Steven Mace

I decided to pick up the new Helloween album which was released on June 18th . It features both the returns of key founding member Kai Hansen and legendary singer Michael Kiske. I ordered the limited CD digibook edition with a nice slipcase. Brand spanking new and wrapped with hype sticker. Unwrapped but still inside the slip case. Back of the case with track detail (all courtesy of Nuclear Blast). The CD Digibook is inside, like so Here's the cover of the album in full, with artwork. Below are images of the CD booklet: featuring more artwork, photographs of the band, lyrics, designs and even a riddle/puzzle to solve. I'm very pleased with this packaging and this limited edition of the album- I can't wait to listen to the music. This is a good example of why its still fun and rewarding to own and to continue to buy music in a physical format, be it CD, vinyl or even cassette.

In the past few years I've begun subscribing to a number of YouTube channels themed around physical music collecting, music discussions, album rankings etc. I've been following these channels and watching videos while I've expanded my own collection. I was originally a heavy metal fan, and during the 90s and 00s I started listening and buying to a lot of alternative/indie rock, and then classic rock. In the past ten years, I've started to get heavily into progressive rock. There are some great channels focusing on these genres which I'll do a blog post in the future about. I started buying my own music with my pocket money in the late 1980s. Of course, back then it was all physical format rather than streaming/downloads/digital. My format of choice initially was cassette so my early purchases were all on cassette tape. In about the mid 1990s I started buying CDs, and I've never stopped collecting albums in this format despite the advent of digital downloads. I&#

I picked up the latest Cirith Ungol release, an EP entitled Half Past Human , released this year on Metal Blade Records. It has four songs on it, 'Route 666'; 'Shelob's Lair', 'Brutish Manchild' and the title track 'Half Past Human'. I was very pleased to add this to my expanding music collection. During the lockdown months, I have enjoyed the pleasures of listening to music while working, writing and exercising. I've been discovering, and re-discovering, a lot of classic rock and metal bands. Cirith Ungol are a band I particularly like for Tim Baker's distinctive vocals, and their heavy sound combined with fantasy 'sword and sorcery' lyrics and themes. They are named after the mountain pass Cirith Ungol in J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, along which is the lair of Shelob the spider.  The band were formed in 1972 and released their first studio album, Frost and Fire , in 1981. However, they broke up in 1992 and were inactive un

I have a host of photographs that I've taken over the past 15 months, that I didn't include in my previous post back at the end of last year. They've been taken from various trips and rambles around Greater London, and unfortunately haven't been labelled. Nevertheless I thought I'd post on my blog again and share them all. If you're familiar with London environs then you will probably recognise many of the places. I quite like documenting my travels but I'm not particular about captioning everything, and it would take too much time to do so now. Instead, I will let the images speak for themselves.