On My Turntable: Witch Mountain, The Smashing Pumpkins, El-P and Decoder Ring…

Spot the hilarious joke….

Don’t be fooled, while there’s not much metal on this list, I’m not going soft. I’ve been hammering MDG favourites Book of Black Earth and Balaclava this past week.

*Masculinity assured, he stops swinging it around and slips back where it belongs*

Yet there’s been plenty of time for non d-beat at MDG Towers. I know. Shit’s craycray, huh?

I have also created a Spotify playlist so you bastards can have a listen. Not that you’ll bother, you James Blunts (that’s cockney rhyming slang my beloved American readers… you work it out).

Top 10 Old School Jungle Classics

It’s silly season and given I am on a heavy music starvation diet due to being at home for a week with my Coldplay-loving wife, let’s saddle up for something different. Behold, my top 10 old school jungle classics!

Some had the Bay Area 80s thrash movement to call their own, others had the sordid London birth of punk or the second Summer of Love in fields and warehouses up and down the UK in 1988.

I had jungle. As teenagers in Birmingham in the early to mid 90s, we were at the epicentre (along with Bristol and London of course) of this thrillingly dark and underground scene.

Top 10 Albums 2011

Speed demons or sweet feelings. The great gamut of music boiled down to that binary definition for most of 2011.

Music had only two roles: to put fire in my belly or smooth my furrowed brow.

I’m not cut out for new fatherhood, even second time around. My synapses need more help than ever to fire and my cranium is forever creaking, aching.

This list – my top 10 albums of 2011 – reflects this.

No black metal, no doom. Neither hip-hop, post-metal nor bass fuckery. Just various blends of death metal, crust and hardcore, preferably with that heartstarting Sunlight tone, or the polar opposite: the pastoral, the dreamy.

Top 10 Emerging Classic Albums

This is a bit of a suspense killer but hey, I needed a pic

Over on Sawtooth Wave, hhbrady poses the following excellent question: what albums are you still listening to at least once month from the past few years?

Nothing from 2011 is allowed onto the list. Essentially, it’s a challenge to name your top 10 emerging classic albums. Which recent records will be hailed in the same breath as Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets or Number of the Beast in another decade?

Gateway Bands or How I Got into the Hard Stuff.

Ooh Crikey It's.. Lawnmower Deth

I hardly have the most extreme taste in music in the world. I’m not fond of death metal or tr00 kvlt anything. I’m not all that excited by Sunn 0))) or Swans. Yet when it comes to parties, my selections are guaranteed to clear the dancefloor in seconds, leaving only perplexed looks and furrowed brows. Perhaps I’m just going to the wrong parties.

It may not be extreme but my taste is certainly not mainstream. You won’t catch me cranking up Keane or raving to Rihanna. There’s a fun little thread on Metal Sucks asking which album turned you onto metal for the first time.

It got me thinking about the various gateway bands that led me from the fringes deep into the various scenes I’ve loved over the years.