Chris Ball
I’m an ageing rocker who has been going to concerts and buying records for over 30 years. I used to write for Metal Hammer, then briefly another magazine that went down to the bottom of the ocean with that fat crook Robert Maxwell.
I gave up for a while. Experimented with listening to dance music, hip hop and indie rock. It broadened my horizons and I had a lot of fun, but when I reached my late 30’s I realised I was living a kind of cultural lie. I love rock music I realised, much of it deeply unfashionable, but fuck it, I’m old enough now not to care. In the meantime I’d become a father, I now have two boys, and accumulated several more tattoos, middle-aged spread and a healthy dislike of modern pop music and the facile celebrity obsessed industry that fuels it.
So I’m an Essex geezer who’s returned to his roots in more ways than one, I live on the coast after having spent 20 years living in East London. Don’t let the tatts and West Ham shirt fool you though. I love Japanese ukiyo-e art and haiku poetry, impressionist art, the works of Alan Moore and Salman Rushdie, botany and bird watching. I still go to gigs as often as my family, liver and bank balance will allow.
My all time favourite bands and artists are Tom Waits, The National, The Drive By Truckers, The Who, Wilco, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Thin Lizzy, Celtic Frost, Slipknot, Public Enemy, Warren Zevon, Queens of the Stone Age, The Handsome Family, AC/DC, Lykke Li, Laura Veirs, Monster Magnet (obvs) Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath.
Recent faves include Bo Ningen, Windhand, Witch Mountain, St Vincent, Lana Del Rey, Public Service Broadcast, Ghost Poet, Triptykon, Matthew E White and Courtney Barnett.
Tell me yours.
Articles by Chris Ball
I guarantee that if you hear one of the singles on the radio it will lift your spirits for four sweet minutes.
Body of Light is a proper, high quality heavy metal album the likes of which we’re told they don’t make any more.
I cannot imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to experience this album. It speaks to us in a secret language we all somehow understand.
You may be expecting a dozen rambunctious electro-punk bangers, but Flight is dominated by a melancholic, wistful air, coloured by jazzy flute and piano breaks
Omens is Desert Storm’s most consistently impressive album to date and cements their position as one of British metal’s unsung heroes.
Song For Our Daughter is a rich, fascinating album, which heralds a new phase in Marling’s musical career
With Casting the Circle, High Priestess have produced one of the best metal albums of the year so far, bar none.
Quite simply, King Buffalo continue to release music that renders the majority of the psych and stoner scene irrelevant.
So then. ‘Lucifer III’ is a bit of a mixed bag. The band are certainly willing to stretch out and explore styles outside of the classic occult rock stable and in fact when they do they often produce their best songs.
Double concept albums can often be seen as acts of hubris by bands desperate to prove how clever they are, but you get the sense from Huntsmen that this music, noisy and threatening as it is, comes from the heart and soul.
Full Virgo Moon, despite its brief running time and fairly light musical style, is a tough, grim listening experience.
I am here to tell you that front to back, Firebride is an absolute triumph of accessible, extreme metal.
Smoke Fairies really have brought the darkness and the wonders.
Clutch’s drummer, genial Jean-Paul Gaster, raps about the blues, Ramblin’ Man Fair, the genius of Neil Fallon and much more besides. . .
It may be the holidays and we may have been lulled into a beery bonhomie, but this bunch of unassuming nice guys can still pack one hell of a punch.
I do miss the more sinister Mk1 and 2 iterations of Ghost, but they are not my band: they are the people’s band, and their number grows ever larger!
Considering its rather singular, not to say peculiar charms, it is an album I keep returning to – eager for it’s dirty sugar rush.
I is a fascinating album, if at times hard work…It is never Pimms o’clock for PETBRICK.
Although the band are mainly remembered for their Super Yob style and beery, working-man anthems there is a lot more to their music in a catalogue ripe for rediscovery.
I do hope their new direction can bring them wider success as there can never be too much soul in the world and Seratones have it in excelsis.
Infest the Rats’ Nest is a surprise contender for metal album of the year. How did that happen? Who cares, just turn it up!
