What are you currently listening to?

Picked the new The Bug album up at lunch so I'm looking forward to annoying the neighbours when I knock off in a bit

Listened to the new Hendrix box set on streaming today after cancelling my pre-order due to being skint.

Thankfully I don’t regret my decision. As usual there is some great stuff on it but the majority is just ‘leave the tape running during pre-production rehearsals and release it at an inflated price with half a documentary to boomer 55 years later’.

I’ve liked some of the posthumous stuff quite a bit and it’s a period of his music that really speaks to me, but there are much better existing presentations of it.

Barrel scraping/10 sadly.

And holy shit that The Bug album is pretty

Glass Beams

Vibes... Golden Doilies and Guitars. It's all there. *swaying commences*

Serj Tankian's last EP, Foundations, was pretty decent, and was made of stuff written in the early SOAD days.

His previous EP, Elasticity, comprises of demos he wrote for a potential new SOAD album but the band members didn't see eye-to-eye.

With those and the two songs they released to raise money for the Armenia fund you've got a kind of new album. About the closest to an album we'll ever get.

Burning Brides - Leave No Ashes

I think the run from Follow the Leader through to Untouchables by Korn has to be in that conversation. I’ve not heard a heavy music production as good as any of them since for one. Deftones would obviously not thank you for calling them nu metal lol.

It’s funny how at the time when Kerrang!, Rock Sounds and Hammer were the Bible how absolute also-ran dreck would come out hyped to the gills *and you’d buy into the hype* and then realise years later it was bad or boring or problematic or some combination of the above. I’m looking at you, Taproot, He’d Pe, Mudvayne and Staind 😂

Staind were absolutely the most boring band I ever saw live.

Remember Amen? They were absolutely the opposite, fucking awesome.

Going through the Kerrang back issues I recovered from my parent’s house (173 issues, 1996-early 2000s) its been really eye opening to remember who was getting hyped and who was flying under the radar.

I think Korn are the greatest nu-metal band but their albums all have real duds on them as well as monster hits. Which is why I think those Deftones and SOAD albums hold up as better albums even if neither of them want to be included in the genre.

Significant Other and Hybrid Theory I think are just both perfect encapsulations of what the genre was musically and culturally. For good and bad.

Its funny, there are bands I was big into at the time who I really cringe at now (the lyrics of Snot do not hold up at all) and others who I was really snobby about but with some distance and nostalgia goggles on I actually enjoy more now than I did then (I was far too mature for a baby’s band like Slipknot when I was 19 but in my 40s? Sure).