Tag: REVIEWS
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Hollow Shift – Reload EP
Whether you love it or not, you have to admit that the darkwave scene sounds better than ever. There are numerous artists and bands doing incredible work, with their albums, extended plays, and singles resonating with many brilliant ideas and outstanding musicianship. If you paid close attention to our pages in the last couple of…
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Leatherface – Peel Sessions LP (Little Rocket Records)
If you’ve spent any time at all browsing Thoughts Words Action, you know that my respect for the Sunderland scene begins and ends with one name: Leatherface. There are bands that play punk rock, and then there are bands that are punk rock, with that sound like they were forged in a shipyard and tempered…
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Roach Squad – Roach Squad LP (Little Rocket Records)
If you’ve spent any significant amount of time digging through the crates or scouring the digital archives of Thoughts Words Action, you know that there is a very specific subgenre of melodic punk rock that hits you squarely in the chest. It’s that grit-under-the-fingernails, gravel-in-the-throat sound that flourished in the nineties and early 2000s, often…
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Scattrbrain – Bombs Away 7″ (Big Society)
If you’ve been following Thoughts Words Action for any amount of time, you know I have a massive soft spot for artists and bands who aren’t afraid to set their own reputation on fire just to see what kind of light the flames produce. Coming straight out of Detroit, a city that knows a thing…
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Bear, Man Dangerous – When We Cease To Understand The World CD
There’s a specific intellectual heaviness that comes out of the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle’s Bear, Man Dangerous has tapped into a particularly potent vein of it. His latest single, When We Cease to Understand the World, is a psychedelic post-rock manifesto for the disillusioned. If you’re a listener enjoying music that feels like a reading…
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Heckspoiler – Live am Heck Meck Fest 2024 LP (Noise Appeal Records)
There is a very specific magic that happens when a band decides to skip the studio polish, ignore the safety net of overdubbing, and just let the tape roll in the middle of a sweat-soaked club. We’ve all heard live albums that sound suspiciously clean, records where every mistake has been scrubbed away, and the…
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Heckspoiler – Bock auf Stress LP (Noise Appeal Records)
When you think of rock duos, the usual suspects often come to mind, often projected through minimalist blues or maybe a bit of garage rock, but what Heckspoiler delivers on their latest LP, Bock auf Stress, shatters any preconceived notions of what two people can achieve with just a bass and a drum kit. It’s…
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CTRL+Z – We Are Social Creatures CD (Interstellar Smoke Records)
If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you know I have a deep-seated fascination with how geography shapes sound. Usually, when we talk about stoner rock, our minds drift to the Coachella Valley, to sun-baked Californian sands, endless blue horizons, and the heat-haze of the Mojave desert, but today, we’re heading somewhere else entirely.…
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Neon Mud – Mud And Black Water CD
There is just something in the Polish water, probably something thick, dark, and industrial, that produces bands with a specific spirit you just don’t find anywhere else. Neon Mud’s latest full-lenght, Mud and Black Water, is definitely a standout piece of sonic artistry you should immediately pay attention to. If you’re looking for a clean,…
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Optical Sun – Diabeł CD
If you’ve been following my ramblings on this blog for a while, you know I have a very specific soft spot for bands that treat an album not just as a collection of tracks, but as a full-blown ritual. We’re talking about that rare breed of music that doesn’t just sit in the background while…
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AcidSitter – Escape From Egoland LP
If you’ve been hanging around this blog for any length of time, you know that I am constantly preaching about the transformative power of a good riff, but every once in a while, a record that wants to reconfigure your entire spiritual DNA comes along. The Polish-Japanese collective, AcidSitter, has recently dropped Escape From Egoland,…
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Asteriæ – Miejsce, które nazywam sobą CD EP (D.I.Y. Kolo Records)
Let’s be honest, Poland has always been a special place for heavy music. It’s a country that has always produced some of the finest European bands, but while the world usually looks to the Polish scene for pure death metal and black metal, there is a bleeding-heart underground that is currently redefining what heavy actually…
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