Abbotsbury Church, Newton Abbot Saturday, 23rd April 2022 A strange venue for a prog gig: strange for me on so many levels. As a church you would expect the acoustics to be good, and they weren’t bad at all. It…
View More Blank Manuskript / The Emerald Dawn
Keyboardist and composer Hans Lundin is the sole constant through the history of the legendary Swedish band Kaipa, which he co-founded in 1973. With the band having just released their fourteenth album, the mesmerising Urskog, TPA’s Jez Rowden talks to…
View More Hans Lundin – Kaipa
“This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” Quite possibly the most famous and most quoted words from T S Eliot, ending his poem The Hollow Men. Hungary’s Ghost Toast, however, have chosen to…
View More Ghost Toast – Shade Without Color
St. David’s Hall, Cardiff Wednesday, 27th April 2022 Let’s get something out of the way at the outset: Nick Mason has to be the luckiest man in rock. I’ve been a huge Pink Floyd fan for years, they were the…
View More Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets
A sumptuous musical feast. In many respects we have come to expect nothing less from ESP Project; luscious layers of exquisitely textured melodies are the hallmarks of the beautifully refined musical experiences with which each release alluringly embraces and caresses…
View More ESP Project – Anarchic Curves
The Lexington, Islington, London Thursday, 21st April 2022 For two or three hours let’s pretend all that shit going on out there in an increasingly dysfunctional and dangerous world is not happening, and immerse ourselves in the disorienting psychedelia offered…
View More The Holy Family / V Ä L V Ē
My first brush with Jonesy was in 2011 when I reviewed the bizarre Dark Matter (Inner Space), apparently a mish-mash of old recordings and new sound effects. Looking back, I cannot fathom why I gave it 7 out of 10,…
View More Jonesy – Waltz For Yesterday: The Recordings 1972-1974
While I have had the Eighth Tower compilation Hauntology in UK since the beginning of the year, it took the recent death of Philip Jeck (on 25th March 2022) to kickstart my writing this review. Jeck was a celebrated and…
View More Various Artists – Hauntology in UK
French singer/guitarist Jean Pierre Louveton has been producing quality, guitar-led prog rock under the JPL name since 2002. Along with albums from his now disbanded group Nemo, and the heavier output from Wolfspring, he has managed to release 22 studio…
View More JPL – Sapiens, Chapitre 3/3: Actum
Riverwood is a progressive metal band from Egypt, and without writing a further word, I imagine for a lot of people they are already imagining comparisons to bands like Tunisia’s Myrath, or Israel’s Orphaned Land. Given that Egypt is the…
View More Riverwood – Shadows and Flames