For their sixth album in eight years – which is almost approaching Steve Hackett in productivity – Spock’s Beard spin-off Pattern-Seeking Animals may well have found the perfect balance between progressive rock complexity and melodic accessibility. Grimalkin is an album…
View More Pattern-Seeking Animals – Grimalkin
Sir Steven Wilson (surely he should have been knighted by now for services to music?) did a brilliant job resurrecting and repackaging Jethro Tull’s classic albums, the ones that made us fans fall in love with them, but bowed out…
View More Jethro Tull – J-Tull Dot Com: Another Cast Of The Net
French TV are probably the best thing to come out of Kentucky since the Colonel’s fried chicken. Yet they’ve managed to lurk almost unnoticed under the prog radar since 1983, despite releasing a family bucket of music that is cheerfully…
View More French TV – The Spanish Caper
The third offering from idiosyncratic Japanese proggers – after 2020’s Tsumibito No Kioku and 2021’s Sazaki Orite Hikari Overflow – is a 90-minute concept album containing all the elements we expect from a band of the Rising Sun: jaw-dropping technical…
View More Project Nayuta – Uniomisty
Can an eight-year-old kid have the blues, asked a 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary. It turned out he could – not only that, he could ‘have’ jazz too and play guitar like a pint-sized Pat Metheny. The kid was Californian prodigy Julian…
View More Julian Lage – Scenes From Above
Daevid Allen was a geographical and musical nomad who wandered from British psychedelia to French avant-garde, Balearic acoustic balladry, New York punk, Oz performance poetry, San Francisco improv, Japanese extreme tripping and Brazilian space rock. He is best known as…
View More Weird Biscuit Teatime: Starring Daevid Allen – DJDDay
Japan has the greatest proportion of jazz lovers than any other country in the world. As Michael Caine never said, not a lot of people know that. The land of the rising sun has also bred a substantial number of…
View More Yusuke Shima – Silent Jazz Case 5
CONFUSINGLY, Focus 12 is the veteran Dutch proggers’ 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th studio album, depending on how you count them. As an additional headscratcher, the track named after the band (there’s one on nearly every album) is…
View More Focus – Focus 12
The Tangent have been more of a real band in recent years, with a line-up that has been fairly stable since 2013. But there is no disguising the fact that, like the heavens circling the Pole Star, everything revolves around…
View More The Tangent (For One) – To Follow Polaris
Andy Tillison has just come out of lockdown. Not a Covid lockdown but 20 months of self-imposed isolation in a compact studio at his remote Yorkshire farmhouse while he single-handedly (well, both hands and feet) created the 13th Tangent album,…
View More Andy Tillison – The Tangent