The Globe in Cardiff

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

The Globe in Cardiff is back in business under new management. Their new official website is at www.globecardiffmusic.com. It’s true that the venue was closed for a few weeks for refurbishment, and many people feared the worst and assumed “refurbishment” was a euphemism for “conversion into a trendy wine bar”.

But the work is now complete, and the venue is open for live music again.

However, in a letter quoted on Matt Cohen’s blog, there are still one or two problems.

The previous owner of the Globe is refusing to give me access to the previously established website, we’ve tried everything and it’s become obvious that he has no interest in helping us, even though the website domain is of no use to him anymore.

This previous website is very cleverly worded, hinting towards us being closed and damaging the work I’m putting into promoting the venue. My management are chasing it up through their solicitors but I can’t afford to waste any more time on arguing with someone who wants to make my life difficult. As you can imagine this site is causing me and other promoters major problems with agents requesting their shows to be moved in fear of cancelation, something which I cannot by any means afford to keep happening.

So, if you stumble upon The Globe’s old website and see a message implying the venue has shut down, don’t believe it. It’s alive and well, and bands like Panic Room and The Reasoning will be playing there.

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Credit Where Credit’s Due

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

For years I’ve complained about The Guardian’s woeful coverage of metal and progressive rock. Major releases are either overlooked entirely, or worse still, given a cursory dismissal by someone with no knowledge or respect for the genre. Dave Simpson’s attempt to review Yes is a prime example. Even their most positive reviews came from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

Which is why it’s good to see Dom Lawson, of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Presents Prog fame reviewing Opeth’s Heritage. It’s not a long, detailed review, but it certainly doesn’t read like Tony Blackburn attempting to review The Fall.

One swallow does not necessarily make a summer, but I hope we get to read more reviews by Dom Lawson in the future.

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Testing an Internet Radio Station

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Tim Hall

Last week I was invited to help test some themed internet radio stations over the past few days. The focus was more on the overall customer experience rather than bug-hunting. But I’m a software testing professional as well as a music fan, so that’s going to have an effect on how I approach things.

Being a huge progressive rock fan, I was naturally driven towards their Prog channel. I listened to it for several hours while doing other work on the PC. Most of the music clearly fell into that genre, even when it was artists I’ve never heard of, and it was a good mix of classic 70s music and more contemporary artists. So far, so good, and the feedback I gave was positive.

But the odd track sounded completely out of place, dance-pop acts or singer-songwriters whose music fell well outside even the broadest possible definition of progressive rock. On further investigation, all of them turned out to be obscure European artists who shared names with better-known prog-rock acts whose own music wasn’t in their library. It’s the same artist disambiguation issue that plagues last.fm once you get beyond household names signed to major labels.

Nice to be able to combined skills learned as software tester with knowledge acquired as a music fan.

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Administrative Note

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Tim Hall

As you might have noticed, I’m experimenting with putting Google Adsense ads on this blog. At the moment I’ve just stuck a single ad in the right-hand sidebar, where it’s visible but not over-intrusive. I’m going to experiment with different positioning, and will probably be installing a WordPress plugin that stops adverts appearing to people who have previously left comments on the site. That way it will serve up ads to people who randomly come in from Google searching for Swiss Kettles without annoying the site’s regular readers.

Since this is my own Adsense account, and I’ve therefore got some control over what categories of adverts get displayed, I’ve blocked some of the more annoying and sleazy stuff. So hopefully we won’t be seeing those awful belly fat or white teeth ads, which are actually for glorified Ponzi schemes anyway.

Let me know if you do see anything offensive, inappropriate or sleazy.

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Firewind - Sub89, Reading, 12-Sep-2011

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sub89 in Reading is gradually building a reputation as a metal venue. Being my local venue, it’s great to be able to see gigs without worrying about travel or accommodation. It also means you can check out unfamiliar bands who you might not have travelled to see. Greek metallers Firewind are such a band; I streamed a few songs on mFlow, liked what I heard, and decided they were worth seeing.

I wasn’t over-impressed with the opening act, but they’re very young and clearly still learning their craft; everyone has to start somewhere. The guitarist with the pink “Hello Kitty” Strat looked rather out of place, as if he’s wandered in from an arty indie-pop band by mistake.

The second support, Sweden’s Wolf were a lot better, playing an entertaining and energetic set. Flying-V wielding Niklas Stålvind comes over as a very engaging frontman, and their music had such strong NWOBHM flavour it was taking me back to the Reading Festival in the early 80s. The song “Kursk”, about the Russian submarine, was very appropriate given the name of the venue.

Headliners Firewind are an archetypal European power-metal band, straightforward melodic songs embellished with the sort of pyrotechnic soloing that people either love or hate about the genre. On this tour they were without lead singer Apollo Papathanasio, although stand-in Mats Levin did such a professional job you’d never have known he wasn’t the band’s permanent singer.

As one ought to expect, lead guitarist Gus G played several air-guitars’ worth of neo-classical shredding over the course of the set, and Bob Katsionis’s keyboard solo was so Rick Wakeman that I thought he ought to have been wearing a cape! The set included no fewer than three instrumentals. On one of them, despite the frenetic soloing, it was the driving bass riff that stood out. Too often the bass gets drowned out by the guitars at metal gigs, here Petros Christo’s playing came through clearly, underpinning the songs.

It all added up to an entertaining evening. Power-metal is never going to be one of my favourite metal sub-genres, but I enjoyed Firewind a lot. They were tight, played with a huge amount of energy, clearly enjoyed being on stage, and benefited from an excellent sound mix. That’s what makes for a good gig, whatever the genre.

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The 2011 International N Gauge Show

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Tim Hall

I spent a fun day at the International N Gauge show at the Warwickshire Exhibition Centre, otherwise known as “The Cowshed”, just outside Leamington Spa. As a show dedicated to N-gauge modelling, with layouts large and small showcasing the possibilities of the scale, and the specialist traders out in force, it’s one of the major events of the year of the model railway calendar. It’s a good time to meet up with a lot of old friends from the railway modelling community, as well as getting inspiration from layouts, and of course buying stuff.

Compared with a few years ago the overwhelming majority of the layouts were British outline with only two or three continental European or North American layouts on display. I’ll put this down to the steadily improving quality of British models from Dapol and Bachmann in recent years.

This show has become a popular venue for nanufacturers to unveil their new products. One highlight for me was CJM‘s class 50, which for a suitably eye-watering price makes the Farish one look like the dated relic it is. Dapol‘s big annoucement surprised a lot of people. After a lot of online speculation as to what class of locomotive it would be, it turned out to be a range of working semaphore signals. They will initally be available as upper and lower quadrant home and distants, although bracket signals are also planned. The samples I saw in action certainly look impressive, driven by a small motor and worm rather than a solenoid, and seem straightforward to attach to a layout. Just drill a 13mm diameter hole.

Bachmann also had a number of new products on display, including fully-decorated Metro-Cammell class 101 DMUs, and advanced samples of the 4-CEP and Seimens Desiro EMUs. I can see some SR and LMR electric layouts in the coming years.

As is usual for this sort of thing, I ended up spending far too much money, and the stuff I bought, such as a class 24 and a secondhand blue class 108 DMU, had a decidedly Cambrian flavour. I did resist the temptation to buy a brass BLS Ae6/8, a Zurich S-Bahn double-deck set. or Dapol’s Grand Central HST, the latter of which looked superb but wouldn’t fit into any layout I might conceivably build.

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Judas Priest - Nostradamus

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

Judas Priest’s double album “Nostradamus” came out back in 2008. At this stage in their career, it seems that the veteran genre-defining metal act had decided there was no point doing just another generic Judas Priest album like 2005′s “Angel of Retribution” that marked the return of Rob Halford. So they went for something altogether more ambitious.

Nostradamus is a concept album based on the life of the legendary seer. Rather than singing about the notorious prophesies themselves, they’ve taken the far more interesting path of telling the story of the life of the man himself. With tales of persecution, plague and love won and lost it does occasionally veer into slightly cheesy melodrama. But this is a Judas Priest album after all. What did you expect?

It’s been compared with Kiss’s infamous “The Elder”, although I feel Judas Priest have made a rather stronger album. It’s immensely varied musically. Alongside the twin guitars of Glenn Tipton and KK Downing there’s extensive use of keyboards, and the album is full of atmospheric moments which owe as much to prog-rock as metal. Occasionally it even strays into even more un-Priest musical territory that’s dangerously close to the sound of a West End musical. But despite these diversions you’re never that far from plenty of their archetypal pile-driving guitar sound either, and the end result can only be described as epic. Both disks flow as one continuous piece of music, songs running into one another, sometimes with short instrumental pieces bridging the gaps between them. Like many double albums, it doesn’t quite manage to be consistently great all the way through, and there are one or two passages that feel like filler. But it’s also of those albums where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts even when some tracks don’t necessarily stand up on their own, and it has more than enough high points to satisfy all but the most narrow-minded of fans.

Rob Halford is still a force to be reckoned with as a vocalist even in his fifties, and those piercing screams of his upper register are in good working order. He’s a little less effective on the album’s many ballads; he’s not as good trying to convey emotion as he is using his voice as a lead instrument on the heavier songs.

Despite a few flaws, I like this album a lot. Many people accused them of going all Spinal Tap with the 12-minute song about the Loch Ness Monster on “Angel of Retribution”, and their response was to take things far, far further with this epic concept album. It’s not as if they haven’t done plenty of albums filled with short punchy songs in the past. If they never do another album it will be a fitting close to their career. And if they do make another one, I’m not quite sure how they’re going to follow this.

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The Sound of the World

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

It may be that social networking has killed the webforum, but HippyDave, who already runs the official Panic Room and Stolen Earth forums has started a new forum The Sound of the World, dedicated to Mostly Autumn and the extended family of side projects and related bands. It has sections for Mostly Autumn, Halo Blind, Morpheus Rising and for Heather Findlay’s solo career, as well as past projects such as Odin Dragonfly, Josh and Co, and Breathing Space.

It’s a matter of debate as to whether or not the world really needs yet another Mostly Autumn forum. As HippyDave himself explains, a great many people, including a lot of dedicated fans, have issues with the way the official forum is over-moderated. There is already an unofficial forum, but that suffers from the opposite problem in that it’s under-moderated and tends to get overrun by trolls. There isn’t a place online where you can have a serious discussion about their music without the constant feeling that you’re walking on eggshells.

Time will tell if the forum gets a critical mass of regular posters and hosts meaningful discussions about the bands’ music.

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Alun Vaughan - If

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

Alun Vaughan, former bassist for Panic Room has a new album out. If is live set of 100% improvised solo bass music, recorded during a streamed gig for the ImprovFriday network.

If solo bass is your thing, or you perhaps want to listen to something a bit different, you can download it in mp3, FLAC, or a variety of other audiophile formats from Alun’s bandcamp page.

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Switzerland in 2005

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Tim Hall

SBB Re460 crosses the Aare viaduct in Bern

Still working on migrating photos from my defunct Fotopic website to my new photo gallery. These are from 2005 visit to Switzerland, not all of which I’d actually uploaded the first time round.

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