Drenched by Subset Review

I’ve been a fan of local band Subset for a few years now. Although I saw them a few times before I truly appreciated their talent they’re now one of my favourite local bands. And with good reason, their music is up-tempo, grungy and their stage performance is great. The lads are genuinely nice people as well and great fun to hang around with, which for me is just as important, if not more-so than the music.

In mid may Subset will release their 3rd Extended Play CD, Drenched, and I’ve been lucky enough to get an early listen in order to write this review.

I was delighted when I first saw the track listing, it has many of my old favourites — many of which remind me of when I first discovered Subet, in fact, when I first started being interested in music and local gigs in general. I was particularly delighted to see my two favourite Subset songs were on the EP, “Silent Treatment” and “Countdown to Adoration”

The first track on the record, “Silent Treatment”, has one of the catchiest riffs I’ve ever heard — it seriously stays stuck in your head for days — and on top of that it also has some incredibly passionate, if somewhat incomprehensible, singing delivered by french vocalist Rom. It’s a great track all round and definitely my highlight of the record. You can check out a bootleg video of the band playing it here, fortunately the recording on the EP is much, much better.

The second track, “I Can’t Play Guitar”, is another great mixture of fuzzy get-up-and-dance guitar riffs and passionate singing, but I feel the singing in this record is much clearer, which is nice. The track was originally recorded before the release of the bands second EP, Mahogany, but has definitely been worked on and sounds all the better for it.

Bang smack in the middle of the record is “Powercut”, it would be fair to say that this is my least favourite song on the record, but I think that just shows the relative strength of the other songs on the CD, because it itself it too is a good song with a different, darker (excuse the pun ;)) tone to the other tracks.

“Drink Dance Burn” is Subsets punkiest record and another one that I’m happy is finally recorded and being put out for people to listen to. Its got a great bass line to it and it’s another record that makes you want to Drink and Dance, but perhaps not burn.

The final song, on the 5 track record, is “Countdown To Adoration” and I’d say the band have saved the best to last here. We’ve been asking Jay, Rom and Rob to record this song for a while and I’m really happy its finally going to be available for people to listen to whenever they want. It’s a tad slower and softer than the other songs and shows the range of music that Subset can produce is bigger than just fast, up-beat grungy stuff. The song is immortalized by the lyrics “I Kiss, I Kiss, I Kiss, I Kiss, I Kiss” in the middle, which we all used to shout at the band a few years ago.

Anyway, you can probably tell that I’m not a music reviewer by trade but what I can say is that Subset have produced a genuinely great quality EP with Drenched — it has a great selection of, in my opinion, their best songs with great, catchy, dance-along riffs and passionate gritty vocals and is actually quite well recorded, technically, too.

As I said at the beginning of the post, the band are a bunch of great guys and I’m sure they’d love your support so check out www.SubsetBand.com

Houses of Parliament Tour

Today was great fun! I Started off in Cottingham and ended up at home via a great day out in London. My day started off with a rush to Hull Paragon Interchange Railway Station at which I found my debit card didn’t want to work in any of the ticket collection machines, worrying. After ten or so frantic minutes I eventually found a machine which would take my card and give me the tickets I’d paid for.

The Journey down to London was surprisingly painless having no changes and being on time, I even managed to do some work on my Windows Phone 7 Version of Evil Squash. I met Jess at kings cross and we rode the underground to Westminster where I met my family for the tour. It took around 90 minutes and was absolutely fascinating, some of the topics our expert guide informed us on were

• How parliament works
• The History of Parliament
• The Role of the Monarchy and Parliament
• Events that take place, including the opening of parliament

My Visitor Pass for Parliament

Unfortunately for obvious reasons the whole of the houses of parliament is a no photography zone, so you’ll have to book a tour for yourself to see all the majestic pictures, tapestries and the beautiful building in general — You can do this by emailing your local MP which for people in Dunstable  is Andrew Seleous.

After the houses of Parliament my dad treated myself, the rest of the family and Jess to a meal at TGI Fridays, which was great! After this the family returned home and Jess and I went to Tuffnell park for a DJ set by Subset at The Hideaway Bar, not a huge turnout but a great night none the less — though unfortunately cut short by the last tube to Euston at 12:10.

Thats all for now,
Danny

Internet issues, Home Time, Evil Squash & Marrow Registration

As you can see, I love short blog titles, unfortunately having one isn’t possible due to the fact that I’ve missed almost a week of blogging, which is upsetting. I was unable to blog toward the end of last week due to a campus wide network issue which prevented anyone from logging in, therefore preventing everyone from getting on-line both at the University and at the Halls of Residence.

Friday night I headed back home to Dunstable — for the first time since I got to university —  from Hull via Doncaster and Stevenage. A map of this incredibly long journey is below.

Once I arrived I went for a pizza hut with Jess, came home for 2 and a half hours and then went round Shauns house for a sleepover, followed by an archery session in the morning, which was great, I’m pretty pro ;

Saturday night I went out for a meal with my family, including my uncle and auntie, and Jess at Vantage, which is a great Indian in Dunstable, which I would reccomend. Later than night we watched a Semi Skinned acoustic set followed by full sets by the amazing Subset and Dutch Order. I then ended up in Sugar loaf till around 2:45, which is great as always, especially in the company of Jess, Shaun, Sam & Fiona 🙂 When I finally got home I appreicated sleeping in my own bed for the first time in almost 2 months.

Sunday I just chilled out at home before a wonderful home cooked roast (which I have missed each week) and finally the journey back home.

On the way back home I started and finished (it’s a long journey…) my assessed coursework 2 for Programming — the aim of which is to build the game “Evil Squash”. Evil Squash is essentially snakes and ladders but with the added game-play mechanic that two players cannot occupy the same square. If a player enters the same square another player already occupies he can do one of two things

1. Evil Squash – Make the player you land on go back to where you’ve come from.
2. Squash Bounce – You get to ‘bounce’ off of the player and can roll the dice again and move forward

To pass the module you simply need to make a text based version of the game, by which the user plays by inputting their name into the console. From then on they simply allow the computer to roll the dice for them and occasionally make a decision on whether to squash or bounce — this is fun to program but diabolically boring to play therefore as one of my enhancements (an addition to the program in order to achieve more marks) I am going to build a graphical windows phone 7 version, which should actually make the game enjoyable… or not!

Yesterday I spent much of the day recovering from my long journey the previous night and then attended my lectures. During the Quantitive Methods for Computing tutorial we were given the 3rd and final question for our ACW 2, which I completed that night.

Today was my late start day, which is always nice and consisted of Computer Systems where we learn about memory and auxiliary memory interfaces and Programming where we looked over data and data types in C#. When I got back to the Lawns Centre I signed up to the Anthony Noland Trust Bone Marrow Register.

I recommend everyone does this, it can save lives and the procedure (which you have only a 1 in 1000 chance of being asked to do) is very similar to that of a blood donation (apart from it takes 4 hours and you get all your blood back). So please check out: http://www.anthonynolan.org/. I plan to give blood in november, so I better get used to needles 😛

Later in the evening I watched the film tron with Rob and his friend Simon, which was pretty good and a nice way to spend a night.

Anyway, this post is rediculously long and i feel as if Ive covered the week well.

That’s all for now,

Danny.