Tag: progressive rock
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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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Karda Estra – Weird Tales (chamber prog-psych)
Karda Estra occupies a fairly unique territory, not a million miles from what Gunther Schuller coined the term ‘Third Stream’ to describe, although, notwithstanding some audible nods toward its harmonic verticality, jazz is not the main constituent of its language. It’s rare that I find myself writing about music where…
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Churn Milk Joan – One (avant-funk)
It’s very hard to know where to start talking about this record. Do I begin by describing its sound? The words I would use would have a hard job to distinguish these sounds from other, entirely less interesting music. I could tell you that it sounds like some kind of…
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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…
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The Inner Road – Visions (progressive rock)
Rock music is such an integral part of our audio culture that it has almost become invisible as a thing in itself: it doesn’t sound like rock music to many ears, in many contexts, but just like music. Furthermore, because of the way in which it is usually experienced, as…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Heavy rock music of various sorts has a long standing relationship with the avant-garde, and the more ‘serious’ end of ‘popular’ music (I may put a lot of ‘things’ in quote marks, but it’s not my ‘fault’ if every term in ‘music’ means something other than its ‘literal’ definition!). Metal’s…
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Various Artists – Singles & EPs
Marley Butler makes music of remarkable clarity: his soundscapes are usually clean, open affairs, in which the boundaries between sonic elements are clearly defined; his rhythms are regular, precise and simple; ideas have room in which to breathe, and although he does not overuse spatialising effects such as reverb and…
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Matt Stevens – Relic (acoustic post-rock)
Matt Stevens is an artist whose work I have followed closely, for several reasons, since I started regularly writing about music. Whatever reason I first came across his work, the reason I have continued to pay attention is that I really like what he does (so far so good, anyway).…
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Awooga – V Column (progressive rock)
Long songs (by the standards of popular music) are often casually referred to as epics: obviously the idea of an epic refers to more than duration, and although such commonplace coinages pretend to nothing more than a disposable shorthand, I think it’s worth examining that idea in relation to V…
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Tom Slatter – Iron Bark (progressive rock/ steampunk)
It’s rare that something truly original comes my way, something that I can’t really put in a box with anything else. Tom Slatter presents me with music for which I can find some comparisons, certainly: there’s a nuanced, psychedelic experimentalism to his compositions, reminiscent of some twentieth century classical music,…
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Matt Stevens – Live In Blackpool (progressive/ post-rock/ acoustic)
What’s the point of live albums? As music fans, we usually hope for a number of things, but they mostly revolve around an anticipated sense of greater authenticity. This is the musician doing it for real: you can hear whether or not they really know their stuff, or whether it…
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Another Dead Hero – Children Of The Witch (metal)
Ominous, dissonant, powerful, and employing a vocabulary that predates any form of extreme metal, it would be easy to class Another Dead Hero’s music as epic doom, for its atmosphere and for its approach, but it’s not so easily pigeonholed stylistically. It sounds like Another Dead Hero, which is to…
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Karda Estra – New Worlds (psychedelic/ progressive/ chamber music)
This album opens with a strummed guitar chord, and an oboe. The oboe is an instrument not often featured in rock, jazz, popular or folk music, and it signals with its presence that we should prepare ourselves for a variety of ‘not often featured’ elements. There are some sounds of…
Oliver Arditi 