Arctangent Festival is closing in on a sellout for their comeback festival later this month. The fest has now added new acts such as Scalping, Famyne, Outlander, Sergeant Thunderhoof, Cryptic Shift, Ogives Big Band, to the weekend. The fest already features headliners Opeth, Cult of Luna, and TesseracT as headliners, and has now added the updated festival map and clashfinder for fans to make use of!
Arctangent Festival already has one of THE line ups for 2022 festivals, and today they announce the very final new band additions for the event, as well as move TesseracT up to main stage headliner status. The fest already features headliners Opeth, Cult of Luna, and more. For the FULL list of newly added bands and artists being announced for ATG Festival today:
2000Trees Festival have today announced 36 new bands to the already stellar lineup! They join a lineup with Thursday night headliners Jimmy Eat World. Other bands announced today include Beach Slang, Nova Twins, Demob Happy, The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, Spanish Love Songs, Hundredth, Airways, Hotel Lux, Together Pangea, The Virginmarys, Haggard Cat, Fangclub, 68, Nova Twins, Ditz, Stake, Static Dress, Erica Freas, Delair the Liar, S.T. Manville, Chloe Moriondo, Bob Vylan, Bent Knee, Gatherers, Giver, Tom Jenkins, Harry Marshall, InTechnicolour, Grief Ritual, Superlove, Sapphire Blues, Lande Hekt, Katie Malco, Holiday Oscar, Non Canon, Zeb, and Andrew Cushin! The fest takes place Thursday 9th, Friday 10th, Saturday 11th July 2020..Continue reading
Continuing our celebration of the releases from 2019 that hit the hardest with our team of metal-loving maniacs, we bring you Part 2 of the official Ghost Cult Albums of the Year and count down from 40 to 21…
You can find Part 1, containing our coverage of the albums that charted from 75 through to 41, here.Continue reading
A thunderous crack of guitars explode outwards above a deluge of dextrous percussion. It all swirls around the listener before reaching a fever pitch and bursting into its main atonal, bending riff. This is just the mere beginning of ‘When You Stare’ from Blackened post-Hardcore outfit, Glassing, a band clearly out to not just pique interest, but demand attention. The vocals have an ominous amount of reverb to them, giving the same halfway-down-a-corridor feel of the likes of early Emperor or any Black Metal luminaries for that matter. The actual screaming itself, however, has far more in common with contemporaries like Tripsitter and We Never Learned To Live, with its strained and passionate delivery evoking repressed tender emotions rather than scathing the eardrums with rhapsodies of hellfire.Continue reading
Much like Roadrunner Records in the 1990s, a mark of contemporary quality is any band on the Holy Roar Records roster. You are guaranteed an absolute slobber knocker with pretty much everything they have put out over the last decade, whether it’s the all-out Hardcore of Employed to Serve or Secret Cutter, the Screamo of Portrayal of Guilt or the psychedelic Stoner Prog of Boss Keloid. Now turning to Post Hardcore, we as listeners should welcome the arrival of We Never Learned To Live‘s latest offering; The Sleepwalk Transmissions (Holy Roar Records).Continue reading
It’s an unquantifiable, ethereal thing, is atmosphere. It is can be created accidentally, or cultivated with utmost planning and precision, and shattered and changed by the slightest inaccuracy being present. It’s clear from the shimmering clean guitar note that slips into understated vocal of intro/opener ‘Shadows In Hibernation’ that on their début album Silently, I Threw Them Skywards (Holy Roar) Brighton, UK, based quintet We Never Learned To Live are meticulously aiming for a pervading atmosphere of deep, immersive melancholy.
To achieve this, there is detail and precision at every step of their emo-meets-post-rock catharsis, and that an incredible amount of thought has gone into things, from the reflective and meditative backing and complimentary guitars to the connections and meanderings that link the songs. At their peak, such as on the jangling, progressive, Karnivool-esque ‘Vesalius’, WNLTL show not just an understanding of how to meld post-rock and depressive music into a meaningful output, but also that they are able to craft it into songs that provoke the desired response in the listener of drawing them away from the outside world into the introspection and immersion required to genuinely get something out of this music.
Yet, fastidiousness doesn’t always equal results, particularly not emotive ones, in the music field, and constancy is even harder to maintain than atmosphere. Sean Mahon’s vocals are inconsistent, jarring and grating as often as his flat cleans croon down another cul-de-sac. Alongside this, the creation of a continuous, similar soundscape serves to feed the feeling of monotony; as, alongside a re-occurring lack of vocal hooks – and I don’t necessarily mean choruses – there is a gaping hole in terms of dynamics (having a section that comes in with a bit of shouting and a some distorted chords is not a crescendo), and the song-writing element seems to have been lost in amongst the being neat (and boring).
Post-rock, particularly of the more morose, introverted kind, treads a fine line at the best of times, and despite moments of promise, We Never Learned To Live, more often than not, are unable to consistently produce the emotive, powerful compositions required to stand out in this field; fading, as with several of their tunes, into the background, defined as much by their inadequacies as their strengths.
5.5/10
STEVE TOVEY