Counter Revolution

So the fallout of the cancelling of Soundwave Revolution is settling and the details of what's replacing it is emerging.

First off, I got a beautiful email telling me that every cent I spent will be refunded in the next 7 days, including postage and booking fees. A nice touch to dampen the blow. If you haven't got your email yet, or changed banking details since you bought the tickets, get a hold of Oztix.

AJ Maddah, the guy behind all things Soundwave related, has been answering a lot of questions on his twitter. I was keeping an eye on it, but it got out of control. It seems some bands are going out on a mini-festival tour, some are doing their own headlining tour, some our doing club tours and a lot are coming out for Soundwave 2012. It's too much for me to keep track of with my currently busy schedule, but the guys over at AltMusicHub are doing a good job of updating with up to the minute news.

So the big announcement yesterday (which has already gone on sale!) is the Counter Revolution festival! Two stages, no clases and 19 of the bands that were going to be on Soundwave Revolution. These include:

Panic At The Disco
All Time Low
Yellowcard
Story Of The Year
Face To Face
The Damned Things
Set Your Goals
Funeral For A Friend
Hellogoodbye
D.R.U.G.S
The Pretty Reckless
Young Guns
This Providence
Go Radio
Make Do And Mend
Alesana
The Swellers
We Are The In Crowd
Terrible Things

Tickets are ~$103 and it will be at the Riverstage on the same day Soundwave Revolution was going to be (September 24th).

My thoughts? It's basically now a pop-punk festival. Most of these bands I didn't want to see at the original revolution, with the exception of Make Do and Mend and Face to Face (who I've at least seen before twice). So, without the draw of anything major like Van Halen, I probably won't be in attendance. Now I'll just wait for the other announcements to come trickling through...

One sentence album reviews (#15)

Yoyoyo, so if you don't know by now, well... I do one sentence album reviews on my Twitter when I feel up to it. I normally build up a review list over the week and post them during the work days to keep me somewhat sane. When I build up a few, I post them all here for historical reasons.

Today saw me hit a new point, I've run out of reviews. I've been so busy lately that I've got a giant stack of CD's next to my comptuer, a stack of vinyl on my bookshelf and about 130 hours of new music queued up on my computer. So, as a consequence, it might slow up for a while. But here's the last bunch:

Lonely Island - Turtleneck & Chain (2011): A few funny songs, but mainly sounding like the Beastie Boys did 20 years ago, with bad humour 2.4/5

Saul Williams - Volcanic Sunlight (2011): 1st listen: like 2 minutes only of spoken word. Disappointed. 5th listen: a clever rap album 4/5

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light (2011): They have gone slightly back in time and got their heavy back. I scarily like it 4/5

Death Grips - Ex-Military (2011): Excellent grimey rap with lots of classical rock samples that make my inner music nerd jump for joy 4.5/5

Fucked Up - David Comes To Life (2011): A departure from their hardcore to make a brilliant rock opera. May alienate old fans. 5/5

Touche Amore - Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me (2011): Hardcore that sounds like La Dispute had a musical baby with Defeater. 4.5/5

Face to Face - Laugh Now, Laugh Later (2011): This is how pop-punk should be. A lesson from the masters 4.5/5

Boy Hits Car - Stealing Fire (2011): A very American rock sound, kind of like nu metal crossed with classic Iron Maiden style vocals 3/5

Braveyoung-We Are Lonely Animals (2010): Instrumental post-rock eh? So you build up each song slowly into a drawn out crescendo? #cliche 1.5/5

Bullets in Madison - We Became Your Family When You Died (2010): starts as boring post-rock and then slowly merges into a Thom Yorke sound. 2/5

Cloud Nothings - Cloud Nothings (2011): Jangly lo-fi guitar pop. Sounds like a lot of other bands, but with more personality due to raw and rough edges 4/5 The song Heartbeat is a contender for song of the year

Crocodiles - Sleep Forever (2010): This album is from the wrong decade, it needs to be in the mid 90's new wave-era. Oh the memories 4/5

The Black Powder - The Black Powder (2008): Unclassifiable noisy-post-punk-hardcore (that's a classification I guess). The kind of band I want to be in 4/5

Ampere - Like Shadows (2011): 11 Songs, 15 Minutes of good hardcore. They exemplify short and sweet 4/5

The Antlers - Burst Apart (2011): It took me 5 listens to take it all in, as it's so quiet and unassuming. Modern elevator music maybe? 2/5

Kindest Lines - Covered In Dust (2011): A band that grew up listening to way too much of the Cure and wants to keep their spirit alive 4/5

Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See (2011): Less garage rock and more indie, there's 2 songs that channel Interpol deeply 3/5

City & Colour - Little Hell (2011): I like Alexisonfire, but I don't like Dallas' solo stuff, way too mopey. #emo 2/5

The Paper Scissors - In Loving Memory (2011): Australian band making brooding moody indie. Channeling their inner dance-goth I think 3/5