Last year, one of my favourite releases was the debut recording from Italian band Ikitan, a twenty-minute-and-twenty-second opus named Twenty-Twenty. I couldn’t help but read into it feelings and experiences from that year. Of course, these were my feelings, and…
View More Ikitan – Twenty-Twenty Live at Forte Geremia
American progressive rock band Evership plunge us back into the pomp/prog-rock era of the ’70s with their third album, and it’s a concept one at that – the first half of an allegoric journey in search of truth, full of…
View More Evership – The Uncrowned King: Act 1
Lost Humanity is the first album I’ve heard from Bulgarian outfit the Daniel Eliseev Project (DEP), but based on the enjoyment I’ve gained from it, it surely won’t be the last. Daniel Eliseev is a guitarist, so unsurprisingly it is…
View More Daniel Eliseev Project (DEP) – Lost Humanity
A retrospective look at the last two releases by CIRRUS BAY Bill Gillham’s Washington State-based symphonic/neo-prog project – currently on hiatus – were sadly overlooked by many on their initial release. There is much for followers of Renaissance, the classic…
View More Cirrus Bay – Places Unseen / The Art of Vanishing
No Mandate. The band name seems almost paradoxical, for their mandate appears to be to have, you guessed it, no mandate. The title for the Australian trio’s debut full-length release seems to confirm this – No Mandate have recalibrated. The…
View More No Mandate – Recalibrate
My initial thoughts were, “Can I just say… this album is fucking tremendous!” Read on further if you want the long version. 🙂 One of my go-to “altered state” albums has long been The Isness by Amorphous Androgynous – those…
View More The Holy Family – The Holy Family
There is no getting away from the fact that Finnish band Confusion Field are going to be compared with Riverside for their debut album, Disconnection Complete. Not that I’ve read any reviews for it, as I never do before writing…
View More Confusion Field – Disconnection Complete
Touching Oblivion is the debut album by Philipp Lippman, a promising 23-year old German guitarist from Thuringia, released under the Briscon name. It brings together around five years of instrumental composition, recording, mixing and hard graft – and the current…
View More Briscon – Touching Oblivion
According to their Bandcamp page, postcards from new zealand (all lower case) have been making “rhythm and noise since 2008”, but this year when their latest release found its way into the TPA review queue was the first I’d heard…
View More postcards from new zealand – we watched them devour, vol.3: city islands
Lockdown has taken people to many places. Howard Boder rose from those depths with Atlantis, an exceptional album that I believe will grow on listeners with repeated listens. A potted history of Howard: He played keyboards with a short-lived band…
View More Howard Boder – Atlantis