Alan Reed’s enthralling second album takes a little while for the uncomfortably menacing significance of its title to make itself felt and understood. Fiercely passionate and enticingly absorbing, the experience it delivers is brutally uncompromising. Much like the iron fist…
View More Alan Reed – Honey on the Razors Edge
Plini is a guitarist and composer who manages to carve his own niche in the increasingly saturated instrumental guitar-centric progressive rock/metal genre – no mean feat. His first full-length album, Handmade Cities, is a thoroughly impressive consummation of the promise…
View More Plini – Handmade Cities
Klub Wytwórnia, Łodz, Poland 7th – 9th April 2017 Marillion Weekend – A Fan’s Perspective [With photos courtesy of Alan Jones, The Web U.K., used with many thanks] When I was a child my favourite day of the year was…
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The words unique and genius are so often overused, however in the case of Allan Holdsworth, they seem to fall short of the mark. One of the true innovators of the guitar and a truly gifted musician and composer. In…
View More Allan Holdsworth ~ RIP
Greek rockers Ocean Mind returned with a new album in May last year, Underwater II representing a change of sound from the first part of the Underwater collection which was released at the end of 2015. This album is essentially…
View More Ocean Mind – Underwater II
Time and public perception have been neither kind nor entirely fair to Phil Collins. A hugely impressive song-writer, musician, performer and (to a lesser extent) actor, his prolific success in the mid ’90s made him an almost perpetual presence on…
View More Phil Collins – Not Dead Yet
The Barbican Theatre, London 8th April 2017 A beautiful and warm spring day in the capital glossed over a visit to a rather lacklustre Italian eatery near Dean Street, prior to a convoluted saunter on the Tube the wrong way…
View More Irmin Schmidt & The London Symphony Orchestra / The Can Project
“Mirror your World through my Touch…Set me Free, oh Set me Free” These words, from the song Colours on Magenta’s new We Are Legend album, are about Vincent Van Gogh, but they could also describe the feelings engendered by this…
View More Magenta – We Are Legend
It would be easy to say of any new release from Norwegian sonic pioneers Ulver “Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting!”, but I have long come to realise that it is far easier to leave all expectations at the…
View More Ulver – The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Hafan Y Mor, Nr. Pwllheli, North Wales 16th – 18th March 2017 Part Three (Time for the Prog ‘After Life’?!) SATURDAY KONCHORDAT Konchordat, first of three bands on the second day from the distinctive Bad Elephant Music label, blew away…
View More H.R.H. Prog V – Day Three