Author Archives: Matthew Belter

Some bands sing about Vikings. Amon Amarth sound like the longship itself —oak hull, iron rivets, and Johan Hegg’s growl rolling over the bow like a storm off the North Sea. Thirty-four years out of Tumba, Sweden, they have turned arena floors into rowing crews and made Odin a household name from pre-teens to grandparents. Thirteen albums in, The Allfather Awakens, out October 2 on Metal Blade, lands like a war horn: this band is not slowing down.

My copy arrived in the Odin’s Hunt variant, grey, white, and red marbled wax that looks like smoke drifting over a battlefield, tucked inside a gatefold jacket with a two-sided insert. I dropped the needle, sealed myself inside my Ultimate Ears Premiers and followed every word Hegg sang on that insert, not coming up for air until the run-out groove.

The production is flat-out stunning. The band wrote on the road this time, then cut the record over two sessions, months apart, at Jacob Hansen’s studio in Denmark, treating every track like a single. You hear that care everywhere.

Olavi Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg ditched their 5150s for Marshalls, and through the Premiers the difference is something you can almost touch. The riffs have grit and grain, the harmonies have room to breathe, and Ted Lundström’s bass sits right in my chest instead of hiding under the guitars. Jocke Wallgren’s kick drum is so tight you can count every stroke.

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The first time I heard “I Sit on Acid,” I was 20 years old, out on the dance floor at Club Metro in Riverside, and I had no idea what I was listening to, let alone who the Lords of Acid actually were. Nobody did. It was slow, dirty, and hypnotic, with lyrics you weren’t supposed to say out loud, let alone over a club sound system. Nobody around me cared. We just moved.

Not long after, I walked into my first warehouse rave in San Pedro, Krusty’s Funhouse, under a huge circus tent. Around 2 a.m., the DJ dropped Lords of Acid’s latest, “Take Control,” and the whole tent lifted off the ground. I’ve been to a lot of shows in the decades since, and I’ve photographed plenty of them. I can count on one hand the times a single record changed the temperature of a room like that. It was life-changing.

That was the beginning for me. Before the festivals, before EDM became a business, before anyone had a phone to film it, there was a guy in Antwerp named Maurice Engelen putting out records under a pile of different names, and they were landing 6,000 miles away in tents and warehouses full of kids like me. Praga Khan. Channel X. Lords of Acid. “Rave the Rhythm.” “Injected with a Poison.” To us he wasn’t a name on a sleeve. He was the source.

Here’s the part that floored me: he had no idea. No internet, no cell phones, faxes with sales figures coming back from America. He didn’t know we existed until a fan cornered him at a party in Miami and recited his discography back to him.

More than 35 years later, Lords of Acid is still doing what it has always done: pushing buttons, making people dance and laughing the whole way through. Mundo Bizarro, the band’s first album of all-new material since 2018’s Pretty in Kink, is out now on Metropolis Records, with the LP following November 9. It’s the first record with Carla Harvey, who grew up dancing to the songs she now fronts. It moves between English, Spanish, German, and Japanese. And true to form, the cover is already getting flagged by the algorithms: a woman holding a banana to her head like a gun. Praga Khan is still too much for the internet.

I got on the phone with the man who started it all for me, on the eve of the Cheeky Freaky Pt. 2 tour, to talk about the new beat accident that launched a genre, why he still trusts an ARP 2600 over a laptop, and what he’d say to the kid on the dance floor.

Before there was Praga Khan, there was Maurice Engelen growing up in Belgium. What was the first record that made you think, “I need to make sounds like that,” and how far was it from the music you ended up making?

I started out in my early twenties as a booker for international bands, bringing acts like Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire over from England to the continent. In 1982 I started my own record label, Antler-Subway, and it became a very influential independent label for electronic body music, with bands like Klinik and A Split-Second. In America, most of the best bands from that scene were on Wax Trax! at the time.

I started making records myself in 1987, when Atari came out with its sequencing software. Before that I’d been working with a Commodore sequencing system. I’ve always been in love with technology and in love with music, so combining the two was the perfect thing for me. The very first record I made was a song called “Blow Job,” and I honestly didn’t know what the word meant. I thought a blow job was a bad job, when somebody does something wrong. Only later did I find out what it really was.

Back then I was influenced mostly by German records like 16 Bit, and by the bands on our own label: A Split-Second, Klinik, Poésie Noire, The Neon Judgement. But that music was a little too dark for me. I wanted to make something less depressive and show the funnier side of it.

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PHOTO: ANNE MARIE FORKER | I have been a prog fan for as long as I have owned a turntable. The genre’s long-form ambition, its odd time signatures, and its insistence that an album be heard from start to finish have shaped the way I listen to music, so the chance to sit down with Bruce Soord of The Pineapple Thief was, quite simply, an honor.

What began in 1999 as Soord’s one-man studio project in the UK has grown, record by record, into one of modern progressive rock’s most respected bands. Alongside bassist Jon Sykes, keyboardist Steve Kitch, and drummer Gavin Harrison—now a decade into his tenure behind the kit—Soord has built a catalog that carries as much emotional weight as technical precision. Their new album, Far and Wide, arrived on October 9 on InsideOut Music, and it finds the band deliberately stripping things back: no more than two guitar parts at a time, a sound built to be played live, and songs that wrestle with a world in turmoil, moral courage, and personal loss.

We spoke just days before the release about the little UK festival gig that first convinced him he was in a real band, the Alan Parsons Project record that rewired his brain, writing in 5/4 with Harrison in the same room, the loss of his father, and why—after years of mixing in Atmos and 5.1—he still believes vinyl is the format you can’t touch. As a lifelong prog listener writing for a vinyl publication, I could not have asked for a better answer.

The Pineapple Thief started in 1999 as essentially a studio project. Take me back to the first time you stood in front of a real audience with these songs. What do you remember, and did you have any sense it would turn into a 16-album life?

That pretty much sums it up. It definitely didn’t make any sense at the time that it would be 16 albums, 26 years, or whatever. But I remember the early days. It was just me in my little studio, and you had to be a bit of a nerd to run a studio in your home back then. It was lots of wires and cables and computers.

But for some reason, it had a bit of momentum, and with every album we’d get a few more fans. When we got to the third record, which was Variations on a Dream, all of a sudden we had some people asking us to play live. I think it was 2003. We were offered this show, a little progressive rock festival here in the UK, and it was headlined by Caravan, you know, the old Canterbury scene band. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Then I thought, oh, I really need to get a band, because I played everything.

So I got my friends in, we rehearsed, and we went up to this little festival and played to this packed room, and I remember the audience loving it. I remember walking out of the room and seeing this big queue of people, and I said to this guy, “What are these people queuing up for?” And he said, “They’re queuing up for you. They want to buy your merch. They want you to sign some stuff.” And I went, “What?” I remember vividly thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is actually a band, and people actually like it.” Luckily, I had some CDs in the car, so I ran to the car, got some CDs out, and that was it. That was the first time.

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There is a version of every record you own that you have never heard. Not a remaster, not a better pressing—the one the people who made it were hearing while they made it. Ultimate Ears Pro has spent three decades building the hardware that grants that access, starting in 1995 with a pair of custom monitors for Alex Van Halen and ending up in the ears of a startling percentage of the artists on your shelf.

I have spent my listening life on the other side of that glass: speakers, a room, a needle, the compromises of moving air across fifteen feet. So, I sat in an audiologist’s chair and had impressions taken of my ear canals, then sat with UE Pro and blind-tested all eight monitors in its lineup until my own ears picked a winner, and about ten days later, took delivery of a pair of UE Premiers that fit nobody else on earth. Then I plugged them into a turntable. What came back wasn’t a smaller version of my system. It was a much bigger one. And because UE Pro would rather you hear this for yourself than take my word for it, they’re giving a pair away to one of you.

It starts with your ears, and that is where I had badly underestimated things. The mold is not packaging. It is the first component in the chain, and everything the monitor does downstream is built on top of it. A custom shell seals the canal completely, and that seal is what gives twenty-one drivers something to push against—without it, there is no real low end and no isolation worth the name. A universal tip approximates your ear. An impression doesn’t have to approximate anything.

I went to Ann Mundell-Noel at Amazing Hearing in Laguna Hills, and the appointment felt closer to a medical exam than a fitting, which is essentially what it is. She inspected both canals first, reading the depth and shape she’d be casting, clearing anything that would compromise the mold, and narrating every step a beat before she took it.

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Some albums arrive. Anghellic detonated. Twenty-five years ago, Tech N9ne split himself into three acts—Hell, Purgatory, Heaven—and dared the rest of hip-hop to keep up with his tongue. It cracked the Top 60 of the Billboard 200 and hit No. 50 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart, but chart position was never the story. The story was that nobody in 2001 sounded remotely like this, and nobody since has caught him.

Anghellic: The Resurrection is not a victory lap. It is Tech taking the master tapes back and finishing an argument he started a quarter century ago.

He went back in with engineer Ben “Bengineer” Cybulsky and remixed and remastered the record himself, and you hear that intent immediately. The low end has weight now instead of mud. The Halloween piano, the talkbox, the horror-movie air around the vocals, all of it has been pulled apart and given room to breathe. Nothing is scrubbed. It just hits harder.

Then there is the object. This is a 2xLP, one disc a devil-red crimson, the other a light celestial blue, the whole Hell-to-Heaven concept sitting in your hands before the needle drops. Four sides also means the three-act sequence lands in chapters instead of one long haul. The fold-out is stacked with photography and full song credits, the kind of packaging that makes you sit on the floor and read while side one plays. Vinyl earning its keep.

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PHOTO: MIKE OWEN | Everybody has one Soft Cell song. For most people, it is “Tainted Love,” and that is fine. It is a perfect record. It is also a door, not a house.

I went through the door at fourteen and never came back out. What was on the other side was not a synth-pop novelty act with a Northern Soul cover to its name. It was Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, a song cycle about bedsits and hustlers and cheap glamour that owes more to Brecht and Weill than to the chart it briefly conquered.

It was The Art of Falling Apart. It was This Last Night in Sodom, the sound of a band detonating itself on purpose. Then came the solo work, where things got genuinely strange: Marc and the Mambas, Torment and Toreros, a double album Almond himself has described as the sound of a nervous breakdown. Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters. An entire album of Jacques Brel translations.

He is a pioneer of the form, one of the handful who took a cheap synthesizer and a drum machine and got a torch song out of them. He also never once stayed in the room he built. I have seen him play more times than I can count, and I have never seen him coast.

On September 25, Soft Cell will release Danceteria, their sixth and last studio album. Dave Ball finished it days before he died on October 22, 2025, and Almond has been plain about what that means: without Ball, there are no more Soft Cell records.

My favorite Soft Cell song has always been “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” and I have never had much of a defense for that beyond the fact that it takes me apart every time. It went to number three in Britain in January 1982, an Almond and Ball composition, a breakup staged in an ordinary nightclub and sung with more contempt and more tenderness than a chart single is supposed to hold.

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The first time I saw W.A.S.P. I was a kid at the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino, 1984. They were opening for Krokus and Helix, and I didn’t have the vocabulary for what happened to me that night. Forty-two years and more shows than I can count later, I’m still not sure I do. But I know what kept me there, and it wasn’t the buzzsaws or the blood or any of the things that got the band on the evening news. It was that Blackie Lawless meant it. I could tell that from the cheap seats at fourteen, and I can tell it from a photo pit now.

That’s the thing, people who only know the headlines never got it. The imagery was real because the man was real, and when the imagery stopped serving him, he changed it, at considerable cost, more than once. He made the record his label didn’t want and watched it go gold in a week. He built The Crimson Idol alone in a studio with no clocks. He still records to tape. He’ll tell you exactly why, and he doesn’t soften any of it.

He’s about to take that first stretch of his catalog back on the road (the “1984 to Headless” tour, forty-plus North American dates starting September 10 with KK’s Priest), and he’s six years into an autobiography, Tales From the Square Mile, that turned out not to be about him at all. He talked about the closet he lived in across the street from the Hollywood Palladium, three feet by twelve. The laundromat where they set up between the washing machines. The meat locker. Bela Lugosi dying seventy-five feet from where he slept, which he only learned decades later while fact-checking his own life.

Early in our conversation, he waved off my thanks and said that what he does and what I do aren’t so different. “We’re reporters. We write down what we see, or we record it, and we tell people about it.” I’ve thought about that line ever since. Here’s what he told me.

Take me back to before anybody knew what W.A.S.P. was, before the makeup, before the buzzsaws, before any of it. What was the actual plan when you started in ’82? Because I don’t think the way this began and the way the world eventually saw it are the same story.

You’ve got to understand, how we got started and what the world eventually saw were two completely different things. We were trying to get a record deal, and we’d been here long enough to know that most bands don’t get deals by playing live. They get them off demo tapes, because the label is looking for something they can manage, something they can put a quarterly report on. I wrote those songs in early ’82, “I Wanna Be Somebody,” “L.O.V.E. Machine,” all of that, and we did a set of demos. We put them out and we weren’t hearing back from the labels. So we thought, these demos are pretty good, why don’t we take them out in front of people and see what happens?

We had no clue what to do. We looked at each other and said, “Well, do we just stand still and look at our shoe tops?” And we thought, no, that’s not really us. It started morphing from there.

I was playing guitar then. Don Costa was our original bass player, and Don and Chris were butting heads, and Chris gave me an ultimatum. I knew Randy Piper from having worked with him before, but the problem was we had three guitar players and no bass player, and I knew those other two guys were never going to give up guitar. So, I was basically elected to play that instrument.

We never intended on playing live. And the irony is that we got known for the show. That first record is considered a classic now, but nobody was really listening at the time, because the show was so powerful. We were scratching our heads. At the end of the day we didn’t care, as long as it got us from point A to point B, that’s all that mattered.

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You know the cover before you know the record. Bushwick Bill on a hospital gurney, eye bandaged, Willie D and Scarface wheeling him down the corridor, all three staring straight down the lens. No album art has ever dared you harder to press play.

But it was neither a costume nor a concept shoot. That was the worst night of a man’s life, and Bill said years afterward that it still hurt to look at the cover, that he had gone along with it and came to feel it was wrong. He deserved to be known for far more than his darkest hour, and he was—a Jamaican-born kid out of Brooklyn who grew into one of the most magnetic voices this music has ever produced.

Since we lost him in 2019, the picture has stopped feeling like a dare and started feeling like something left in our keeping. Twelve inches of restored artwork is where it belongs. The jacket doesn’t display it so much as place it in your hands at full scale, and that asks something of you before a note plays.

We Can’t Be Stopped arrived in July 1991 as a flat refusal to accept that rap’s center of gravity belonged to a coast. Houston. Rap-A-Lot. James Prince. Three voices with nothing in common but nerve.

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Some rappers tell you what happened, and some rappers hand you the shovel and make you an accessory after the fact. Scarface has always been the second kind.

He was 23 years old when he cut The Diary, and Brad Jordan already sounded like a man who had buried more friends than he had left—that low, unhurried Houston drawl reading funeral arrangements over funk. It landed in October 1994 on an independent in Houston, which is exactly why it sounds this way: no committee ever got near it. Rap-A-Lot has brought it back to wax for the label’s 40th anniversary, and I’ll say it plainly—I’ve lived with this album for three decades, and the vinyl is the first time I’ve actually heard it.

That’s not collector nostalgia talking. It’s the low end. Mike Dean, N.O. Joe, Uncle Eddie, and ‘Face himself built these tracks from live bass, dusty Rhodes, and guitar that curls around the beat instead of sitting on top of it, and every digital version I’ve owned smeared it. Spreading fourteen tracks across four sides of a 2xLP fixes that—grooves cut wide, nothing crowded, all the headroom that bass needs.

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PHOTOS: MATTHEW BELTER | Some records you outgrow. Others grow up right alongside you. For more than forty years, Haircut 100 has been the second kind for me—the sound of a certain light, a certain feeling, the kind of song that quietly turns an ordinary afternoon into a memory you keep.

“Love Plus One” has been a soundtrack of my life for as long as I can remember, and I’m hardly alone in that; I felt it again last September in Anaheim, camera in hand, watching faces in the crowd light up, watching people cry over memories they’d carried in their pockets for decades. You don’t shoot a show like that so much as get swept up in it. I came away thinking the same thing I’d just been talking over with Richard Blade—that there’s a rare kind of music that refuses to age, and Nick Heyward has spent a career making it.

So, when the chance came to sit down with him ahead of Boxing the Compass—only the second album the classic lineup has made since 1982, and, fittingly for this publication, arriving on vinyl the way it was always meant to—I’ll confess my heart was in it every bit as much as my notebook.

What I found on the other end of the line wasn’t nostalgia. It was a man still chasing the magic, still talking about turning up to the studio like it’s the best job in the world, still steering by the same compass that first pointed him out to sea all those years ago. We covered the reunion, the records that shaped him, the strange arithmetic of keeping a promise the universe seemed to make to him when he was barely out of his teens—and where, after the whole long voyage, the needle finally settles. Here’s how it landed.

I read that the band reconvened for what was meant to be a business meeting that ended up feeling more like a reunion of old friends. Can you take us into that room—was there a specific moment you realized this wasn’t going to be a meeting; it was going to be a band again?

It was never that definite, because we didn’t want to get our hopes up—we always hope the band is going to stay together. The key position is manager, and that’s the one we lost back in 1982; it had never been filled since. So, we could get back together, but staying together was the hard part. Even after we played Shepherd’s Bush Empire, I was still wondering, is this going to last?

But it started to build—the 40th anniversary, then the gig, and then the BBC Piano Room invited us on, which is a big deal over here. When the BBC wants to help you, you think, wow. Then a manager who’d looked after Wet Leg and the Manic Street Preachers rang up and asked if we needed any help. That seemed to be the feeling around that time—people actually wanting us to stay together, which felt different from every other time. We wanted it, and so did everyone around us. And honestly, we’re too old to split up now.

You left after Pelican West, and the band went on to make Paint and Paint without you in ’84. More than forty years later, you’re writing and recording with Graham and Les again. What did it take—in yourself, not just on paper—to walk back toward something you once chose to walk away from?

It wasn’t really a return, because we’ve known each other all along and we’ve always been friends—old friends just slot straight back into the same position. Les, Graham, and I have so much history—the band years, but also before that, when we lived together, and all the good times since. We’re a real band—it was our dream, and it happened. That goes beyond everything else, and the truth is everything else just gets in the way. We let that stuff get in the way before, which is why we didn’t stay together. So now we just keep having to let go, and because we let go, it keeps going.

It’s too easy to get bogged down in the reasons not to do it—the music business has changed, there’s no money in touring, no money in records. But none of that is a reason not to do it. We’re a band, so we get on with it. Every time the four of us—Les, Graham, Blair and me —play, I can’t think of anything better to do with my life. It’s the best job in the world. We’re foolhardy enough to think there are more albums in us, because we just keep turning up, the way we did when we were young. We didn’t get to turn up and do our thing for forty-four years. Now we can, and it’s precious. We’re not going to give it away.

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Some bands play rock and roll. Van Halen rebuilt it from the studs up, and for more than four decades, Eddie Van Halen’s fingerprints have been all over the blueprint—the tapping, the tone, the grin you could hear in every run. I have loved this band since I was a kid spinning records in my buddy Tommy B’s bedroom on 26th St. in San Bernardino, and I have chased them across roughly 25 shows in every lineup they ever fielded. So, when a record I had never heard of landed in my lap, I did not expect it to knock me flat.

The 5150 Sessions arrives not as a cash-grab, live bootleg but as a defiant act of preservation, a window into Van Halen with the curtain pulled all the way back.

Culled from 2006 and 2007 rehearsals at Eddie’s own 5150 studio, this is Ed, Al, and a young Wolfgang running full set lists twice a week with no singer in the room. Andrew Bennett, the filmmaker who lived inside those sessions, pulled the uncompressed files straight off the soundboard and handed them to producer Howard Wulkan, who mixed and mastered them at Farmadelica Sound.

The result floored me. This does not sound like a soundboard feed—it sounds like a finished studio album, every string and cymbal sitting in its own pocket of air. Wolfgang’s bass is rock solid, locked tight with his uncle and his dad, though I will always miss the rafter-shaking high harmonies and bottom end of the one and only Michael Anthony. What you get instead is something rarer: Eddie and Alex stripped bare, two brothers reading each other’s minds in real time.

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