Grumpyrocker

The most punctual band in metal are back, film maker Marty DiBergi has managed to reunite Spinal Tap to play at the forthcoming Live Earth concert.

What have the band been up? Nigel's been working with animals, David is now reprezentin' and Derek is in rehab.

Marty has even made a short film of his efforts to get Nigel, David and Derek back together and you can watch it right here.

There's nothing like new high tech to make a geek excited. Especially if the toy is one of the best, if not the best, in its field.

This is the new iRiver Clix 2, it's an mp3 player, movie player, ebook reader and more besides; and I'll tell you much more about it in a review over at Boomtown early next week.

So much for being a man with depth. I was listening to Janis Long's Radio 2 show the other night when she had an amazing folk singer on as a guest. The lass' voice was utterly amazing and I found myself really falling in love as she sang a couple of songs.

So the next day I tried to find out more about the singer, perhaps buy her CD, but I struggled to remember her name. I finally found it and also her official website.

And then discovered via that website that she was a bit plain. And suddenly my interest in her music disappeared. How shallow is that eh? Sometimes I think I'm probably not a very nice bloke at all.

After all, the music was great, so why should her looks put me off. She wasn't a hideous troll or anything, it was just that the beauty of her voice wasn't matched by the rest of her. I reckon any aspiring psychologist could have a field day with me.

I've been like this for ages, I remember how Alex would laugh at me for only buying country CDs based on how attractive the singer was. I have to say though this is an approach that reaps dividends for country. It works less well for pop, as the best looking singers tend to be making utter pap. I think that's called the "Rachel Stevens" syndrome.

Oh my giddy aunt, I know this record is for charity and everything, but the cover of Walk This Way (the Aerosmith/Run DMC version) by the Sugarbabes and Girls Aloud is without any doubt the worst sound I've ever heard. No not the worst music, the worst sound. Surely we'd rather have child poverty than actually reward this shite with any money?

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Sad news today that DJ Alan Freeman has died. For many rock fans he was the epitome of the golden era of rock and metal on radio. Along with the late great Tommy Vance he provided a ray of light at Radio 1 when everything else on the station was complete tat.

Freeman was a great DJ and someone who showed that whatever your age, there was something to be found in all branches of music. He was a lover of opera and metal, something that informed the icon jingles on his Radio 1 Rock Show.

G'Bye Fluff, you were one of the greats of radio.

It's some weeks now since Iron Maiden released A Matter of Life and Death, the third album since Bruce Dickenson and Adrian Smith returned to the band. I've held off writing a review of the record for a few weeks so it's not full of initial release excitement and takes a more honest appraisal of the work.

That said, in my opinion this is the best collection of songs from the band since 1988's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. All members of the band are firing on all cylinders and they are aided by a clear and dynamic production by Kevin Shirley. Steve Harris made the decision not to master the album and this has really allowed the music to breath, with quiet sections that a genuinely quiet and let the powerful passages shine through. The mix is just as good, though Dickenson does seem a little buried until you turn up the volume a little - that's when this record really hits its stride.

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Sony's Connect online store has little low-bitrate samples of all tracks from the new Iron Maiden album A Matter of Life and Death. The sound quality on the clips isn't great, but you'll at least be able to hear a snippet of every song.

The samples don't seem to work with Firefox though, so you may have to fire up Internet Explorer. You can find the album tasters right here.

If you only listen to music in your car or on public transport via headphones you are probably not aware of the way the modern CD has been ruining the sound of many classic albums and providing terrible reproduction of new records. The problem is that record companies today make albums as loud as possible. In the mastering process, which follows the mixing stage, a company may decide to brutally compress an album to make it uniformly loud across the whole range of songs. The result of this is that even the quiet songs are loud and the quiet bits of any of the songs are loud too. After all, you can't hear the quiet bits in the pub or in your car otherwise can you?

Do you listen to Radio 1. I know it's crap, but today give it a listen for five minutes. Do you notice how loud and punchy the sound is, with plenty of bite? That's compression at work. But you might also notice how little dynamic range is in the music, there are no quiet moments in records on Radio 1. In making everything loud you lose so much of the subtlety in the original recording and this same process is going on with nearly every CD you buy today.

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If you've heard the new Iron Maiden single, The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg, you may be wondering who Breeg is. Was he a real person or just a creation of the band.

The answer seems to be that he is a fictional character, but we are meant to believe he is a real person.

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I've been having a think about my favourite rock riffs the last few days, probably because I've been noodling around with my electric guitar for the first time in ages. For those uninitiated in the dark arts of rock, a riff is a repetitive phrase often (but not exclusively) played on guitar. Riffs are the mainstay of rock rhythm tracks, or at least they were until the current generation of dull distorted chord strumming weeds arrived.

So without further ado I present my own personal favourite ten rock riffs. I've limited myself to only one riff per band, which made for some very difficult decisions indeed. If I hadn't done that, they most probably would have all been Led Zeppelin riffs.

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