Table of contents for Issue 128 in Prog

Karisma Records is an independent label based in Bergen, Norway. They work mainly with rock and progressive music even though their main focus is simply quality music for musically minded people. In opposition to popular trends they maintain a strong belief in the physical album complemented by digital alternatives, and their records are available worldwide in multiple formats. Karisma Records is currently the home of Airbag, Arabs In Aspic, Bjørn Riis, Black Magic, Himmellegeme, Jordsjø, Lucy In Blue, Magic Pie, MEER, Oak, Seven Impale, Shaman Elephant, Tusmørke, Wobbler and many more, and this exclusive sampler showcases the diversity of their artists. How to download your free digital sampler from Karisma Records 1. Visit www.bit.ly/karisma_sampler. Type it straight into your browser – do not type the URL into a search engine.…

SHINING EXAMPLE I have just renewed my subscription to Prog and found the CD had been discontinued. Not happy at first but after downloading the MoonJune sampler in Prog 126, which is wonderful, I had a change of heart. I found this was a much better way of listening to a sampler album than by CD as I could get to the information on my device without having to keep getting up to check the player and the CD cover information. It will probably prompt me to buy more CDs from it. It’s a good way ahead hopefully. Trevor Hall, via email LIVING IN THE NOW Well, it’s not a bad time to be a Jethro Tull fan! First up the Benefit reissue complete with not one but two live…

Prog news updated daily online! progmagazine.com A deluxe reissue of Rush’s classic 1981 album Moving Pictures will be available from April 15. As part of UMe/Mercury and Anthem Records’ Rush 40th anniversary series, the band’s biggest selling album will be released in a dizzying number of formats and editions including CD, deluxe vinyl, Dolby Atmos versions and audio Blu-ray. Bonus items include a full, previously unreleased concert mixed by longtime collaborator Terry Brown, plus extensive, newly produced booklets, replica programmes, posters and tickets, and more. Moving Pictures was born from musical ideas first bounced around by Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart during their lengthy Permanent Waves tour over the first six months of 1980. Excited by the strong new material emerging, they deferred a projected live album and…

Jon Anderson has launched a Patreon page and is promising to dig deep into his “massive” archive of unreleased solo songs for fans who subscribe to it. “A friend told me about Patreon as a way to connect with people directly on different levels,” the former Yes singer tells Prog. “Record companies think I’m an old fart who isn’t going to sell many records, but I have so much music from the past 20 or 30 years sitting around, I thought, ‘What a great way to let people hear it, and read stories I’ve written.’” Anderson’s Patreon features three different ‘Membership Levels’ ranging in price from £8 to £77 per month, which allow followers access to everything from exclusive behind-the-scenes footage to access to Anderson’s archive, and in-person online Q&As.…

Innovative electronica artist Gavin Miller releases the ninth album from Worriedaboutsatan on March 25. Available via the This Is It Forever label, Bloodsport was recorded at Miller’s home studio in Bradford, and he says that the record’s “gnarled, aggressive energy” marks it as a departure from Worriedaboutsatan’s previous more layered ambient approach. “You can’t live and make music in a bubble,” he says, “and the way things are at the moment made it particularly difficult to give it a happy soundtrack. There’s a bit of light on the album too, it’s not all doom and gloom. I haven’t made a harsh noise album or anything. Yet.” Track titles such as Sigourney Weaver Fanclub President, Apex Redditor and An Absolute Living Hell, Pt 1 give a taste of what’s in store.…

Pattern-Seeking Animals release their third studio album, Only Passing Through, on April 1 via InsideOut. The US band features Spock’s Beard trio Ted Leonard (guitars, vocals), Jimmy Keegan (drums) and Dave Meros (bass), and is the brainchild of composer and keyboardist John Boegehold. He says that the new album picks up where their second, Prehensile Tales, left off: “But it soon takes several stylistic detours as it progresses. Everyone involved made this album a lot of fun to make and we’re all looking forward to it finally being heard.” According to Boegehold, lead single I Can’t Stay Here Anymore is “based on a fictional character who finds the place he’s lived his whole life has turned dangerous and dystopian. Or, maybe it’s not…” The band are on the bill at…

Saluting the scene’s supporting crew “The Finnish music scene is tightly knit,” asserts Eclipse Music founder Tapio Ylinen, “and there are a lot of world-class musicians here.” Based in Tampere, Finland’s second biggest city after Helsinki, the 41-year-old has an ear for talent, and is a highly proficient guitarist himself. In his 20s his own band, Eclipse, did well before petering out, and by 2007 he’d earned a Masters degree in Musicology (his thesis delved into the musical theory behind prog rock chord structures). He’s since eked out a living on the local theatre scene as a musician, composer and director, and on radio and TV as both a writer, presenter and voiceover artist. He founded Eclipse Music in ’07, and the first release was avant-garde band Kauhukakara’s Taistelu Pahoja…

The prog top 30 albums January 2022 Compiled by 1 JETHRO TULL The Zealot Gene (INSIDEOUT) 2 BIG BIG TRAIN Welcome To The Planet (ENGLISH ELECTRIC RECORDINGS) 3 RADIOHEAD Kid A Mnesia (XL RECORDINGS) 4 GENESIS The Last Domino? (UMC/VIRGIN) 5 MASTODON Hushed And Grim (REPRISE) 6 PINK FLOYD A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (PARLOPHONE) 7 PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING Bright Magic (PIAS) 8 MOGWAI As The Love Continues (ROCK ACTION) 9 HAWKWIND Sonic Attack (ATOMHENGE) 10 DREAM THEATER A View From The Top Of The World (INSIDEOUT) 11 DREAM THEATER Lost Not Forgotten Archives – The Majesty Demos 1985-1986 (YTSEJAM) 12 STEVEN WILSON The Future Bites (CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL) 13 JETHRO TULL Benefit (PARLOPHONE) 14 CARAVAN It’s None Of Your Business (MADFISH) 15 MATT BERRY Gather Up (ACID JAZZ) 16 VANGELIS…

WHEN JOE BURNS, the drummer of psychedelic rockers Guranfoe decided he wanted to explore a “dark and heavy” progressive metal project, no one would have guessed he’d look towards blues and jazz musicians, rather than seasoned metalheads for his musical muscle. But Joe Burns, a wellorganised workhorse, as bassist Oli Cross attests, isn’t really one for predictability. “It was just a jam in my parents’ lounge initially,” Cross recalls of their first session back in 2018. “I thought it would just be a jam and a few beers, but Joe brought his full kit and recorded and filmed the whole thing. But that’s Joe Burns in a nutshell.” Burns picks up the story: “We never did anything with those recordings,” he explains. “Then over lockdown I thought about bringing it…

“Every single one of us were into it and knew what we were all trying to achieve.”Rick Wakeman Whenever he’s going out in the car, it’s Rick Wakeman’s habit to grab a handful of CDs so he’s got something to listen to while he drives. Not knowing which albums happen to be in the pile he’s snatched up adds a nice element of surprise on the journey, kind of like shuffle play, but with the addition of the internal combustion engine. On a recent jaunt, Wakeman found himself listening to Close To The Edge. “I hadn’t heard it for a long time and as I was listening, I actually pulled the car over on the A14 and I sat there, and I actually said out loud, pardon the language, ‘How…

It’s 1973 and David Cross is onstage at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. It’s regarded as being among the finest classical music venues in the world, and the violinist is treading those hallowed boards as a member of King Crimson. To his immediate left stands John Wetton and just behind, sweating profusely and wiping himself down, sits Bill Bruford at the drum kit. On the other side of the large stage is Robert Fripp. As the applause dies away, the guitarist leans forward and, with the Mellotron on its flute setting, begins to play. Wetton cautiously explores the upper fretboard and then Cross delicately harmonises with Fripp’s notes. As Bruford sits in silence, arms folded across his chest, for the next five or six minutes these three players step into…

Charlie Wayne still has a voice memo on his phone from summer 2018. The drummer and his bandmates in the newly formed Black Country, New Road had just hit on an interesting musical motif at rehearsals. “It just grew and grew and became more distorted,” he explains. “Then about a year later we started writing what would become Basketball Shoes. It just came from a lot of different composite parts brought together. By the beginning of 2020 we were playing it properly as a band. It always felt like the sum total of everything the group had been moving towards for a while.” At 12-and-a-half minutes long, the magnificent Basketball Shoes now forms the anchor of Black Country, New Road’s latest album, Ants From Up There. Released exactly a year…

“I think a lot of what Animals As Leaders want to do is to defy categorisation.”Tosin Abasi Time, for Animals As Leaders, has always been a concept to be toyed with. The trio’s obsession with unusual rhythms, rudiments and subdivisions is what drives them. But until now, time has never been a concept the Washington-based band has taken at face value. “This album is the one we’ve worked on the most,” says guitarist Javier Reyes of Parrhesia, the band’s fifth studio record. “It was nice to write with no real pressure or time constraints.” Parrhesia, an Ancient Greek word that translates as ‘free speech’, is a liberating album of expressive aggression and intricacy. It’s their heaviest by a country mile, but it’s much more than just grunt and grit. It’s…

Though there are many disciples and offspring who follow in their wake, few are bands or artists who can claim with any degree of honesty to have altered the course of music. Occupying that rarefied space are Kraftwerk, a group so far ahead of the curve that the ramifications of their work are still being felt to this very day. Their run of albums from 1974’s Autobahn through to Computer World in 1981 remain peerless examples of a whole new genre of music being created that at once anticipated the future while simultaneously defining it. Crucial to the bandqs rise was electronic percussionist Wolfgang Flür. Born in Frankfurt in 1947, Flür began to make his name as a drummer in the 60s first with the punningly named and Merseybeat-inspired The…

Parrhesia SUMERIAN RECORDS Prog metal shred kings stick to their comfort zone. It’s been a long wait for fans of eight-string guitar virtuosity, but six years after The Madness Of Many, Animals As Leaders return with Parrhesia. Taking its title from the Greek phrase for ‘free speech’, it sees guitarists Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes and drummer Matt Garstka wasting no time diving into a world of technical wizardry and odd measure mayhem with the opening Conflict Cartography. “The playing is as outrageously dextrous as ever.” The overall sound is less heavy than its predecessor, though that doesn’t mean Animals don’t deliver distortion and intensity when the spirit is upon them. Yet Parrhesia feels less sonically adventurous than much of their previous work, for example compared to the way they…

Raum KSCOPE/EASTGATE MUSIC Statement of intent from ever-evolving krautrock veterans. Back in the early 70s, Edgar Froese was a visionary musician. A visual artist as well as a musical one, he wanted the music he made with Tangerine Dream to have a quality he called “transparency”, and throughout that decade they produced a groundbreaking series of electronica releases, including the ineffably mysterious Atem and Zeit and the pulsing cosmic travelogues of Phaedra and Ricochet. “It nods respectfully back to the past, while heading to the future.” From the mid-80s onwards, Tangerine Dream simplified their approach, churning out a series of albums of big shiny, glossy tunes, but by the 2000s, the line-up of Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss, and violinist Hoshiko Yamane had evolved to give Tangerine Dream a new…

Follow us on twitter.com/progmagazineUK NICK BEGGS @NickBeggs It’s 1,000 years ago this week since Kajagoogoo were No.1 and PEOPLE still think it’s funny when they tell me not to be Too Shy NAD SYLVAN @SylvanOfficial Five years ago. I do like this outfit. It’s the regal bastard look PETE FOWLER @petefowlerart Anyway, back to listening to Eno’s Music For Airports’ Man Getting Face Massage GIANCARLO ERRA @giancarloerra Juno trying her hardest to be cute and persuade me to share… ROBIN ARMSTRONG @cosmograf This might be a good time to admit I’ve never listened to a @MarillionOnline album in its entirety, but I bloody love the new single Murder Machines.…

Ms Amy Birks releases her second solo album on April 8. In Our Souls is the follow-up to her acclaimed 2020 debut All That I Am & All That I Was, with three of its 12 songs featuring poems setting music to words by the Brontë sisters. “I did English Literature at college,” Birks tells Prog, “and I’ve always had a fascination with the Brontës. I thought, ‘Well, Kate Bush has done Wuthering Heights so I’m not going to touch the novels, but what about the poetry?’ So I went through them and landed on three that I loved, one from each sister.” With a performance video featuring talented young dancer Courtney Cork, the album’s title track and lead single draws on Charlotte Brontë’s poem In Our Souls. A Death…

AS A KID in the 80s, David Joseph was thrilled by his parents’ vinyl box set of instrumental supergroup Sky. As a teen in the 90s, his tastes extended to Pink Floyd, Chris Rea, Britpoppers Blur, and later, the likes of jazz giant Keith Jarrett and electro maestro Aphex Twin. And always there was Talk Talk, whose work truly nourished this budding singer and musician. He’s 38 now, with a raft of ambient and singer-songwriter albums behind him under various pseudonyms, but Joseph (who endearingly describes himself as “a sleevenote reader”) says new project Held By Trees was different from the start. “I’d done an ambient track with [Floyd touring guitarist] Tim Renwick,” he tells Prog. “Then the first lockdown came along, I started writing, and like most of us…

On October 20, 1994, Pink Floyd took over London’s Earl’s Court as part of their final concert tour. The magnificent spectacle brought together material from The Division Bell and the whole of The Dark Side Of The Moon. Highlights from the show were released as PULSE in 1995 and now, nearly 30 years later, footage from that gig and others on the European tour has been lovingly reworked from the original masters and made available as part of a revamped bumper package. We’ve got a deluxe Blu-ray edition of Pink Floyd’s PULSE Restored & Re-Edited to give away to one lucky reader this month. The set also includes music videos, concert screen films, documentaries and rehearsal footage spread across two discs, as well as a 60-page booklet and the iconic…

Expectations and natural assumptions can be dangerous. The pairing of original Spock’s Beard members Neal Morse and Nick D’Virgilio instantly generates thoughts of spacious, frequently wacky progressive rock that recounts tales of Catfish Men. However, the duo recently linked up with Haken frontman Ross Jennings to record Troika, an album that relies more on tight vocal harmonies than expansive musical journeys. Harking back to the type of guitar-based rock created by Crosby, Stills & Nash, the LP may come as a revelation to some of their fanbase. “I got a surprise email from Neal at the end of December 2020 asking me if I would be interested in becoming the third voice in the project,” says Jennings. “Although I’ve sung with Neal and met him on various Cruise To The…

“We’ve always been drawn to a certain kind of music. Complicated music, if you like, whether it’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel 3, or whatever.”Roland Orzabal Curt Smith has a framed picture of King Crimson on his bathroom wall. It’s not just any old photo. The occasion is April 30, 1981, in the confines of Bath’s Moles club, where a fresh iteration of the band – tentatively called Discipline – is returning to the live stage for the first time in seven years. Bassist Tony Levin dominates the foreground, while the 19-year-old Smith stands directly in front of him, utterly transfixed. “A friend of mine got Tony Levin to send that picture to me,” explains Smith, who went on to…

Jettison, the new album from Northern Irish instrumental rockers And So I Watch You From Afar, is a change of gear for many reasons. Most noticeably, it’s a departure in tone compared to their 2017 album The Endless Shimmering. In place of the gut-punch riffs and towering bombast is a more nuanced progression, written and presented as a single 40-minute song. It’s also a multimedia concept album, accompanied by a film created by visual artist Sam Wiehl. It’s been a long time coming too, with the band first teasing it in 2020. Guitarist and principal songwriter Rory Friers reflects on the effect that the last two years has had on Jettison: “In the process of making a record, you spend a lot of time with that music and usually by…

prog.reviews@futurenet.com The Von Hertzen Brothers are often described as “hard to pigeonhole”. By turns this has been a feather in their caps and an albatross around their necks – sometimes both at once. Too weird for the mainstream but far more accessible than that implies, they’re a band who revel in musical idiosyncrasies and king-sized pop melodies. Purveyors of music that’s both clever and hummable. The black sheep of modern rock, who also grew up with ABBA and choral singing (their parents met in a choir and, if the brothers’ knack for immaculate, gauzy harmonies is anything to go by, the experience resonated in the family long after). Back in 2015 they threw all their resources at the snappier, stadium-reaching New Day Rising. It didn’t blow up as they probably…

Envy Of None KSCOPE Rush’s Alex Lifeson returns to the fray with unexpected collaboration. Any new project with Rush’s Alex Lifeson attached will come freighted with big expectations, but for best results it’s worth taking the darkpop project Envy Of None for what it is – a rewarding collaboration with friends, old and new. “An engaging album that rewards repeat listens.” A pal of Lifeson’s since the 80s, Andy Curran (of Canadian rockers Coney Hatch) stumbled across Portland-based singer Maiah Wynne five years ago via a song contest. As Curran and Wynne worked on music with co-producer/engineer Alf Annibalini, Lifeson was intrigued by what he heard, and contributed his considerable talents to their debut album. Produced to within an inch of its life, Envy Of None is a headphone album…

Elevation SUSANNASONATA Devout homage finds the light in the poet of darkness. Susanna Wallumrød is evidently a huge fan of French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821–1867), who was described by Proust as the greatest poet of his century and whose musings on sex, death, morality and melancholy scandalised his time. He was also big on finding beauty among the darkness, and it seems to be that strain of his work that the Norwegian singer is tapping into. Elevation isn’t afraid to probe under some clammy rocks and delve into murky, gloomy areas; it’s on a mission to locate the light, which shines all the brighter for acknowledging its transience. “It floats into a similar area to that inhabited by Kate Bush’s Aerial.” This is her second bonding session with the…

Smiling At Grief – Revisited TWELFTHNIGHT.INFO Remixed vinyl reissue of diverse album from neo-prog innovators. The first album that Twelfth Night made with Geoff Mann as their singer and lyricist, Smiling At Grief represented a major step forward for the band in terms of their sound and presentation. Issued 40 years ago on cassette, it’s now getting a limited release on vinyl for the first time, but as the Revisited part of the title suggests, this is a remixed version of the album, with prog friends and peers – including longtime fan Steven Wilson – applying various degrees of polish to the tracks, from sonic tweaking to radical reworkings. The vinyl replicates the original track listing, while a CD version adds a series of additional mixes. “They remain neo-prog’s most…

Where’s home? Walthamstow [in east London], with my studio, massive cats, parrot and my wife, Ang. Earliest prog memory? My older brother took me, aged 11, to see Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, then Yes on the Fragile tour. I thought the smart-arsed, classically proficient approach to music was made for me, and the clothes… First prog album you bought? Tubular Bells from the dope-filled Virgin Records in Brighton. And the last? Public Service Broadcasting’s Bright Magic. First prog gig? Bowie, then Yes, and my third was Pink Floyd on the Dark Side Of The Moon tour. Cool, huh? And the latest? Kraftwerk at the Bluedot Festival [Jodrell Bank, Cheshire] in 2019. The best prog gig you ever saw? Pendulum at Glastonbury [in 2011]. They were followed on stage by an…

Peter Jones’ Tiger Moth Tales return to the progressive fold on the new album, A Song Of Spring. Just released on White Knight Records, the collection follows on from 2017’s The Depths Of Winter in the band’s exploration of the seasons. It is billed as a record that regales the listener with tales of life, rebirth and renewal, with stories “from Pagan rites to Roman and Greek goddesses” and beyond. “The last few albums went into different territories,” Jones tells Prog, “so I felt it was time to get back into the prog arena and return to the true Tiger Moth Tales ethos. You have some very joyful tracks and then you’ve got my take on Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring – which was quite a dark tangent to go down…

UK art rockers Pure Reason Revolution are set to return on May 6 with new album Above Cirrus, on InsideOut. “There are extremes of heaviness on the record,” says singer/guitarist Jon Courtney of the follow-up to 2020’s Eupnea. “Points of it are heavier than ever before, but it also has more electronics, though it’s by no means an electronic record.” The album title came from a conversation Courtney had with guitarist Greg Jong outside the studio in the New Forest, where they were working on the album. As the pair looked at the sky, Jong began to reel off the different cloud formations: cumulus, stratus and, at the top, cirrus. “I said, ‘What’s above cirrus?’” Courtney recalls, “and Greg said, ‘Nothing’s above cirrus.’ It opened these existential questions: what’s above…

Three members of psych-rockers The Lazy Eyes met at a performing arts high school in Sydney. As the only rock kids there, they bonded instantly. “Everyone else was playing cello and violin,” recalls guitarist/vocalist Itay Shachar, “so we were instantly drawn to each other.” Shachar, drummer Noah Martin and keysman/guitarist Harvey Geraghty shared a love for the Australian psychedelic scene spearheaded by Tame Impala and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Bassist Leon Karagic joined after the band had honed their craft while busking around Sydney’s sun-baked streets. “It was the ideal start,” Shachar believes. “It taught us we had to always put on a show to engage people who were just out to buy sneakers or whatever. We went above and beyond to make people think, ‘What the hell’s…

In 1980, when Secret Affair went into the studio to record their second album, they had big ambitions. The mod revivalists’ 1979 debut LP Glory Boys had glanced just shy of the UK Top 40 and garnered them two UK hit singles, Time For Action and Let Your Heart Dance, but with Behind Closed Doors they were after something more substantial than fleeting success in the pop world. Looking beyond the college circuit and clubs, chief songwriters Ian Page and David Cairns wanted to make a record they could take onto bigger stages and festivals. In that respect their expanded vision took inspiration from The Who’s 1973 masterwork Quadrophenia, with its use of synthesisers, sound effects and moments of high drama. While Behind Closed Doors is nothing like as Wagnerian…

EVERY DAY FOR around three months, Evergrey singer Tom S Englund and prolific pianist Vikram Shankar would meet virtually over Zoom to see what musical ideas might blossom between them. The result was their second album Nectar, and despite its digital roots, the rich record brims with emotive soul that manages to be intimate yet absolutely grand. “It was beautiful, because if I wanted to take a chance on something I could just walk over to my Moog synth or something and just try it,” Shankar recalls. “It was a very free-flowing process where we were throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see what stuck.” For a group that pivot on the rudimental pairing of vocals and piano, Silent Skies make a hell of a sound. Not…

JONAS LINDBERG HAS an intriguing musical life. His progressive project, Jonas Lindberg And The Other Side may be his main creative focus, but as a freelance musician, his adept genre-hopping is both unexpected and refreshing. “I’ve mostly worked with a lot of Swedish bands,” he explains. “But I’ve also been playing with a country singer from Nashville, Doug Seegars, who has a career here in Scandinavia. There’s also a folk duo that I play with, so there are a lot of different things going on.” His career really began in 2013 with the release of an EP, The Other Side, which provided an outlet for Lindberg’s more progressive tendencies and ambitions. Given the positive reception to that release, he linked up with musical acquaintances from his time at college and…

It’s 2002 and the sun is shining on a rehearsal space in Turnham Green, London. The 21st Century Schizoid Band in its original incarnation with Michael and Peter Giles, Mel Collins and Jakko Jakszyk are blasting their way through an incendiary version of 21st Century Schizoid Man. Ian McDonald, with the look of a slightly preoccupied professor, puts his alto sax to his lips and fires off a volley of careering notes that spatter and shape-shift around the backing in the track’s twisting instrumental section. It seems so incongruous that such a furious salvo of notes could issue from someone who offstage was quiet, reserved, and more often than not, self-effacing. In 2003, after the band had been on tour playing King Crimsonrelated material and one or two songs from…

“The ‘Blue Forest’ idea has to do with something we feel we’re about to lose, or have lost already. It’s not an actual forest, but also, it kind of is.” For more than two decades Mikko Von Hertzen has spent part of the year at his apartment in Kerala, on the southwest coast of India. When the pandemic kicked off in 2020, most commercial airlines were grounded, and he was stranded. His usual seven-week stay turned into five months, so he wiled away the time writing songs. Meanwhile, back in the Von Hertzens’ native Finland, his elder brother Kie did some hardcore social distancing of his own. He threw his acoustic guitar into his canoe and paddled over to the island of Söderskär in the Finnish Gulf, south of Helsinki.…

A mutual love of Dream Theater brought together Azure’s Christopher Sampson and Galen Stapley early on during their music degree course at the University Of Sussex. Eight years later, they’re astonished to find Azure voted Prog’s Best Unsigned Band. “I still can’t believe it!” exclaims guitarist Stapley. “We put up a post on Facebook to see if we could do anything. Everyone was so sweet and voted for us! I knew we had a few fans out there but not enough to help us win the poll.” This accolade rounded off an action-packed 2021, which saw the release of their second album, Of Brine And Angel’s Beaks, a story involving a fantastical sailor-rescuing bird, and Mistress, the glass-shattering high-voltage single. Three gigs also introduced audiences to Azure’s dynamic live show,…

proguk2228 Jason Pierce is puzzled at the idea of being interviewed by Prog. He doesn’t really feel that his band Spiritualized are a rock band. “I’m obsessed with rock’n’roll,” he explains over a cup of tea in a pub near his home in London’s Spitalfields, “but I don’t really like rock music.” Well, maybe he’s a little too close to it to judge. Because whether it’s by default or by design, Spiritualized have built a body of work that takes blues, R&B and rock’n’roll tropes, and mutates them, via a kosmische post-krautrock, quasi-prog long-form approach to writing and performance, into hypnotic, captivating musical experiences. The climactic piece of Spiritualized’s best-loved album, 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, is 17 minutes long. He’s long had a penchant for…

Call To Arms & Angels PIAS Collective take an eclectic approach on first studio album in six years. It’s a brave furrow that Darius Keeler and Danny Griffiths have ploughed with Archive since first emerging in the mid-90s, expanding their sound to incorporate elements of post-rock, electronica and progressive influences in recent years. Brave because, in simplistic terms, they’ve often seemed a touch too progressive for their initial fanbase, and not prog enough for uncompromising foes of the 4/4 beat. Since the mid-2000s Archive have also been a collective, with several different vocalists to serve as varying focal points. That allows them to be as sonically diverse as they see fit but also makes it hard to pin down a characteristic ‘Archive sound’. “It’s a haunting, disorientating listen at times.”…

Everything To Everyone KARISMA Airbag man questions expectations on new solo outing. With his fourth solo album, Airbag guitarist Bjørn Riis was prompted to explore conflicting emotions and how we deal with the “fear of losing oneself in the constant effort to meet every, often perceived, expectation”. For fans of Airbag, the careful songwriting of that band’s back catalogue and Riis’ own solo output is present, along with his Floyd influences, in the 13 minutes of Every Second Every Hour, for instance. “There’s a raw, organic, looser feel to some of the material here.” The extended passages of sparse ambience that are part of Riis’ regular arsenal haven’t been ditched – there’s plenty of space in long sections of Lay Me Down, throughout the acoustic guitar-based, reverb-drenched Descending and in…

Hatwise Choice/Hattitude HATCO CD/BURNING SHED Two treasure chests of Canterbury gold. In 1980, five years after Hatfield And The North had gone their separate ways, grieving fans of the quartet were briefly cheered when Virgin released Afters. An uneven compilation that mostly features tracks from their self-titled debut and The Rotters’ Club, it did at least throw in a couple of rare live tracks. As welcome as such in-concert morsels were Afters completely failed to sate the appetite of those who fondly recalled the group’s brilliant onstage chemistry and their legendary Radio 1 appearances. Notwithstanding the furtive activities of tape traders, and later, the emergence of the internet, if you wanted anything ‘official’ from that aspect of the group this was the thin gruel being served. “A detailed portrait of…

The Mothers 1971 ZAPPA/UME Zappa’s full Fillmore East stand and more get the box set treatment. While the hastily released, bootleg-sleeved Fillmore East – June 1971 album has provided Frank Zappa’s multitudinous detractors with an ever-reliable stick with which to beat him for the last five decades, brimming as it is with an excess of tiresome prurience masquerading as edgy humour which is at best tedious, at worst indefensibly misogynistic, it certainly didn’t have to be that way, as this eight-CD box set proves. “Zappa is on top form guitar-wise across the truly inspired improv.” All four New York Fillmore shows – recorded over two nights – that provided source material for the original album are included here, and a glance at the setlist reveals that Zappa was positively spoilt…