Mad Ones – Kecskemet
Genre: Garage Rock, Alternative Rock, Hard Rock
Most rock bands start out in a garage, a formerly flooded basement, or a dingey rehearsal room. The only sound that you’ll be able to make out from outside those rooms for the first few months is of endless feedback roar and drums crashing out of time. It’s amazing to consider that while many stories end this way, all of the colossal bands that end up influencing millions of people across the world need to begin in the same fashion.
That future customarily belongs to those that not only iron out the kinks of their music but work to develop their songwriting. In this way, they learn what and how to communicate to a potential audience of millions. They are then the same band that started out in the garage. But, while they were hiding away from the world down there, they learned secrets that nobody else had a way of learning.
Canadian alternative-rock group Mad Ones has taken the necessary steps to iron out the bugs. Beneath a wall of guitar riffs and a large cloud of smokey vocals, they’ve created Kecskemet. This is a love letter to a city in Kecskemet, that much like the rest of Central Europe, is beautiful beyond description. Pays off, sometimes, to own a guitar and learn its most intimate secrets.
On The Cinder – Past, Present, No Future
Genre: Punk, Pop Punk, Alternative Rock
Society, generally, likes and rewards comfort. On social media, people post pictures of themselves media relaxing, watching Netflix, casually drinking. Folks don’t post many pictures of themselves suffering, either to achieve a goal or because life has hit them hard. Now, consider which ones of these activities actually lead to anything positive, and you may want to reconsider some of the pics designed to get you likes.
It’s a strange time to be a writer. The folks that had developed the powers of observation to vividly describe a scene, or to accurately point out a villain, were prized and honoured by society. It’s the time of flash fiction nowadays, with everyone living in their own make-believe fairyland.
On The Cinde’s Past, Present, No Future sounds like the sort of reality that most of us would like to ignore with little of the gruesome details omitted. The songwriting has an incredible power of zooming in on minute details and showing them as the symptoms of sickness they truly are. Leave it to punk-rock poets to stay connected to reality and keep us social media junkies in the loop.
