Mick Birchall Reviews

Wow, this review got away from me a little. This year I had the chance to get myself to SOS Festival and see some good freaking music. This is where I found out about, Kikamora . They had a blinding performance that weekend and I was very curious to hear more from them. Luckily, they had a new EP in the pipeline and set for release in November. Like an idiot, I've put off this review, thinking I had more time to put it out, but man, the release date has soon snuck up on me. Although I have been listening to the EP for the last couple of months, for some reason, I just didn't write anything about it. So let's rectify that, shall I? Kikamora, for those of you who haven't made yourselves aware, is a hard rock band from the south of the UK and I would describe them as somewhere in between categories of hard rock and glam rock. They have the flair and style of an old-school glam rock act. Yet, they are far more grounded than your traditional glam rock act. There's muc...

Sometimes running this blog is amazing. I get contacted by bands and artists, from near and far and I get to experience so much good music. I get to see the world from other people's perspective and hear the unique and fun sounds that they create. This leads me to this band, Fuzzhoneys , whose music I have been massively enjoying recently. The Malta based rock duo have been making waves with the blues infused garage rock. They're even starting to break in to the UK underground rock scene, which is quite impressive.  The pair really work off of each other quite well. Caroline Spiteri on drums keeping that fun, frenetic pace while, Francesca Mercieca brings the hazy and rocked up guitar to the picture. After releasing a few tunes and EP's they're now hitting hard with their debut album Love Juice . It's definitely something worth getting stuck in to. The album packs a punch with the good blend of fuzzy blues riffs, hard rock rhythm, dynamic vocal li...

One of my favourite albums this year has definitely been It Was Metal by American metallers, A Sound of Thunder . It really is an inventive and enjoyable record and I have loved rocking out to it this year. Along with its comic book counterpart, It Was Metal just works so well for me and I would recommend it to anyone who's into the metal and comic book culture. After one of their rehearsal sessions, I managed to catch up with Josh Schwartz (guitarist), Jesse Keen (bassist) and Chris Haren (drummer) to talk about their career, music, comic books and their songwriting and discography. The band tell some good stories about their time as a band in the USA metal scene and how they come up with their music. Did you guys have a good rehearsal?   Chris: Oh yeah Josh: This one was an unusual one as we have just started working on a bunch of new songs. We have a bunch of covers and quite a bit of original material that we're going to start re...

After a stellar performance at HRH C.R.O.W.S. , I became enamoured with the music of Zack Logan . I went and bought his debut album, Raised By Wolves ,   and it's genuinely one of my favourite albums of 2018. His sweeping melodies and wonderful lyricism make for an incredible listening experience. I wanted to know more about the man himself, so, I managed to sit down and chat with Zack about coming to the UK and Europe, his musical influences, his new album and dealing with stage fright.  You recently visited the UK and played HRH C.R.O.W.S. How did you enjoy coming over here?  It was great. See, we did London and that HRH show as well. It was a real blast, although there were a lot of rock fans there, I still think it went over pretty well. I met a lot of new people and that was great. I played two sets that day, one solo and I played a set later with the other two guys and that was a lot of fun. It was well organised as well which was good. Yeah, it was a great l...