A regular feature highlighting some of the great album releases each month. I don’t do album “reviews” - these are just recommendations. A few words about the artists and the albums that appealed to me this month. These will be albums from which I’ll have been playing tracks on the Friday NI Rocks Shows recently.
This month the list features Flotsam & Jetsam, Midnite City, Brother Against Brother, Mammoth WVH, Crowne, Timo Tolkki's Avalon, Social Disorder, Constancia, Buckcherry and King Company.
There are two NI Rocks Shows uploaded each week on Rock Radio NI. These are the playlists for those shows for the month of May – all of which are still available from the On Demand Player. There are tracks by around 140 different artists on the Shows this month. Playlists for April were published previously and most of those Shows are also available via the On Demand Player – http://www.rockradioni.co.uk/news/rrni-updates/3810-ni-rocks-playlists-for-april-2021.html
There was a new interview this month with from Tom Harte from local band Trucker Diablo and with singer Robin McAuley who released a new solo album in May. All interviews can be found here - http://www.rockradioni.co.uk/interviews.html and most are on the NI Rocks MixCloud page as well - https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/
Singer Robin McAuley has been fronting successful bands and releasing albums for around forty years. He has fronted Survivor as well as releasing albums with Grand Prix, Far Corporation, McAuley Schenker Group, GMT, Michael Schenker Fest and most recently Black Swan.
However, Robin, who born in Ireland, released what is only his second ‘solo’ album through Frontiers Music on 7th May. It is called "Standing on the Edge". In fact the first ‘solo’ album released back in 1999 wasn’t even intended to be a solo album initially.
I had the opportunity to have a very entertaining chat with Robin via Skype on 24th May 2021 and you can hear that interview on the Friday NI Rocks Show on 28th May. We chat about the solo album, new music from Black Swan, working with Michael Schenker, the ‘Raiding the Rock Vault’ shows and much more. The interview can be read below or you can listen to the Show on the MixCloud page
- https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/interview-with-robin-mcauley-on-the-friday-ni-rocks-show-28th-may-2021/
Local band Trucker Diablo released their fifth album, “Tail End of a Hurricane” on 7th May after a delay caused by the Covid pandemic. Singer Tom Harte has been a guest on the Friday NI Rocks Show on two earlier occasions in 2017 and 2015 to talk about the two previous albums so it seemed appropriate to get him back again to chat about “Tail End of a Hurricane”.
You can hear that interview on the Friday NI Rocks Show for 14th May 2021 – that Show is available from our MixCloud site -
https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/interview-with-tom-harte-from-trucker-diablo-on-the-friday-ni-rocks-show-14th-may-2021/
Read more: NI ROCKS Interview with TOM HARTE from TRUCKER DIABLO