WELL, 'tis almost the season to be jolly and all that, so what better time to take a quick look ahead to the Christmas parties lined up for us over the festive period.

The classic CheapSweatyFun shindig over TJ's takes place on December 20, and features Capdown, Goldblade, The Wazzocks, Bill Faddon, and Silvertone Flyers. Go to Rockaway for more details.

And a couple of days later, in Barfly, Sounds favourites The Toe headline the club's first Cardiff Christmas Party. With The Toe's penchant for quality covers and the success of last year's booze fuelled knees up, it sounds like a promising night.

And in an unfortunate head-to-head with the TJ's party is the Boobytrap bash, in Clwb Ifor Bach.

All three floors will be taken up with bands such as JT Mouse, who also play Barfly this Monday, Cubare, MC Mabon (pictured), Big Leaves, McLusky and Zabrinski. And there are also some 'very special guests' on the bill - the word on the grapevine is that it could be some of the Super Furries, regular faces at the single launch nights.

I cannot believe it has been ten years since Atari Teenage Riot came seething out of Berlin with their radical political angst and manic hybrid of speed metal, acid house and 200 plus BPM breaks.

Taking further Berlin's reputation for pioneering electronic music, (Neu! and Kraftwerk). they paved the way for band's like Consolidated to get mainstream exposure, by becoming the first new wave Euro-techno industrialists band to achieve mainstream success in the USA via MTV.

And much of this was due to the popularity of founder member, Alec Empire, who plays in TJ's on Wednesday.

The night is a guaranteed crowd pogo-ing rock out, with the set list made up of tracks from next year's new album, Intelligence and Sacrifice, his first record since The Destroyer five years ago.

The line up is unconfirmed, but may well include Nine Inch Nails Charlie Clouser and Gabe Serbian from Locust who played with Empire at in the summer's Fujirock show. Empire's current shows are made all the more poignant, as these are the first since the death in September of his co-founder member Carl Crack who died in his Berlin flat after a long fight with drug addiction and psychiatric problems.