Tag: progrock
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Regal Worm – Use and Ornament (avant-prog)
‘Detail’ seems to be the watchword by which this album was conceived and constructed; I hesitate to say that it’s all about the arrangements, as it’s clearly about much more, but a conspicuously enormous amount of effort has gone into them. Ideas abound in every area, in an album which…
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Matt Stevens – Lucid (avant-rock)
Matt Stevens has a particular approach as a solo performer; he gigs on his own, with an acoustic guitar, and he plays instrumental music. He’s a great player, but he doesn’t tackle the challenge of solo performance by throwing a heap of complex technique at the problem; instead, he uses…
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The Fierce And The Dead – Spooky Action (avant-rock)
It used to make a certain amount of sense to refer to The Fierce And The Dead as a post-rock band, and they have indeed been known to make use of that term themselves; I feel they’ve moved on, however, into some kind of a post-post-rock phase. Leaving aside my…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Twelve minutes is a respectable length for an EP, but with eight tunes on this disc they’re still pretty much crammed in, none of them clocking in closer to two minutes than one-and-a-half. If you think that makes this sound like a sampler, you’d be very wrong: although these bands…
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Karda Estra – Mondo Profondo/ New Worlds (avant-prog)
It’s far from unusual for me to beaten to the scoop on the music I’m sent to review, for various reasons, but not least because I like to spend a good deal of quality listening time trying to get inside the music before I set dactyls to chiclets and start…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
We’ve all seen some pretty rough justice in the wake of global capitalism’s recent crises, but Greece has suffered worse than any other part of the developed world. The Figures Of Enormous Grey And The Patterns Of Fraud appears to be a response to these circumstances, although it’s too complex…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
You’ll hear a lot of familiar echoes in The Executioner’s Lover, but I can more or less promise that you haven’t heard anything quite like it. It opens with a song, ‘Half Life’, that is mainly arranged for ‘orchestral instruments’, but which also incorporates a rock rhythm section, which comes…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A combination of electro-acoustic and programmed sounds are used here to create a sound that pays clear homage to African polyrhythmic percussion music, unpitched attacks mingling with sounds similar to idiophones or lamellophones, although they might come from almost any source. Then there are the synths, guitars and lo-fi samples……
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The Inner Road – Ascension (progressive rock)
Steve Gresswell is a prog auteur of the old school, producing music that is not particularly progressive stylistically, but which makes use of a sophisticated and complex approach to composition and orchestration. I’m familiar with two of his projects, this one, and Coalition, a band with a similar sound that…
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Tom Slatter – Three Rows Of Teeth (avant-prog)
Tom Slatter likes steampunk; he likes it enough to have used it as the thematic touchstone for all three of his albums to date. Now steampunk is not a musical style (Abney Park notwithstanding) but a genre of fiction, and a large body of visual culture derived from it. If…
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Coalition – In Search Of Forever (progressive rock)
I felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity when I first saw this album, but I couldn’t work out why. The first thing I thought of was Return To Forever, but that band’s album covers had very little in common with this one. It was several days before it came to…
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Astralfish – Far Corners (space rock)
Labeling this record as ‘space rock’, as I have above, is a bit like an American telling you that they’re Italian, or Polish or Armenian. I don’t have to write anything after the title, and I’m never trying to ascribe any particular set of characteristics when I do so, but…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Glockamole is a great name for a comedy hip-hop record. There’s clearly a lot of wordplay left in ripping the piss out of hip-hop’s tropes and clichés, but I have to say there are probably not many jokes left in it. It’s a well worked mine, especially gangsta rap, bearing…
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trillian – creature teacher (progressive/ post-rock)
Textural rock music, crafted in painstaking sonic detail, utilising intricate and unusual rhythmic structures, has become a ‘thing’ in recent years; but it has generally been a thing in which vocals, while not necessarily altogether absent, take a back seat to the other elements. Not so with trillian: these songs…
Oliver Arditi 