June 11th-12th - Field Day - Victoria Park, London

Featured Artists: PJ Harvey, John Grant, Beach House, The Thurston Moore Band, Fickle Friends, Parquet Courts, Girl Band

With a new album on the way PJ Harvey as ever is a sure must see artist, we also love Girl Band

Featured Artists: Faithless, Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, The Kills, The Who

TICKETS £5.

BUY THEM FROM THE DECO OR THE BANDS.

THE MONEY GOES TO RSPCA STUBBINGTON ARK BECAUSE ANIMALS ARE EXCELLENT.

Victorian Whore Dogs
Returning to crush Portsmouth once more with their psychotic sludge onslaught, the hounds of doom are going to be unleashed again! Absolutely unforgiving, theirs is a menace crafted by multiple tours and festivals (including Bloodstock), but moreover, a true and bitter rage that manifests in the form of some of the heaviest metal in the UK right now. 

Stray Bullets Kill
All the dirt of the world, inhaled and spat back out at maximum volume, with a ferocity that has seen the band labelled "..bleak, darkened, relentless... mesmerising". 

Terraborn
Drawing from the likes of Lamb Of God and Pantera, you're either with these five brutal warriors, or against them- make sure you pick the right side. 

CAGED SPECTRUM
With a sound so huge they have to spell their facebook tag in all caps, these prog/experimental monsters will jolt you into another dimension, and leave you tasting colours!

Fissure of Riddles
Melodic Riff conjurers from the South Coast, combining elements of Death, Sludge and Post-Metal. Songs are available on BandCamp and SoundCloud.

Blackprint
Thick slabs of prime pit beef, with more bottom end than the Kardashians. Tech groove mosh lords.

Death Head
Self described as "Gosport's 3rd Best Metallica Tribute band", they are fast, hard, heavy thrashers, guaranteed to melt your face off.

HACK JOB.
These local grind/powerviolence yobs are the newest mutation from the tainted DNA that's brought you The SLM, Joythief, Ed Wood, and many more Southsea scumbags.

MORE BANDS TO BE ANNOUNCED.

The London 4-piece return with an album brimming with new sounds amid a vibrant energy, flecked with sublimely delicate, intimate spaces and recorded by Simon Raymonde (Bella Union / Cocteau Twins).

At the core is a deep respect for the frailty of life and the nobility that can be observed in death. Sonar, a highly emotional Liela Moss vocal, delivers a poignant goodbye to a loved one, framed by a magnificent circular guitar hook around which organs, bass and drums carry prayer and eulogy. There are some maverick guest appearances throughout the record, Mark Lanegan, Raymonde himself, longterm TDS collaborator Terry Edwards (PJ Harvey/Gallon Drunk) and old friend Sam Windett from Archie Bronson Outfit is here also to duet with Liela on the wiry post-punk vibes of Side By Side.

One of the many standouts on the album is Pacific, a hyper vigilant and introspective tale of travel and self-discovery, of the realisation that often silence is a better way to communicate than with words. Adding to the tension, a force that pulls you in deep throughout the album, is a beautiful melody at the start of the song played on the saw by Mara Carlyle who also lends her effortlessly fluid voice to this and Sonar.

Despite these cameos, this is about The Duke Spirit, who in ten glorious songs, have resurfaced effortlessly and quietly, with one of the most exhilarating albums of this year!

Over their almost decade-and-a-half career, The Kills have released four records. Each one a restless, reckless enigmatic art statement that bristled with tension, anxiety, sex, unstudied cool and winking ennui, yet not one of them sounded like the previous one. Ash & Ice is the follow up to 2011’s critically lauded Blood Pressures and was five years in the making in part due to Jamie Hince’s five hand surgeries, which resulted in him having to re-learn how to play guitar with a permanently damaged finger.
 
Unlike earlier albums, which have largely been written and recorded at Key Club Studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan, the bulk of the recording for Ash & Ice took place in a rented house in LA and at the world famous Electric Lady Studios in NYC. The album was produced by Jamie Hince and co-produced by John O’Mahony (Metric, The Cribs), and mixed by Tom Elmhirst (Adele, Arcade Fire, Amy Winehouse) and Tchad Blake (Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys).
 
It was during Hince’s recuperation from surgery that he first started sketching out what would become the songs for the album. To shake up the writing process, Hince booked a solo trip on the infamous Trans-Siberian Express for inspiration while Alison Mosshart, now residing in Nashville, TN, wrote some of the most affecting, poetically candid lyrics that she ever has, painting word pictures that mine the dangerous terrain between romantic obsession, prophecy and tough love. Where previous albums had an air of detachment and emotional austerity, underpinned by an uneasy self-awareness and unexpressed anger, the 13 songs on Ash & Ice are more understated, less tempestuous and more affecting because of that, exposing the kind of push-pull you feel when you find yourself in a complicated but all-consuming relationship. Ash & Ice is The Kills at their emotionally charged, arresting best. Prepare to be slayed.

with Modern Baseball, Three Man Cannon

New Album The Dream Is Over is out now

Darko are playing the Unicorn Camden this week with their brand of melodic hardcore punk then they're off to Manchester Punk Festival on the weekend ... check out their track Timepieces & Lock Shaped Hearts here:

BAND OF SKULLS

With exclusive releases on the day and live music all over the place this one is absolutely a date for your diaries!  Our local event will be at Southsea's Pie & Vinyl well worth a journey if you have yet to discover this little gem. Come down for a great day of music, vinyl and all the pies you could ever want. Record Store Day has so many participating venues UK-wide celebrating independent record shops with all the excitement of exclusives and musical discoveries old and new. Check out your local store here: www.recordstoreday.co.uk/participating-stores

WEEZER are back in the UK for a few  UK dates in support of the new "White Album" released 1st April

XENO is unlike any other album released this year. It has a story of hope, failure, love, betrayal and death like no other woven into its fabric so skillfully it's impossible to tell where truth ends and fiction begins. It's both an escape from and examination of reality that reveals more and more truths the further it delves.

Produced by Josh Wilbur (Avenged Sevenfold, Lamb Of God, Hatebreed)  and mastered by Ted Jensen, XENO takes the groundwork laid by 2013's APOCALYZE and 2012's ZION EP as well as the band's vast touring history and catapults them into a whole new league. Not just because the album contains the best and most fluent tracks Crossfaith have ever written, but because it's an artistic endeavor like few others, with roots in manga, anime and the furthest reaches of its creators' minds. Front man Kenta 'Ken' Koie, guitarist Kazuki Takemura, bassist Hiroki ‘Hiro’ Ikegawa, keyboardist Terufumi 'Teru' Tamano and drummer Tatsuya Amano are, quite simply, operating on a different level.

At the end of last summer, after a grueling festival run, Kazuki confided in Ken that his hand felt slightly weird and he wasn't comfortable playing guitar. What started as a simple problem – maybe a trapped nerve, maybe he slept on it, maybe anything – sharply escalated when the guitarist followed the mystery problem down a rabbit hole. He had, it transpires, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and the issue with his hand was a minor manifestation of a deeply serious problem. “He was,” admits Ken grimly, “very lucky. We all were. We thought the band was finished, and this was the worst thing that had ever happened to us.”

But because Crossfaith's never-say-die attitude runs through his veins – in this case, a little too literally – Kazuki steamed through an intensive course of physical rehab that, helpfully, involved playing a lot of guitar. At this point, after working through “Vanguard” and the thrilling “Ghost In The Mirror” (on which Caleb Shomo from Ohio breakout rippers Beartooth guests), Teru told Kazuki that he had an idea about a character called Xeno. Or rather two characters.

There are two Xenos – one a non-corporeal female digital intelligence that seeks to understand the complexities of human behavior, and the other a human with a death wish. After the AI boots herself up (the sound of which is captured on the album's intro, “System X”) she inserts herself into the brain of the human Xeno. He is so distraught with the state of the world that he, on the brutal chaos of the title track, destroys the entire world and then returns to his mother's womb, desperate to create reality again so people have a second chance.

“Everyone has a dark side,” says Ken. “Everybody is so hypocritical. And everything – our world – is being completely fucked up by so many people, especially the government. It's easy to see what they do. So Xeno, the person, decides to do something big so he can hit reset and start again.”

And all this time she lives behind his eyes, watching and learning and trying to understand just why people do what we do. Throughout the album all shades of human life are rendered: “Paint It Black” deals with gleeful revenge, “Wildfire” (enlivened by the exhilarating Benji Webbe from Skindred)  is all parties and serotonin peaks and the colossal “Tears Fall” speaks of love and loss with the deftest of touches.

But at the album's close, she notices that the one feeling that binds humanity together is loneliness. Despite how busy they are, how many other people they surround themselves with and what the smiles on their faces say, there's an ache below the surface that she simply wasn't prepared for.

“And this feeling, this loneliness that Xeno discovers – it's the same way we feel after a show,” explains Ken quietly. “She didn't expect people to feel this way when they live the lives they do, and it's the same for us.”

Crossfaith have transcended everything they've done before to create a headspinningly complex and futuristic allegory. And, somehow, it cuts to a simple truth at the heart of life in 2015.