HEY YOU: the Mercury Prize is announcing it’s 2013 winner on Wednesday 30 October 2013. That mean we’re announcing the winner of our COROT-3b Prize too. Don’t know what the COROT-3b Prize is? Well, go click on that link. Everyone up to speed? Good. You’ve got mere hours left to cast your vote, so we figured we’d use this week’s Sunday Slaylist to not only remind you of who’s up for the prize, and to prompt any Johnny-come-lately types to CAST THEIR VOTES NOW.
Yes, yes, yes, the Mercury Prize doesn’t have any metal in it. Yes, yes, yes, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Yes, yes, yes, that hasn’t stopped us resurrecting the COROT-3b Prize to celebrate a dozen great British metal albums from the last 12 months. Go click that link if you need an explanation why we called that. Everyone else: go click the “Read More” link and go listen to our Sunday Spotify Slaylist of this year’s COROT-3b nominees.
Yes, we know the Mercury Prize is just a marketing vehicle for the NME and the Guardian and we’ve genuinely given up complaining about rock and metal not being included in there – even as a token gesture, like they occasionally do with avant garde and jazz artists – but it’s a bloody good excuse to have a little celebration of the excellent British music that has been released over the past year.
This weekend would’ve been the fifth Hevy Festival…but as you no doubt know by now, the festival was forced to cancel their event this year. They tried to schedule a replacement all-dayer at the Brixton Academy here in London, featuring some of the biggest bands on this year’s (cancelled) bill…but as you also know by now, they had to cancel that too.
It’s not been the best year for Hevy Festival, truth be told.
In just four weeks time, arguably the “most metal” (whatever that means) of the UK summer festival season takes place: Bloodstock Open Air. To get ourselves in the mood for a weekend of wearing denim vests and drinking mead out of horn, we’ve put together a gigantic Sunday Spotify Slaylist, featuring the best of this year’s line-up.
Download Festival 2013 is just around the corner, so for this week’s podcast, Raz and Hugh got together to talk about the bands they’re looking forward to, the worst clashes on the bill, the bits of the festival we’re dreading, and about what Thrash Hits is going to be doing this year at Donington Park: HINT: It’s going to be awesome.
Earthtone9
IV
Self-released
8 April 2013
by Rob McAuslan
Ask a random selection of UK metal fans aged mid-20s and up which band they thought should have been massive at the turn of the century, and there’s a fair chance that Earthtone9 will be the answer you get. The Nottingham six-piece had a blend of accessible melody, progressive tendencies and sheet-metal fury that was rare at the time, and still proves hard to find now. Splitting in 2002, the band announced in 2010 that they’d be reforming to play a few shows…and then we even got a new EP a few months later…and now 11 years almost to the day since the release of their last EP, (finally!) a new Earthtone9 album has arrived.
While we’re on the subject of PledgeMusic, earthtone9 have just launched their second campaign using the fan-funding service. Last year the reformed alt-metallers successfully released their For Cause and Consequence EP via the service, and now they’re planning on using it to fund their first post-reformation album.
The sheer level of power (and there is no other word to describe it – certainly none that can do it justice) within earthtone9’s Damnation performance took us completely by surprise. It wasn’t that we were expecting it to be lacking in any respect – quite the opposite in fact – but it was so far above and beyond even our already sky-high expectations that we barely know where to start when it comes to deconstructing it for this review.
It’s time for another Thrash Hits festival splash page – and this time it’s for Sonisphere! All of our Sonisphere Festival 2010 coverage from the weekend will be linked to on this here post, so make sure you bookmark it as it’s all you’re going to need need. That means individual band coverage (interviews, photos, setlists and maybe even some reviews), all the dodgy rumours and salacious gossip we overhear, and every lewd photo of fit girls frolicking about at Knebworth we can rustle up will be here.