T P A

The Holy Family – The Holy Family

My initial thoughts were, “Can I just say… this album is fucking tremendous!” Read on further if you want the long version. 🙂 One of my go-to “altered state” albums has long been The Isness by Amorphous Androgynous – those…

Confusion Field – Disconnection Complete

There is no getting away from the fact that Finnish band Confusion Field are going to be compared with Riverside for their debut album, Disconnection Complete. Not that I’ve read any reviews for it, as I never do before writing…

Briscon – Touching Oblivion

Touching Oblivion is the debut album by Philipp Lippman, a promising 23-year old German guitarist from Thuringia, released under the Briscon name. It brings together around five years of instrumental composition, recording, mixing and hard graft – and the current…

postcards from new zealand – we watched them devour, vol.3: city islands

According to their Bandcamp page, postcards from new zealand (all lower case) have been making “rhythm and noise since 2008”, but this year when their latest release found its way into the TPA review queue was the first I’d heard…

Howard Boder – Atlantis

Lockdown has taken people to many places. Howard Boder rose from those depths with Atlantis, an exceptional album that I believe will grow on listeners with repeated listens. A potted history of Howard: He played keyboards with a short-lived band…

Franklin Mint – Bristle

The exciting Bristol quartet Franklin Mint return with their new album, Bristle, the follow-up to 2018’s Scrage, which I reviewed for TPA. Their blend of rock and punk with progressive leanings continues, alongside their at times upfront, in-your-face presentation. They…

Flairck – Back Alive!

After reviewing the recent Cronofonía release, I found myself wondering what else Pablo Ortíz had been doing all these years (as Cronofonía had been in the making since at least 2013. It turns out that while Ortíz is Mexican, he…

Mystery

De Boerderij, Zoetermeer, the Netherlands Wednesday, 17th November 2018 A few months after the release of the new studio album Lies and Butterflies, the successor to the extremely successful Delusion Rain from 2015, the Canadian progressive rock band Mystery returned…

Mystery – Caught in the Whirlwind of Time [Blu-ray]

It has been said before: Mystery and De Boerderij, that is a kind of unity. There can hardly be any other explanation for the fact that the Canadians keep returning to the Dutch rock temple, time and again. And not…

Anders Buaas – Tarot

Tarot, the latest album from Norway’s Anders Buaas, is a must for all fans of instrumental guitar-led music, with a range of acoustic and electric guitar styles ranging from delicate, folk-influenced pieces all the way through to full-on electric guitar…