There are a few artists out there who pursue a singular vision that probably not even the protagonist knows where it will lead he or she, but the ride will never be less than interesting, and following the work of…
View More Kayo Dot – Plastic House on Base of Sky
About nine months or so ago, after decades of sporadically trying, I suddenly “got” Cardiacs. The penny did not so much drop as knock me down like a soppy Great Dane, and then proceeded to give me a good licking.…
View More 7Shades – Bursting
Three years on from their last album, the rather fine Conjure, American band Herd of Instinct are back with another excursion into sinuous alt-prog instrumental territory with a selection of tunes built around a base of Mark Cook’s many guitars…
View More Herd of Instinct – Manifestation
O2 Kentish Town Forum, London Friday 29th July 2016 Having often railed against the ever expanding nostalgia industry…quick, exploit the silver surfers while their ears still function…the unfettered greed of which now climbs up another notch with that astonishingly expensive…
View More Blue Öyster Cult
If I told you Mercury Tree have been roped into that driest of sub-genres “math rock” in the past it may put you off reading further. However, this Tree do human things with the dusty academic description that make this…
View More The Mercury Tree – Permutations
Towards the end of last year I reviewed the gloriously tumultuous album Beyond Space Edges by heavy avant-prog band Unit Wail, and sometime early in the new year I was sent a file containing the 2016 remaster of their first…
View More Unit Wail – Pangaea Proxima
An album long anticipated by this particular scribbler, Italian avant-prog band Yugen’s fourth studio album, Death By Water, arrives in a year already blessed by several high quality releases, and it would be in danger of being lost in the…
View More Yugen – Death By Water
Johanna Elina sings her stripped-back songs of bared souls and mystery to a soundtrack of sometimes gentle and minimal backing containing electronica and found sounds, alternating with more edgy palettes of modern rhythmic clatter and thrum. Finnish by birth, she…
View More Johanna Elina – Belonging
Dancing Plague Rats in a Melody Jus… Serves as many as you want it to, a satisfying meal, that akin to the finest arrabiata will be fiery and full of flavour, but subtleties will not be lost in the heat.…
View More Panzerpappa – Pestrottedans
Continuing my occasional penchant for jazz rock in a “big band” style, viz-a-viz Gavin Harrison’s Cheating The Polygraph and The Nathan Parker Smith Large Ensemble with Not Dark Yet, both fine and fairly recent examples of this seemingly resurgent sub-genre,…
View More The Ed Palermo Big Band – One Child Left Behind