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 is clearly a paean to much of the best music that progressive rock has produced; stylistic cues come from many sources, including folk, jazz and sixties psych-pop, and melodic or harmonic devices are presented in a rapidly cycling kaleidoscope of nuanced affective conditions. However, it is in the constant, subtly modulated…

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 live looping technology to accompany himself. He builds up a pattern of rhythm and harmony, in anything from one to several layers, and plays melody over the top (or not, depending on what else is going on). You can see this if you go to one of his gigs. He’ll start playing, then after a while he’ll stop, but what he’s just been …

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 irritation at contemporary culture’s tendency to append the prefix post- to anything and everything, it’s a good enough term to describe a particular form of predominantly instrumental, texturally inclined music that employs the resources of rock; it’s a term with currency, pointing to an established set of stylistic practices, and to some…

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 clearly have much more to say than can be heard here, these eight songs are perfectly concise and self-contained distillations of energy, political rage, atavistic catharsis, humorous aural vandalism or whatever the appropriate term may be (and I’m sure it’s different for each song). What the eight bands collected on Without Kibou …

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 spouting off. Little surprise, then, that Classic Rock Presents: Prog beat me to the punch on the Mondo Profondo review, giving me the opportunity to rip off any pertinent observations they may have shared. ‘Unclassifiable’ isn’t a characterisation with which it’s hard to concur, nor is it news to me (or anyone with a functioning pair of ears) that Richard …

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 an album to be pinned down quite so glibly. Choral voices are layered with a complex variety of rock textures, ranging from post-rock atmospherics, through mathy convolutions to heavy prog riffing. It’s the big epic sweep of things that tends to predominate, rather than the individual voice or the…

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 and goes at strategic moments; the song is a melodramatic number, which while it is not a ballad, has a narrative feel to it, like a piece from musical theatre or light opera. This is more or less the course followed by the album as a whole, but within those approximate bounds there is a huge diversity …

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… No Security Through Numbers is far too complex to glibly summarise with a juxtaposition of stylistic labels or a list of other bands I think you might have heard of. Towards the end of ‘Super Symmetry’ a series of fusionesque stabs appear

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 incorporates vocals; in both cases he is the principal actor, although he clearly prefers to work with collaborators, and all tracks on Ascension are credited to him and Jay Parmar, who plays guitar on the album. The previous record, Visions, was a collaboration with guitarist Phil Braithwaite on apparently similar terms. Despite his variety of collaborators, there’s a singleness of vision to all of the recordings I’ve heard featuring Steve Gresswell, probably aided and abetted by the fact …

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 you want a watertight definition you’ll have to go and dig one up yourself, but science fiction based on Victorian technology is not a bad shorthand, and Slatter’s brand thereof tends to incorporate a powerful element of the macabre, as well as elements of fantasy. To write and record music that is ‘in’ a literary genre obviously suggests an unusual approach to songwriting; the compositions on Three Rows Of Teeth are not the usual explorations of commonplace situations and …

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 me: the fantasy artist Rodney Matthews published a book of his work by the same title in 1985, and although the album art itself doesn’t resemble his pictures, he was a prolific typeface designer, and the one used here looks very like his work. I don’t propose to labour this coincidence, but I think it’s inevitable that such associations colour our perceptions to some degree, and the strange visual worlds I explored at Matthews’ hands as a teenager may have an influence on my imaginative response…

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 it serves as a useful guide to those among my readers that are utterly convinced they have no interest in anything that could be labelled ‘metal’ for example, or ‘hip-hop’. That is, it serves a mainly negative purpose, because if you are likely to enjoy it, a genre label tells you virtually nothing about a piece of music. Far Corners is a space rock record in the way a fifth-generation suburban American realtor from Hackensack, New Jersey might be Irish.

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 in mind that everything N.W.A. released after Straight Outta Compton was basically a joke. No, it takes more to make a funny hip-hop record than just pointing out how ludicrous hip-hop is, or being incongruously self-deprecating. It requires some comic creativity to raise a laugh in any medium, but luckily for me, I find Fat Ross pretty darn funny.

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 are really songs, in the fullest sense, with well considered chord sequences, lyrics that seem to actually be about something, and melodies that provide each track with its central narrative. The vocal is an equal partner, rather than the dominant element, and for some reason that’s a relative rarity: bands tend to emphasise either their song craft or their arrangements.