Travels With Nate

The Elijah are a 5 piece progressive metal band from Shropshire in England. I’d not heard of them before this album came through my door so I was unsure what to find. What did I find? The album starts off with an eerie synthesised atmosphere in the song In Misery along with some light drumming. This builds up into a nice orchestral background and some slow, progressive death metal vocals. It’s amazing that such vocals can carry such atmosphere. The song dies down into just the synths and drums with some clean vocals which are really nice but a tad sombre before building up with more heaviness and death metal vocals. This switching between clean and death metal vocals and sometimes even duets that work really well continues throughout the song and really works with the atmosphere in the background. The second track, I Loved starts off with pianos and a strum of guitar with similar drumming to the first track along with clean vocals. I can’t help but think he sounds s

  "Beautiful & an idiot at the same time" - Sums me up! Dead Belgian are a Liverpool-based band playing the music of Jacques Brel .  They began life in 2007, inspired to share Brel’s music with all who would listen.  Each member brought their own influences to the band, from European folk to progressive rock, stripping the songs to their bare bones and fattening them up again using a ramshackle drum kit, ukulele, guitar, accordion, saxophone, mandolin, clarinet and flute. The album opens up with a wonderfully cheerful rendition of Madeleine . It really is wonderful… you find yourself immediately jigging along to the sound of the accordion and the saxophone. The vocalist is very talented and makes even the French language sound beautiful… the one language and accent I usually can’t stand. The second song is in English, it’s probably my favourite on the album; It’s called Au Suivant and it’s sombre as fuck which is hardly surprising considering that th

I've noticed that several people have unfollowed me on twitter lately. Probably for a few reasons that include: 1) I've been quite depressed lately.             Well, my Doctor says I might be depressed but what does he know? I, personally just think I'm a bit miserable. You can't blame me for this. Maybe I shouldn't convey my feelings on a social networking site but sometimes I can't help it. I'm only human. Things aren't going well in most areas of my life right now. Fair play to people who can pretend to be happy all the time; I'd  quite like to be one of those people but I'm not. I don't blame you for unfollowing me for this reason though, I'm a miserable bastard mostly. 2) I tweet a lot.              Yes, I tweet a lot. I clog up your newsfeeds. People don't like this. I got twitter originally because people said I update my facebook status too much. I then grew to like it and started tweeting even more. I tweet about music

I like beer . I like real ale. I like macro-lagers. I like craft beer. I like keg beer. I like cask ale. I like bottled beer. I like canned beer. I like beer . The issue I have is that craft beer is full of shit. Here are some of my feelings towards craft beer: 1)       Barrel Ageing   Don’t get me wrong I like some barrel aged beers but now it seems that every fucker is doing it and it’s no longer niche. Brewdog Paradox is great. I’ve had paradox poured from a wooden barrel, it’s beautiful but the issue is that everyone’s copying that kind of thing and making it so limited that nobody will ever get to fucking drink it anyway. Another thing is the price of them. I appreciate that it can’t be cheap to buy old whisk(e)y casks but Brewdog just released Tokyo* Rising Sun which is a barrel aged version of the first ever batch of Tokyo*. Sounds cool, right? Well my issue is that this is beer that they apparently literally forgot they had sitting in the barrel only to disco

I’ll admit, I enjoyed reviewing part one of the Eurovision album, you can read it here if you missed it: http://www.boozebeatsbites.com/2012/06/beats-eurovision-2012-album-part-one.html It also destroyed my soul, however, as most of the songs were so goddamn depressing. I’m hoping this isn’t the case with Disc Two. Let’s find out... Israel : Izabo – Time Wow. This is funky, really funky! I want to dance to it. The lead singer has quite an awesome voice but I really   hate the backing singers in the chorus. Iceland : Greta Salome & Jonsi – Never Forget This track has a really nice atmosphere about it. Piano, violins, big drums and a bit of synth. Greta & Jonsi are really talented singers and have a great chemistry and really work well together. I really like this song. Yeah, it’s a love song but it doesn’t sound depressing. Top marks, Iceland. Italy : Nina Zilli – L’Amore E Femmina (Out of Love) Imagine an Italian version of Amy Winehouse. We

Image from: http://www.eurovisionshop.tv/en/product/media/43/434/official-2-cd-esc-2012 Ahh, Eurovision . The one time of year where loads of countries in Europe enter musical artists into a contest to see who has the best music in Europe as voted for by the people of Europe. When I first got the press release asking if I fancy reviewing this because it’ll be “fun”, I said no. I said “I’m sorry but I don’t think my readers want to read about Eurovision” but after conveying this on twitter and facebook, I had quite a few people saying I should do it. So I did. I realised that this could actually be quite a fun experiment... to test whether every county enters complete and utter shit. This is disc one: Albania : Rona Nishilu – Suus Nice Orchestral backing music but I simply cannot deal with her voice. She sounds like she’s putting way too much effort into it but getting nothing out of it. Austria : Trackshittaz – Woki Mit Deim Popo   This is what Eurovisio