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
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” – from Shakespeare’s The Tempest The sleeper awakens into a world he no longer recognizes. The ruined landscape spread out before him, laid waste by the hellish torrent that departed as…
View More Telepathy – Tempest
Richard Barbieri is a name that needs little introduction, but on his occasional solo albums he calls on his long career in synthesiser technology and sound design to craft highly intricate ambient works that never fall into the trap of…
View More Richard Barbieri – Planets + Persona
Dutch progressive outfit Summer Breeze Project – often shortened to SBP – complete their Contact “triptych” (their word, not mine) of EPs with Part 3, a single track lasting over 25 minutes, automatically making it longer than any song Yes…
View More Summer Breeze Project – Contact: Part 3