There currently appears to be a thriving rock and prog scene emerging around Bergen in Norway with bands like Seven Impale, Tiebreaker, D’accorD and Ossicles. Into this mix, we can now add Shaman Elephant, a four piece that has been…
View More Shaman Elephant – Crystals
2016 has been another very good year for music at the progressive end of the spectrum, a bumper crop of new releases to digest, and assimilate. On the down side, the genre has lost way too many of its heroes…
View More TPA Best Albums of 2016
The existence of No Spare Planet, the third studio album from collaborators Nikki Squire and Nigel McLaren, is a bitter sweet experience. On the one hand it marks the triumphant return of Esquire nearly twenty years after the release of…
View More Esquire – III: No Spare Planet
I’m a grumpy sod sometimes and when I’m trying to concentrate I absolutely cannot stand the relentless banter that my colleagues have about house prices, dietary righteousness, gym habits; basically anything that isn’t work. Because there’s only so many times…
View More Brand X – Nuclear Burn
What is a Stick Man? Documentary pictures taken in the 1950s by the celebrated bloke Laurence Stephen Lowry (RBA,RA) show matchstick men with their matchstick cats and dogs making music. Bored with these omnipresent artists of that time who were…
View More Stick Men – Prog Noir
It’s been a while since I ventured into the experimental deep end of the pool, it’s been a struggle getting there past the wary learners and the middle distance swimmers, such is their ever growing number. An album by Killing…
View More Hypnopazūzu – Create Christ, Sailor Boy
Turning back the clock some ten years or more – around that period there seemed to be a steady influx of great music arriving from Japan. The wonderful KBB, along with notable side projects from violinist Akihisa Tsuboy. Asturias, especially their…
View More Lite – Cubic
Disciples of the riff. That is the core element, the engine that drives UK-based Heavy Prog outfit Kylver and their latest instrumental concept album The Island. Most Prog-leaning bands tend toward adornment, artfully layering as many elements as possible into…
View More Kylver – The Island
Following on from the recent release of the Hawkwind Charisma Years box set we are now presented with the RCA Active Years set, this one covering the three albums that the band released on the RCA label in 1981 and…
View More Hawkwind – The RCA Active Years 1981-1982
Hawkwind continue to have a long and interesting career, recently releasing their latest The Machine Stops album that proves their ability to provide consistent song writing. Here we have a box set re-release of four of their albums which were…
View More Hawkwind – The Charisma Years 1976-1979