Table of contents for Issue 162 in Prog

Discovering JUMP Jump formed in High Wycombe in south-east England in 1990, although their six-member line-up is drawn from across the UK. They’ve played countless shows and released 14 studio albums, although their first taste of bigger stages came from support slots with Marillion – keyboardist Mark Kelly produced the band’s fourth album, the recently remastered The Myth Of Independence – which indirectly led to a tour with Fish and a host of more recent associations, from Lifesigns to Lazuli, that continue to the present day. Onstage, Jump are renowned for delivering hugely entertaining sets, with frontman John Dexter Jones setting the tone through his endless capacity for narrative, drama and no shortage of irreverence. The band’s recent 35th-anniversary gig, with support from the brilliant EBB, demonstrated that after more…

Italian instrumental, prog-metal fusionists Asymmetric Universe have been signed by InsideOutMusic for a worldwide deal. To celebrate, the band have released new single Don’t Go Too Early, which is now streaming across a variety of digital platforms. “We are so excited to join such a big family as InsideOut! Being part of a team with legendary artists and bands that we’ve been listening to since we started studying music is a dream come true!” say the group’s founders, brothers Federico Vese and Nicolò Vese. “Our new single, Don’t Go Too Early, is a mixture of fusion-jazz, aggressive progressive metal, wind quartet arrangements and an avant-garde string quartet orchestration, that brings a unique colour to complex yet catchy music. We can’t wait to share with you all the music we are…

King Crimson-related quartet BEAT are set release BEAT LIVE on September 26 via InsideOutMusic in three configurations: a three-LP set; a Blu-ray release accompanied by two CDs and a 12-page photo booklet; and a collector’s limited edition with the Blu-ray, two CDs, a bonus CD, and a 36-page artbook BEAT were formed, with Robert Fripp’s blessing, by guitarist Adrian Belew and feature King Crimson and Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Levin, Tool drummer Danny Carey and guitarist Steve Vai. “You’re walking onstage with three virtuoso musicians, world-class professionals who have seen it all but are still having fun playing this music which is timeless and unlike anything done before or since. The audience know every word and are so thrilled with the performance the energy and love beaming back at you…

Now signed to Kscope, Dutch prog-metal sextet Textures have released the single Closer To The Unknown. It’s their first new material since 2016 and a new album is also in the works “Closer To The Unknown is one of the most direct and hard-hitting tracks we’ve ever written – and also one of the most straightforward songs on our versatile album that we’re currently working on,” they say. “It’s showcasing one of the iconic new elements on this record: the prominent synths and sound design that really added to our new Textures sound.” They continue, “It’s an honour for Textures to join the Kscope roster and be part of a long list of artists who inspired us and our genre. To us the label represents a certain kind of class:…

Formed in 2009 by bassist Michel Doncas and then-keyboard player Pascal Lapierre after the pair were invited onstage in Amsterdam by Dutch prog band Knight Area, Huis – pronounced ‘house’ – have been through a number of personnel changes before settling on the current line-up of singer Sylvain Descôteaux, keyboard player Johnny Maz, drummer Martin Plante and Mystery guitarist Michel St-Père. Over the course of four albums – Despite Guardian Angels (2014), Neither In Heaven (2016), Abandoned (2019) and In The Face Of The Unknown (2024) – Huis have developed a signature sound that embraces a symphonic approach with epic running times. “Every member who writes a song pretty much delivers it finished,” says St-Père of Huis’s compositional approach. “So we have the skeleton of the song and we then record…

It’s 1983 and Kate Bush is, er, frankly, bushed. Five years previously, the symphonically spooky No.1 hit Wuthering Heights was the south London singer-songwriter’s hugely successful breakthrough – making her, aged just 19, the first female artist in global chart history to do so with a self-written song. Next came the astonishing The Kick Inside and Lionheart LPs, both released in 1978; her first No.1 album, Never For Ever in 1980; and, in the autumn of 1982, The Dreaming. On top of that there had been 16 singles, the six-week Tour Of Life in 1979, countless engagements around the world and a clutch of vocal collaborations, perhaps most notably for Peter Gabriel on his third self-titled record, aka Melt. Each step had seen Bush bloom as a songwriter, vocalist, musician,…

How do you follow up one of the in question, the now-iconic Tubular Bells, had most innovative debut albums of been released that May via Richard Branson’s all time? That was the position fledgling Virgin Records to widespread a young Mike Oldfield found critical acclaim – and no small amount of himself in back in 1973. The debut commercial success. But this was a young man unused to fame and attention. Oldfield had channelled oceans of hard work and angst into his music, and he desperately needed a rest. Seeking escape, he took a drive in his reconditioned Bentley across the Severn Bridge. Ending up in the small market town of Kington, Herefordshire, Oldfield spotted an isolated house for sale on Bradnor Hill, with magnificent views across the Brecon Beacons.…

“We’re living in rather uncertain times and in uncertain times there’s a tendency to go with the most certain voices, and certainty can be simultaneously comforting, misleading and dangerous.”Malcolm Galloway The British-Polish mathematician and philosopher, Jacob Bronowski, said in his classic The Ascent Of Man: “Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty”. While Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate’s musical duo of vocalist and guitarist Malcolm Galloway and bassist Mark Gatland may not primarily see themselves as adventurers and purveyors of knowledge, their albums take sometimes esoteric subjects and perspectives on the human condition, and invite the listener to learn some interesting titbits about the world around us, the tortuous paths of history and ourselves. Settling down in a genteel hotel bar in north London, Galloway and Gatland…

eter Giles knows a thing or two about going the distance. As a 15-year-old grammar school boy, he swapped winning crosscountry championships for playing bass guitar in local groups alongside his drumming brother, Michael. Leaving school the following year, the Giles brothers went on to notch up hundreds of professional gigs and more miles on the road in the UK and Europe as members of Trendsetters Limited during the mid-1960s. Despite a couple of singles on Parlophone, success eluded the group, and the brothers returned to Bournemouth to start anew. After seeing the Giles brothers’ advert for a singing organist, Robert Fripp, a local guitarist not known for his prowess at the keyboards or his vocal abilities, came along for an audition. “I know, the cheek of the guy,” laughs…

Magenta man blends pop smarts with long-form songcraft. Rob Reed and Steve Balsamo have described M.I.A. Vol 1, their third album as Chimpan A and the first since 2020’s The Empathy Machine, as a response to the “TikTokification” of music. The clue is in its full title: Music Is Art: this is an old-fashioned, listen-in-one-sitting record. It’s a common goal in the prog world, but to pull off that trick, artists need to create material engaging enough to keep the listener rapt and the pair have done more than talk a good game here. “Imbued with a character very much its own.” They’ve also done something different. Considering Chimpan A is the partnership of two artists who straddle the world of prog and pop (Reed with Magenta, Cyan and his…

Modern prog-metal gems shine bright. They’re one of the British prog-metal scene’s brightest new sparks and their second LP has arrived after a lengthy wait. Ihlo’s Legacy comes six years after Union’s superlative modern thump, writhing djent and swathing keyboard sojourns put them on the musical map – it was reissued by Kscope last year as a prelude to this and served as a gentle reminder of why it remains so adored. That label is the tinder to their long-awaited second coming. “A record that reveals its clever nuances over repeat listens.” Their new partnership with Kscope is a badge of honour they’re happy to wear, but the label’s history of iconic prog releases also brings with it a sense of pressure, one they cooly shrug off across Legacy’s 10…

Space rockers’ final Lemmy-driven album returns across nine discs. It might have been Lemmy’s penultimate record with the band (he was let go within a year of its September ’74 release) but he’d often attest that Hall Of The Mountain Grill marks Hawkwind’s zenith. The astral-travelling free-festival favourites’ fourth album, co-produced with Doug Bennett and Roy Thomas Baker, captures yet another revamped lineup of a band perpetually in flux, who’d recently survived Silver Machine’s unexpected chart success to return to their familiar role as darlings of the UK’s underground freak scene. “A multifaceted, if superficially flawed gem.” Audio generator operator Dik Mik’s gone, charismatic co-vocalist Robert Calvert away on hiatus (he’d be back for 1976’s Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music) and with keyboardist Del Dettmar intending to follow, ex-High Tide/future Bowie,…

GALAHAD VENUE THE 1865, SOUTHAMPTON DATE 21/06/2025 SUPPORT LEAGUE OF LIGHTS, TIGER MOTH TALES, PETERS AND LEE Forty years ago, a group of Dorset lads named their new band after a local fruit and veg delivery business, not an Arthurian knight as was widely perceived. They’ve since battled through numerous line-up changes and personal challenges, but Galahad never gave up on their musical quest. The centrepiece of their 40th-anniversary celebrations is the Midsummer Festival in adjacent Hampshire; Southampton, in fact, being the home city of guitarist Lee Abraham. On this sweltering midsummer’s day, openers League Of Lights instantly generate positive charges of elegant electro-pop. Ballgowned and befeathered Farrah West admits she’s slightly overdressed for the prevailing conditions, but her clear, ringing voice and husband Richard’s keyboard wizardry beguile, especially on…

“I wanted to get back to a partnership because that feels like BJH.” John Lees, one of the two surviving founder members of Lancastrian symphonic prog pioneers Barclay James Harvest, has told Prog about the new studio album his incarnation of the band are releasing on October 17 via Esoteric. Relativity is their first new recording since 2013’s North, and the guitarist and vocalist explains that the 78-minute, 11-track album is“a true group effort”, which has been developed over the past eight years with input from Lee’s longtime bandmates Craig Fletcher (bass, vocals), Kevin Whitehead (drums) and Jez Smith (keyboards). John Lees’ Barclay James Harvest were first put together in the late 90s after the original Barclay James Harvest split into two acts: Lees’ version reunited him with then-estranged fellow…

Cellist and sound designer Jo Quail is beaming with no little pride. Not only is her seventh solo album Notan out on September 12, it’s the first release on her own Adderstone Records. “I’ve moved rather rapidly into the next phase of my life, which is fantastic,” she says. “It’s not because I’m not welcome anywhere else – indeed, I had a wonderful experience working with my old label – but now it’s entirely down to me. I have complete control over everything that I’m doing. So if I want to release an orchestral album that’s probably only going to be performed once, then I will.” Which is what’s going to happen. Explaining the creation of the new collection, Quail reveals that Notan began as a series of improvisations that…

Norwegian prog metal five-piece Green Carnation have announced their first album in five years. A Dark Poem, Part I: The Shores Of Melancholia is set to come out on September 5 via Season Of Mist, and will be the first entry in a trilogy that explores different sides of their sound. Lead single In Your Paradise is now streaming, and the album’s fourth track The Slave That You Are features guest vocals from Grutle Kjellson, singer and bassist of prog metal veterans Enslaved. “When we wrote that song, I was singing melodically on the verses in the demos,” says frontman Kjetil Nordhus, “and then we thought the song needed to be uncompromising and harder. I’ve known Grutle for many years, and we’ve been talking about doing something together for a…

Camel were one of the most influential prog bands of the 70s and their legacy continues to this day, albeit it with line-up changes over the years. As part of Esoteric’s ongoing reissues campaign, five of the band’s key releases have been remastered and expanded this year and this issue we have a copy of each to give away to one lucky reader. The bundle contains pioneering 70s albums: Mirage, Music Inspired By The Snow Goose and Moonmadness, which are all presented as two-CD and Blu-ray packages with both the original stereo recordings and Stephen W Tayler’s 5.1 surround sound mixes. Each comes with bonus tracks and is packaged with an illustrated booklet and essay. In addition to this, the winner will also receive updated two-CD plus Blu-ray versions of…

“These last few years have been pretty tough for us,” sighs Alexander Skepp, Gösta Berlings Saga’s drummer and co-founding member. Alongside keyboardist David Lundberg, he’s seen the band’s fortunes rise and fall like the Baltic Sea that laps against their home city. “We were locked and loaded to tour [sixth album] Konkret Music in 2020, and then [laughs]… things happened.” A record rich in shorter songs that bottled their acid-laced, jam-heavy progressive jazz identity never got the celebration it deserved. The story of Forever Now, then, reads like a redemption arc. Under Pelagic Records’ banner, a new era dawns. “The album title refers to many things, but it’s something that we hear quite often from people: ‘When I hear your music or go to a show, it feels like time…

“We see Nightwish as a gigantic oil tanker cruising across the Atlantic and Auri is like a luxury yacht floating around in sanguine seas. It’s very different.”Troy Donockley “That’s the thing that keeps me stoked up after doing music for 30 years: it’s still a big mystery to me,” says Tuomas Holopainen. III – Candles & Beginnings sees the return of Auri, the band featuring Holopainen, his wife and vocalist Johanna Kurkela, and Holopainen’s longtime Nightwish bandmate Troy Donockley. By turns ethereal, earthy and always expansive, Auri’s latest album is steeped in the mysterious power of music. “Whenever Troy sends me something or Johanna does something that resonates with me, I just don’t understand what’s going on,” says Holopainen. “I enjoy what I hear and can’t wait to contribute to…

Apillar of the neo-prog world hangs out with the heir apparent of the Berlin School of electronica in this first collaboration between latterday Tangerine Dream man, Thorsten Quaeschning, and Marillion’s Steve Rothery. The album’s unifying theme is the moving image, a fitting subject in light of all the film soundtracks in the Tangerine Dream discography and Rothery’s avowed enthusiasm for photography. That concept informs the song titles and the name of the project itself. Derived from the Greek words meaning ‘life’ and ‘to look’, the pair called their collaboration Bioscope after an early film projector, while Gentō takes its name from a 17th-century Japanese magic lantern, a forerunner of the moving picture. So far so cinematic, although if Gentō was a movie it would be less Hollywood blockbuster, more arthouse…

US prog veterans’ first album in eight years, mixed by Terry Brown. Detroit’s Discipline have hardly been prolific across their near 40-year career. After releasing three albums between 1988 and 1997 (including cassette-only debut Chaos Out Of Order), they took a long hiatus, only restarting with 2011’s To Shatter All Accord, followed by Captives Of The Wine Dark Sea in 2017. “It may surprise the curious with its accessibility.” Now arrives Breadcrumbs, which sees bandleader Matthew Parmenter reunited with longtime bassist Mathew Kennedy and guitarist Chris Herin of Tiles. The latter’s association with Terry Brown brought the Rush producer into Discipline’s orbit, with Brown remixing 1997’s Unfolded Like Staircase for a 2020 reissue. The veteran studio hand is back again here – Parmenter produced Breadcrumbs, before handing it over to…

Reissue series revives high-class hodgepodge. While that tweak to the title of 1972’s Living In The Past compilation practically invites comment on its dated elements – and in fairness, some of those live drum solos haven’t aged too well – there remains something about vintage Tull which, in 2025, still throws up surprises. Nobody ever sounded quite like them, and the colourful identity established by Ian Anderson’s poeticism and social observation, alongside some quicksilver musicianship, sets them apart from lazy assumptions of what prog was doing in the early 70s. The singer’s wordy snipes and seductions, mostly concerning the state of England, placed him in the lineage of Ray Davies or (later) Elvis Costello, and the band’s early line-ups, with Mick Abrahams and Martin Barre offering inventive, unconventional guitars, were…

Vinyl reissue for Canterbury supergroup’s 1978 debut. While ‘the punk killed prog’ debate has been largely exaggerated thanks in part to lazy journalism and equally lazy music documentary scripts, it’s an undeniable fact that by 1977 record companies were largely allergic to anything with more than four chords. One such casualty affected by this shift in taste was National Health. “What a masterpiece of the Canterbury canon this is.” Initially conceived in 1973 by Dave Stewart as a rock chamber orchestra after Hatfield And The North and Gilgamesh had combined forces to play two concerts of devilishly difficult music, it wasn’t until 1975 that Stewart was able to make this a reality. Boasting the twin keyboards of Stewart and Gilgamesh’s Alan Gowen, guitarists Steve Hillage and Phil Lee, Egg’s Mont…

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Where’s home? Beautiful York. What’s your earliest memory of prog? Late summer, 1996, listening to Comfortably Numb on a mixtape Bryan Josh gave me prior to my audition for Mostly Autumn. It also had early demos of their songs The Night Sky, The Last Climb and Heroes Never Die, as well as White Room by Cream. What’s the first prog album you bought? Floyd’s Animals from Track Records in York. And the most recent? Naked by Franck Carducci & Mary Reynaud. It has some great proggy moments on it. Your first prog gig? Genesis at Manchester NYNEX, March 1998. It was their Calling All Stations Tour. I think it was a birthday gift from Bryan. And the latest? The awesome John Hackett Band at Bannerman’s in Edinburgh on May 11,…

Canadian duo Crown Lands have signed to InsideOutMusic for an ambitious three-album arc that expands their sound in new directions. Carrying the torch for “the golden age of the record” in the single-driven, digital era, the wide-reaching trio of albums continues the story established on 2023’s Fearless. Ritual I was released to streaming platforms on July 8 and serves as a trippy, instrumental prequel. It also sees the band stepping out of their comfort zone. “It was a very intentional left turn from our traditional sound,” says vocalist/drummer Cody Bowles. “We wanted to make a meditation record, so we started each day in the studio doing yoga and breathing exercises. Then we started taking mushrooms, and it got a little too psychedelic: it morphed into its own thing. Psilocybin is…

“Some of the subject matter is quite caustic,” says Thighpaulsandra as he considers the inspiration behind the title of his ninth solo album Acid & Ecstasy, which is released on double vinyl, CD and digital via Retractor Records on August 8. “I never want to write about anything too pleasant: I’ve always been attracted to the darker side of prog,” he continues. “When I was younger, I liked Yes and Genesis and ELP and anything with keyboards, but as I got older, I got into stuff like Van der Graaf Generator and Magma and Henry Cow, so I don’t write about pastoral subjects. I write about things like child abuse and slavery and the darker side of the human condition. I go where no one else goes. But there are some…

Newly-discovered recordings by 60s Luton band Genesis-now called The Genesis, for obvious reasons – comprise a lost concept album, A Story, out on September 19. The music was unearthed by Hand Of Glory label owners Will Twynham and Mary Epworth when Will found a desirable vintage Hohner Cembalet pianet for sale online. The owner, keyboardist Chris Stokes, had a ‘The Genesis sample’ in the listing, which piqued Twynham’s interest. Digging through archive tapes, A Story – planned for release in 1969 but abandoned – emerged. Stokes tells Prog, “When my band The Mantis Set fizzled, my old schoolfriend Snip [Turner, guitar] asked if I’d like to join him and his friend Jock [Carleton, guitar and vocals].” Adding bassist Steve Holmes and drummer Mick Loughton, they called themselves Genesis. “Every band was…

“My parents got me hooked on progressive music early on. They were always listening to Pink Floyd, Barclay James Harvest and King Crimson around the house. The textures, inventiveness and quality of the instrumentation fascinated me. Prog was deeper than other music and I loved the idea of mixing synths and Mellotrons with heavy rock guitars. I would have been around 15 years old when I first heard Porcupine Tree. My first album of theirs was Lightbulb Sun. Tracks like She’s Moved On really resonated with me and after hearing the Deadwing album I learned how to play all of those songs. I love the attention to detail in Steven Wilson’s music, and the emotion that goes into it. One of the things that I most like about him is…

The announcement of Dave Cousins’ death on Sunday, July 13, marked the end of a long and fruitful career in music that began with the formation of the bluegrass-picking band The Strawberry Hill Boys in 1964, but he truly found his original voice once the outfit morphed into Strawbs in 1967. With his roots deep in folk music, like many of his contemporaries, he was galvanised into writing original material after seeing Bob Dylan and Donovan, but equally open to the giddy pop of The Beatles. Amassing a personal songbook that had already accumulated over 50 songs by the mid-1960s, Cousins eagerly embraced the stylistic freedoms of the times, seizing the opportunity to write about the issues of the moment – war, peace, sectarianism and sexuality, all of which were…

“When I’m making music I’m not thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a part of a scene.’ I don’t want to be boxed in or make the same album forever. Those elements are always going to be in Zopp.”Ryan Stevenson (Zopp) Back in the mists of 2015, in Prog 55, Sid Smith explored the existence of the semimythical beast that is the Canterbury scene. The consensus is that it comprises a loose connection of musicians and music emanating from a band called The Wilde Flowers who gigged between 1965 and 1968 and whose members went on not just to form the classic Caravan line-up, but also an earlier nucleus of Soft Machine, alongside Mike Ratledge and Australian beatnik Daevid Allen (later of Gong). The Canterbury scene would also come to encompass…

Writer’s block – is there any condition more dreadful to a creative soul? The very anathema of the muses that bestow inspiration, that fearsome struggle to bring art into the world plays a key role in Maestro, the new album from Norway’s Magic Pie. The record is bookended by the twopart Opus Imperfectus, the story of a composer struggling to find the perfect ending to complete their masterpiece. The subject seems apposite when Magic Pie’s fans endured a six-year dry spell between 2019’s Fragments Of The 5th Element and the arrival of Maestro. “This was far too long,” says Icelandic-born frontman Eiríkur Hauksson. “That was never intended. I think it started with Covid. Many bands used that period to go into the studio and work on stuff. Hail to them.…

Nightwish-adjacent prog-folk trio return with more beautiful distractions. In troubled times it’s good to have bands who can hold a black mirror up to twisted reality, but there’s also a place for those who offer a haven of temporary relief. Finnish symphonic prog-metal titans Nightwish have always had a flair for the fantastical, and their prog-folk offshoot Auri offer a similar escapist vibe. Their mystical flutterings are perhaps what should be expected from a project taking its name from a fantasy book series (The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss). ‘Far across the sea/A land of home we weave/With songs of light we bridge the dark,’ croons vocalist Johanna Kurkela as they tiptoe in velvet shoes across The Invisible Gossamer Bridge, the opening song on their third album. “It ebbs and…

Modern drum great and Mastodon guitarist make a muso dream team. Porcupine Tree, The Pineapple Thief and ex-King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison first played with Canadian musician Nick Johnston on the latter’s fine 2016 album Remarkably Human. The fusion guitarist/keyboardist has performed with Intervals, Plini, Polyphia and Periphery, and this year was formally announced as a touring player for Mastodon. Such is the pedigree behind Harrison/Johnston’s maiden, all-instrumental outing. “Strange, beautiful music, immaculately performed.” Early Mercy is the result of Harrison sending loops and ideas fresh from his drum room floor to Johnston, who embellished these rhythms with his own harmonic flourishes. Allan Holdsworth/Tigran Hamasayan bassist Evan Marien is the third player here, and although this is a trio of terrifying quality, thankfully the result is no facemelting noodle-fest. Opener…

Chicago’s AOR-prog veterans return in fine fettle. It’s not a bona fide concept LP à la 2017’s The Mission, which imagined a recce to Mars in 2033, but Styx’s 18th album continues the long-running US band’s recent progorientated renaissance, as last heard on 2021’s Crash Of The Crown. Amid a seven-piece line-up with talent to burn, oldhand guitarists James ‘JY’ Young and Tommy Shaw plus founding (and these days part-time) bassist Chuck Panozzo sound galvanised and vital, while younger co-writers Will Evankovich (guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Lawrence Gowan (piano, synth, Mellotron) prove especially crucial to these hyper-melodic, ingeniously succinct songs. “A late-period flourish, although not quite the best of times.” With Evankovich also acting as producer, drummer Todd Sucherman and Panozzo’s job-sharer Terry Gowan flesh out proceedings on a record…

Satisfying overview of pre-Crimson Robert Fripp. “Giles Giles & Fripp are three young men with enough musical talent for a whole gang,” screamed the advert for their sole album, The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles Giles & Fripp. Emerging from Bournemouth, brothers Peter and Michael Giles and ‘singing organist’ Robert Fripp brought their idiosyncratic take on popular music. “Allows the beauty of the strange, baroque pop to shine through.” Relocated to Brondesbury in north London, the trio landed a contract with Decca’s progressive imprint, Deram, with the demos they had been making in their flat. Recorded in early 1968 at Decca’s Studio 2 at Broadhurst Gardens in West Hampstead – the very room Lonnie Donegan had kickstarted UK skiffle and where The Beatles failed the audition – The Cheerful Insanity Of…

VENUE ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON DATE 06/06/2025 There’s room to breathe in the Islington Assembly Hall tonight, but it’s testament to both Neal Morse and The Flower Kings that those already here have arrived long before “should-we-leave-the-pub-yet?” o’clock. The first four songs of The Flower Kings’ set are taken from their newest album, Love. We Claim The Moon demonstrates their adaptability with a glide toward Relayer-esque fusion, before a cheeky Firth Of Fifth quote in Considerations shows appreciation for their contemporaries. The Elder is explorative and genre-averse. Its twinkling piano introduction is Disney-esque, but moments of pseudoorchestral grandeur feel more like a Michael Giacchino score. Pastoral guitar passages and enigmatic vocals are imbued with the spirit of Yes, while a Camel-shaped instrumental whisks us in a more energetic direction. The…

VENUE INDIGO @THE O2, LONDON DATE 07/05/2025 Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s Remain In Light tour continues to break rules regarding how classic albums should be performed. Conceived as a celebration to mark the 40th anniversary of a record that was released in 1980, Harrison and Belew didn’t actually hit the road until 2022 (not that that was in their control). Moreover, suggesting this is solely about Remain In Light is a slight misnomer: there are multiple tracks played from Fear Of Music, one from Harrison’s solo career, and even a choice nugget from King Crimson’s Discipline. Perhaps they could go with a present-continuous reframing and call it Remaining In Light, given that they’ve been performing this show for three years now, and don’t appear to want to give it…

VENUE DONINGTON PARK, DERBYSHIRE DATE 13/06/2025-15/06/2025 After the washout of 2024, Download Festival 2025 is largely bathed in sunshine, and despite the event moving towards what the promoters clearly see as a younger audience base with three debut headliners, the shift in priorities in the booking department is evident. And yet there are more progressive acts on the line-up than there have been for a while. For the prog contingent, Eivør is first up on Friday afternoon, and although on paper she might look like a bit lightweight for a noisy rock festival, her performance is a masterclass in a minimalist yet emotionally resonant stage presence. Rooted in Faroese folk traditions, she conjures up ambient atmospheres with her vocals that echo around the tent in a hypnotic manner. The sparse…