The Television Of Cruelty Archives

The Television Of Cruelty go out of this world with ‘The Winchcombe Meteorite’

Posted on 18 June 2021

Eclectic is a word that gets overused in music reviews, but there are few that fit The Television Of Cruelty better; unexpected, often eerie and unsettling, ‘The Winchecombe Meteorite’ is a narrative tale telling the story of a big chunk of space debris which landed on the driveway of a house smack in the middle of Suburban England in February 2021, amongst the lockdown of the Coronavirus pandemic and the echoing divisions of Brexit and the Black Lives Matter protests.

Musically, there’s a mixture of folk, prog, and out and out rock; guitars, yes, and drums, but also flutes and a melodica. It sounds a little like New Model Army back in their ‘Vengeance’ and ‘Thunder and Consolation’ perfection heyday, mixed with ‘Space Oddity’-era Bowie and dashes of Pink Floyd and Yes. It’s gentle, poetic, storytelling folk-prog that’s a perfect introduction to the ToC’s new album ‘England’s Wyrding’. Stellar (sorry).

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Review by Alex Holmes

The Television Of Cruelty’s ‘Road Movie’ Is A Trip Worth Taking

Posted on 13 September 2017

America is more than diversity and pride and celebration. America is physically vast and this is often overlooked from the tight quarters of a dense city. This is why people truly love Americana. It is a musical style that maintains storytelling as a focus with specific themes borrowed from poetry and art that culminate in something that always feels simple and familiar despite all it can encompass. In the case of The Television of Cruelty, it borrows from several places. Orchestral awe and psychedelic influences creak in and out of a story of travel.

What makes this song stand out among similar peers is definitely the feeling of travel that’s embedded in the mix itself. There are times when you can hear the crowd and other times when you can swear the singing is studio-based. For all we know, this song was recorded in a car while quietly driving down a highway. There is a very pure sense of distance covered by the end of the track. For a song about traveling companions, it’s fitting that one feels as if they’ve arrived somewhere different than when the song began. Road Movie is a trip worth taking again and again.

-Paul Weyer