West Midlands II - Mini Disc Edition
A completely dead format that still feels futuristic? West Midlands music is made for Mini Discs.
You remember Mini Discs. Smaller and more space-age than CDs, more robust and longer lasting than cassettes, laughed at and ignored by the world at large. Let them laugh. Keanu Reeves used them in The Matrix and what’s cooler than that?
West Midlands II: the long-awaited (pretty much presumed-missing at this stage) second coming of West Midlands (the band) is unleashed on MiniDisc and everything from its sound, to its cover, and even its format screams ‘ancient and modern’. Unwanted art from the past that still feels ten years ahead of its time.
The record starts, as BIG ROCK records invariably must, with the song Are You Ready? the purest distillation of West Midlands mogadon metal fixation, an instantly iconic, bone-dry riff, an invitation to party that very suddenly goes south.
Shit Business at the LA Fitness is a bona-fide rock and roll radio smash that you can’t really play on the radio. A floor-burning, horns-aloft, would-be world beater, if only it wasn’t a toilet-mouthed tirade about the proximity of death and being the only goth in the gym.
Track three, Give Me The Music adds a touch of Duran Duran’s Brummies-on-a-yacht swagger, and a dash of The Streets’ plate-eyed rave evangelism to a cautionary tale of night club jitters, before peeling off not one, but two glitterball guitar solos. You know, like Judas Priest would do.
West Midlands II closes with a heads-down slab of proper Midlands metal. Dinosaur is a thundering T Rex of a song, a stone-cold jurassic classic, proudly parsing the souped-up second city paranoia of Black Sabbath into a two-minute air guitar anthem, complete with unreconstructed caveman vocals.
A completely dead format that still feels futuristic? West Midlands music is made for Mini Discs.
You remember Mini Discs. Smaller and more space-age than CDs, more robust and longer lasting than cassettes, laughed at and ignored by the world at large. Let them laugh. Keanu Reeves used them in The Matrix and what’s cooler than that?
West Midlands II: the long-awaited (pretty much presumed-missing at this stage) second coming of West Midlands (the band) is unleashed on MiniDisc and everything from its sound, to its cover, and even its format screams ‘ancient and modern’. Unwanted art from the past that still feels ten years ahead of its time.
The record starts, as BIG ROCK records invariably must, with the song Are You Ready? the purest distillation of West Midlands mogadon metal fixation, an instantly iconic, bone-dry riff, an invitation to party that very suddenly goes south.
Shit Business at the LA Fitness is a bona-fide rock and roll radio smash that you can’t really play on the radio. A floor-burning, horns-aloft, would-be world beater, if only it wasn’t a toilet-mouthed tirade about the proximity of death and being the only goth in the gym.
Track three, Give Me The Music adds a touch of Duran Duran’s Brummies-on-a-yacht swagger, and a dash of The Streets’ plate-eyed rave evangelism to a cautionary tale of night club jitters, before peeling off not one, but two glitterball guitar solos. You know, like Judas Priest would do.
West Midlands II closes with a heads-down slab of proper Midlands metal. Dinosaur is a thundering T Rex of a song, a stone-cold jurassic classic, proudly parsing the souped-up second city paranoia of Black Sabbath into a two-minute air guitar anthem, complete with unreconstructed caveman vocals.
A completely dead format that still feels futuristic? West Midlands music is made for Mini Discs.
You remember Mini Discs. Smaller and more space-age than CDs, more robust and longer lasting than cassettes, laughed at and ignored by the world at large. Let them laugh. Keanu Reeves used them in The Matrix and what’s cooler than that?
West Midlands II: the long-awaited (pretty much presumed-missing at this stage) second coming of West Midlands (the band) is unleashed on MiniDisc and everything from its sound, to its cover, and even its format screams ‘ancient and modern’. Unwanted art from the past that still feels ten years ahead of its time.
The record starts, as BIG ROCK records invariably must, with the song Are You Ready? the purest distillation of West Midlands mogadon metal fixation, an instantly iconic, bone-dry riff, an invitation to party that very suddenly goes south.
Shit Business at the LA Fitness is a bona-fide rock and roll radio smash that you can’t really play on the radio. A floor-burning, horns-aloft, would-be world beater, if only it wasn’t a toilet-mouthed tirade about the proximity of death and being the only goth in the gym.
Track three, Give Me The Music adds a touch of Duran Duran’s Brummies-on-a-yacht swagger, and a dash of The Streets’ plate-eyed rave evangelism to a cautionary tale of night club jitters, before peeling off not one, but two glitterball guitar solos. You know, like Judas Priest would do.
West Midlands II closes with a heads-down slab of proper Midlands metal. Dinosaur is a thundering T Rex of a song, a stone-cold jurassic classic, proudly parsing the souped-up second city paranoia of Black Sabbath into a two-minute air guitar anthem, complete with unreconstructed caveman vocals.