This week's records

Fu Manchu - Signs of Infinite Power

This record sort of took me by suprise as I only heard it would be coming out a couple of weeks beforehand. But it's good solid stoner rock and roll in the same vein of Queens of The Stone Age. Unsuprisingly, their bassist Scott Reeder was in Kyuss whom Josh Homme was their guitarist.



Rammstein - Leibe Ist Fur Alle Da

A little concerned about this one after hearing the god awful (but hilarious at the same time) single "Pussy". The album as a whole actually isn't too bad and has restored a little credibility for the band but still isn't a patch on their earlier material and lacks the catchy choruses that can be heard in "Keine Lust" and "Mann Gagen Mann".

I thought it would be ideal to post up what records I have been buying over the past weeks seeing as how I'm now pretty much an avid record collector.





A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head

Have to say, this definitely is a progressive masterpiece. Their first album was awesome and they still haven't managed to dissapoint. I can't understand why publications like Kerrang and NME have written it off. Maybe because they can't handle that it's not artificially made :P



Japandroids - Post-Nothing

The irony of this was on the way to Rough Trade, Matt Hurst (a person on my course) were discussing this band and so I felt more than a bit excited to find it for a rather reasonable price. It was fifteen fucking quid when I saw it in HMV. But the music itself is very good and has encouraged to look further into the noise pop scene more.



Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary

I was a little curious about this one. They've had a lot of buzz recently since their reformation and so the reissues of their first two albums have come back into life. I have to say it's not bad at all and can see myself giving this a few more spins. There seemed to be quite a lot of great bands from the original emo wave. Contenders for the next ATP curated by Pavement?



Jesus Lizard - Goat

Yet another reissue and by a band I've been meaning to obtain material from for ages. I'm hooked!! This really does sound like a straight forward thinking record ahead of its time. Now I can see where bands such as Future of The Left and Pulled Apart By Horses get their influence from. "Seasick" seems to be the one song that sticks out and "Mouth Breather" also deserves a worthy mention.



Tubelord - Our First American Friends

Got this from the lovely people at Banquet Records seeing as how the corporate nazis at HMV didn't appear to stock it. But yeah, it's a solid record and it makes me happy to know these guys don't live too far away from me so that's one good local band in the bag even if the sound isn't too different from their contemporary plas Dananananakroyd but that's certainly not a low point.

Porcupine Tree

So on friday I paid a visit to the HMV Apollo in Hammersmith for one good reason. To watch one of the most innovative and underrated bands this country has given birth to. But before all of that, first to come was support from Engineers, a very visual and interesting alternative act. Their music transformed much better live than on record considering the sound was incredible it almost made my phone drop out of my pocket.

But now for the opening act Porcupine Tree who prepared a lot of suprises in advance. First of all no recorded footage was allowed resulting in automatic ejection if anyone was found using such property. Secondly one noticeable feature was this was an all seated gig dating back to the days of Pink Floyd where you take in the music without the hassle of being injured. And finally we had the privilege of watching a performance of latest album "The Incident", a progressive masterpiece.

Following that, they took a 10 min break whilst hypnotising us with a digital countdown. They came back to perform a handful of tunes from their extensive discography. Personal highlights included "Anthesize" and "Normal". Their frontman Steve Wilson seemed to provide a suprisingly good sense of humour when declaring the tree does not take song requests from fans. The set closed with "Trains" rounding off perhaps one of the best gigs of this year so far.