Julian Bream (1933-2020)

We lost a giant among guitar players last Friday when Julian Bream passed on to the Other Side, where hopefully he is shredding still:

Bream was born in Battersea in 1933, the son of a father who played piano and jazz guitar – a self-built electric version – and taught Julian the rudiments of each instrument. Bream’s talent earned him a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano and cello. But he was largely self-taught on his primary instrument, the guitar. He played his first public guitar recital in Cheltenham in 1947, aged 13.

That year his father chanced upon a sailor walking through London carrying a lute and asked what it was. The sailor sold it to him and Bream began learning it, eventually helping to revive wider interest in the instrument and Elizabethan music.

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Rambo: Last Blood (2019)

Gore, horror, and revenge cinema converge on a single idea: the ability of the normal protagonist to snap out of the sleepwalk of civilization, recognize a problem beyond which socially-mediated language can address, and overcome moral qualms in order to address it with absolute certainty. Rambo: Last Blood comes straight from the middle of this genre.

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Mentors / Elbow Deep – Trash Party (2018)

Hanging out on the edge of the thrash genre with MOD and SOD, the Mentors represented the side of thrash that took thematically after punk; most thrash either placed metal riffs in punk songs (Cryptic Slaughter, Suicidal Tendencies, Fearless Iranians From Hell) or punk riffs in metal songs (DRI, Dead Horse) and took after one of the two thematically, but the Mentors kept the party and sleaze side of punk alive.

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