Tim H

Possibly her best post-Nightwish album to date. Released in August, I've managed to get hold of a review copy

A lot of things.... Slayer - Reign in Blood & South of Heaven Haken - Aquarius & Visions Riverside - Shrine of the New Generation Slaves Deep Purple - Now What?! Tarja - Colours in the Dark Harvest - Chasing Time Cosmograf - The Man Left In Space Luna Rossa - Sleeping Pills and Lullabies

Uriah Heep - Firefly In memory of Trevor Bolder, who passed away today at the age of 62

Thea Gilmore - Regardless.

Having heard the whole album (My review is one of those on the band's website), you're in for a treat. Shipping this week, I'm told.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Z2TtakiwxVs Taster for the forthcoming second album by Stolen Earth. Bit of The Cult's "Sonic Temple" in the big guitar sound.

Hafield and the North - The Rotters Club Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son Steve Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing Mostly Autumn - The Ghost Moon Orchestra Shadow of the Sun - Monument

Marillion - Clocks Already Ticking (Both the CD and DVD) Live recording from Friday, on sale on Saturday! And it's a properly mixed and mastered release, not a bootleg-quality thing like those "Concert live" albums from High Voltage.

Haven't done one of these for a while, so.... Spocks Beard - Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep (One of the most out-and-out prog things they've done) Unexpect - In A Flesh Aquarium (For those of you for whom The Mars Volta are not nearly bonkers enough) Machine Head - Unto The Locust (Real in-your-face metal) Alestorm - Captain Morgan's Revenge (Can "Scottish Pirate Metal" be a genre if it only applies to one band?) Marillion - Sounds That Can't Be Made (Homework for the weekend!)

As far as I know, the original albums are out of print. Mostly Autumn's own site lists them as "Temporarily out of stock" implying an intention to reissue them at some point. Amazon lists "The Last Bright Light" at inflated prices. Haven't investigated whether they're available as downloads from iTunes or anywhere else.

Not to mention the "Laira departmental blue" carried by Ramilees, Thunderer and (very briefly) Illustrious And there were *four* different variants of NSE livery,

Hmm. I didn't cut-and-paste it. I'd previously done an RSS blog import of old posts, and it's picking up new ones. Unfortunately it's mangling it in the process by not translating HTML into BBCode...

This is an ambitious project, which is an attempt to combine my British and Swiss modelling interests in a single layout. The idea is for a fixed track plan that will work either as a British or a Swiss outline layout, with scenery and buidings as swappable modules to enable the layout to be run in either mode. Time will tell whether or not this approach will actually work or not, but the intention is an operation-based layout rather than a exhibition-quality display layout. It centres around a junction station between a double track main line and a single track branch, with a five-road marshalling yard for wagonload freight. In British mode it’s a Par/St.Blazey/Lostwithiel mashup with the yard handling china clay traffic. In Swiss mode it’s somewhere on the Lötchberg line with elements of Frutigen and Kandersteg. The fiddle yard is currently six main line tracks, although I have plans to expand this to eight. I haven’t completely decided how to configure the branch fiddle yard. It’s at a very early stage of construction at the moment, since the track plan isn’t completely finalised, and nothing’s actually fixed down or wired up. This is the far end of the line, with the junction with the branch and a couple of roads of the yard in place. What will be the station area, with a Dapol class 122 “Bubble car” looking a bit lost. The Speedlink/Enterprise era freight stock in the goods loop is being used to check clearances and siding lengths, and represents the longest train the yard can handle. A steam-era freight at the other end of the layout. Despite the mixture of stock while test running, it’s intended to keep to one era during operating sessions, so you won’t be seeing kettles and modern air-braked freight stock at the same time, at least not when anyone is looking. The track is all Kato Unitrack, some of it ten years old and on it’s fourth layout. No, it doesn’t match hand-ballasted Peco Code 55 in appearance, but that’s not what it’s for. I’m using a mix of #6 and #4 turnouts; all main line points with the exception of one trailing crossover are #6s, while the yard is all #4s. I’m done this because the some older rolling stock with cruder wheel profiles isn’t happy on the lightly-sprung #4s, but #6s don’t give closely-enough spaced tracks for the yard. More updates will come as construction progresses. Source

CJM used to offer this an an option before Chris developed his own chassis. Much improved, both in looks and running quality from the Farish chassis.

Ihsahn - Eremita. Norwegian metal with added sax and Mellotron. The end result sounds like Black Sabbath jamming with King Crimson Threshold - March of Progress. Classy prog-metal whose biggest fault is it sounds exactly the same as their last album. And the one before that.

Can't wait for the N gauge version!