As a Buddhist, an album that takes inspiration from the ancient, mysterious and often misunderstood Tibetan sky burial intrigued me and I approached this review with interest. Italian trio ZU have been free of genre classification for twenty years, preferring…
View More ZU – Jhator
John Mitchell’s first Lonely Robot album, Please Come Home, was a big hit when it was released in 2015. Some reviewers even whispered – out of Steven Wilson’s earshot, obvs – that it might even be better than Hand. Cannot.…
View More Lonely Robot – The Big Dream
“Mother, he’s got in again…you know what that means, don’t you?” “Oh Gadzooks, Henry! Not the attic again…I swear to Jehosephat I hid the key well!” “He always finds it, you know that. How, I don’t know.” “The pink medicine…
View More Nick Prol & the Proletarians – Loon Attic
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
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
“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
“Soft, lilting melodies of delicate gossamer loveliness blow through the spring flowers, like a breath of sunshine, giving a relaxing air of calmness…” …is not something that you would hear said about any release from The Bob Lazar Story. This…
View More The Bob Lazar Story – Baritonia
Following my eye-catching review of their debut album, how could those strangely comprehensible Glaswegians Big Hogg fail to be noticed by the big boys down in That London? Quite easily in all probability, but in the real world these winsome…
View More Big Hogg – Gargoyles