Today I decided to start doing some pre-production for a couple of solo podcasts, an hour each, on the best alternative music of the past twelve months.
On my Itunes, I changed the library settings to predominantly show the year, scrolled to 2014, and started to depict what to include in the specialist music programmes, that will become available to listen to online come mid-December.
As I was doing this, I noticed that it has IN FACT been a pretty strong year for guitar music. If I look at the bands that I’ll be playing and talking about on the shows, we’ve got Slipknot, Pulled Apart By Horses, Kasabian, The Black Keys, Foo Fighters, Ben Howard, Eagulls and Royal Blood.
Of course, some of these acts do intersperse elements of different genres. For example, Kasabian have started to use synthesisers fairly prominently recently, especially on their ’48:13′ album release in Summer this year. However, all of these bands (and more) have had a brilliant 2014. Look at Royal Blood, they’ve just been announced as one of the supports bands for Foo Fighters at Wembley in June next year! This is incredible for a new UK two-piece who just wrote garage rock songs for the hell of it in Brighton.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t panic. Guitar music is on the rise. In the last two weeks or so, I have been literally obsessed with this new two-piece (again), from Kent called Slaves. These guys are unbelievably exciting. Last night on Twitter I compared them to The Sex Pistols due to their gritty Southern accent, heavy riffs, loud drums and energy. They also politically speak for our generation to a certain extent. If you’re interested, check out the new song, ‘The Hunter’. This is a fantastic record. It shouts at you with such vigour and venom and everything else beginning with V. Also, my tweets got a favourite from their tour manager, so he must agree with me here!
Anyway, I digress. To condense this post into one summarising sentence, I’m confidently hopeful for 2015 with regards to guitar music.
NB – I am a big fan of many music genres, so I’m not trying to look biased. It’s only that guitar music is the closest to my heart and I can be annoyingly passionate about such matters at times. Cheers.
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