on Earth, with the player characters were a team of freelance security ops hired as bodyguards for a Mexican folk singer at a festival in a small South American state. Naturally our problems turned out to be more complicated than fending off groupies.

The second game, on the Saturday night was one of those strange Narrativist games that’s come out of The Forge, InSpecres. As the GM described it, it’s basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off, crossed with a bit of parody of Internet start-ups. We played it very strictly for laughs, travelling around in a converted Routemaster bus playing a very bass-heavy version of Jingle Bells with the volume stuck on 11 (One PC tried to turn it down, but failed her roll, and the volume knob fell off) After dealing with usual green slimes and exploding zombies, we ended up on the trail of dyslexic Satanists, which explained why we tried to break into their lair while dressed as elves. Having subsequently purchased the game, yes, it is supposed to be that silly, so we were indeed playing the game exactly the way it’s supposed to be played.

Sunday’s game was GURPS again. This time in the GURPS Infinite Earths setting, on the parallel Britannica-6, a steampunk setting into large scale engineering projects and a culture far more decadent than our own Victorian era. We’d visited this parallel before as dimension-hopping I-Cops agents. I’d remarked to Phil Masters that this setting seemed to combine the worst stylistic excesses of the 1870s and the 1970s. He’d taken that as inspiration for an adventure set entirely on that parallel with the PCs as local cops; “Lyme Regis Vice”. What started as a simple case of arson got a whole lot more complicated once the Zeppelins started appearing. (It’s a parallel world; of course it has Zeppelins, they always do)

Thanks to Michele and Hammy for running yet another excellent convention. The next one in at the same venue, on the 4th to the 6th of July. See you there.

I know NRT won’t agree with me, but things like this Guardian Music Blog piece convince me that the war against lazy NME-consensus music journalism is still worth fighting.

Summary, hack music critic gets out the big book of punk-era cliches when dismissing Pink Floyd, and gets roundly clobbered by commenters who correctly inform him that he’s talking complete and utter bollocks.

He starts with the mother of all bad clichés

In 1976, purging Britain of progressive rock was so urgently necessary that putting Pink Floyd, Genesis and their public school ilk up against the metaphorical wall and shooting them was the only way forward.

When taken to task over this, he has to resort to the old Cliché-O-Matic again:

… extended guitar solos, inflatable pigs, pretentious concept albums, expensive studios, stadium gigs, albums in gatefold sleeves, dim-witted social commentary, rock songs that last longer than three minutes. All these things are as objectionable now as they were in 1976.

But the fun bit is watching the commenters comprehensively taking his second-hand arguments apart, even those that don’t actually like Pink Floyd. Far more people will read that and come to the conclusion that the author of the article is an ignorant twit than will come away with negative impressions about Pink Floyd. One small victory…