Labelled and marketed as a progressive rock album, Karmakanic’s newest release lacks the sort of authenticity and creativity that one expects from the genre. Instead, the 50-minute album is a well-recorded and mechanically composed symphonic album, that never strives to…
View More Karmakanic – dot
If any of you are like me and feel that Haken’s latest album, Affinity, was rather lacklustre (I have to say, it seems as if a lot of you aren’t) then you can stop feeling glum as this album does…
View More Edge Of Reality – Vicious Circle
The Posies were formed in 1987 in Bellingham, near Seattle in Washington State, by legendary songwriters Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow. I have been a fan of their music since the 1990s and some of my favorite songs of the…
View More The Posies – Solid States
If you, like me, often find yourself perusing European forestry statistics then I’m sure that you’d have noted that Denmark is not as big in wood as it is in bacon, lagging far behind its Germanic and Nordic neighbours in…
View More Afenginn – OPUS
4:15 AM came to be like a breath of fresh air. I hate that bloody alarm clock. Likewise, 4:45 AM, the last Aisles album, was also an introduction to something new and easily slipped into my 2015 Top Ten at…
View More Aisles – Hawaii
Three years on from their last album, the rather fine Conjure, American band Herd of Instinct are back with another excursion into sinuous alt-prog instrumental territory with a selection of tunes built around a base of Mark Cook’s many guitars…
View More Herd of Instinct – Manifestation
This review may seem well overdue, given that my review of Quantum Jump’s self-titled debut was published in January. Esoteric did not have Barracuda in stock at the time. Fortunately though, there has been a re-pressing (is it called a…
View More Quantum Jump – Barracuda
A year on from the enigmatic and sonically diverse tour de force that was Tales from the Silent Ocean, Steve Hughes’ debut solo release, the imaginative album Once We Were (Part One) has been released by the former drummer with…
View More Steve Hughes – Once We Were (Part One)
2016 has seen a veritable outpouring of releases which express and embody a seemingly deep-seated contemporary preoccupation with despair and despondency. Melancholic gloom is finding strong, heart-felt resonances in the work of many song writers, bands, musicians as well as…
View More Airbag – Disconnected
If I told you Mercury Tree have been roped into that driest of sub-genres “math rock” in the past it may put you off reading further. However, this Tree do human things with the dusty academic description that make this…
View More The Mercury Tree – Permutations