It is a while since I have listened repeatedly to an album in a foreign language where the lyrics are obviously central to the whole exercise remain a mystery to me, the singer’s voice becoming another instrument, but I suppose…
View More Sophie Tassignon – Khyal
Drifting Sun have never flinched from staring into the heart of darkness; indeed they seem to relish it, and Veil, their latest offering, is no exception. It is a conceptually complex album, exploring such existential challenges as sin and betrayal,…
View More Drifting Sun – Veil
Marco Mansoro is a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, in his own words, writing “songs that create a positive energy and cause a feeling of faith in the good things in life”. Everyday Fate is an instrumental album that was released via Bandcamp…
View More Mansoro – Everyday Fate
Esoteric’s approach to reissuing albums on vinyl seems as canny as picking names out of a hat; it’s impossible to predict what they’ll choose next. With stablemates Van der Graaf Generator, Esoteric have selected two rather opposite entries from the…
View More Van der Graaf Generator – Still Life [Remastered]
With 50+ album offers arriving each week at TPA, there’s simply never enough time to listen to all of them, so quite often it’s just a phrase or the suggested ‘genre tags’ that sparks the initial: ‘take a listen’, or…
View More Elephant Planet – Elephant Emoji
I love the unpredictable power of music to take you completely by surprise. I knew absolutely nothing about Belgian duo Jeroen De Brauwer and Lukas Huisman apart from the briefest of messages which arrived in an email along with a…
View More Tempus Cucumis – Rêves
The late ’70s and early ’80s has been a fertile era for Cherry Red Records, with releases covering the heydays of various genres of music that rode the wave of the commercial and creative booms for popular music at that…
View More Various Artists – New Guitars in Town: Power Pop 1978 – 1982 [3CD Boxset]
My first experience with the German acoustic duo of Melanie Mau and Martin Schnella was at New Jersey’s Progstock festival. Mau (vocals) and Schnella (acoustic guitar & vocals) are typically abetted onstage by percussionist Simon Schroder, performing on various hand…
View More Melanie Mau & Martin Schnella – The Rainbow Tree
The Aristocrats… is there really anything left to be said about this obscenely talented band? Guthrie Govan, Marco Minnemann and Bryan Beller have spent more than a decade releasing albums of mind-bending – but always with a point – content…
View More The Aristocrats – DUCK
Riverside’s frontman Mariusz Duda is a man brimming with ideas and creativity. Since 2008 his main side-project has been the rather different sonic worlds of Lunatic Soul, characterised by widescreen soundscapes infused with either folk or more electronic inflections, and…
View More Mariusz Duda – AFR AI D