As openings go, it’s arresting. Drop the needle on Frost*’s first studio album for five years and the bewildering voice of a child prompts a double-take: ‘Sit back, relax, and enjoy yourselves… you scum.’ 

Charming. Yet the blend of toxic positivity and open contempt in that statement sets the tone for a recurring lyrical theme. Keyboard player/co-vocalist/mastermind Jem Godfrey described 2016’s Falling Satellites as his “midlife crisis album”, urging us to live life to the full as our time is limited. Day And Age resembles the work of someone who’s decided positivity only goes so far. Yet rather than representing a grand, over-arching ‘concept’ uniting this record, it’s backed up by a distinctive emotional feel. 

Several tracks were recorded in the “bleak, isolated oppression” of a converted coastguard tower, and it shows. Paranoia, bitterness, resignation – they’re all swirling around the lyrical mix: the chorus of the 11-and-a-halfminute title track claims, ‘We’re living in a dyin’ age, where the writing’s on the wall.’ 

Yet the accompanying sounds are still galvanising, even if it’s anger acting as an energy. ‘We’re burning with a quiet rage,’ sings guitarist John Mitchell, Godfrey’s longtime co-conspirator (vocal and lyric writing duties are split throughout). The former’s six-string arpeggios and the latter’s urgent piano figures echo Duke-era Genesis and even latter-period Police. The track evolves further, across slowly chugging metallic riffs and ghostly angelic voices, before the chorus bursts back in. Soon afterwards, nervy stabs of prog metal jab the gut on Terrestrial and lend edgy anxiety to its AOR-ish vocal melodies as Mitchell laments ‘never knowing what’s out there’.

Yet while those compositions are far from conventionally structured, wilful complication is kept to a relative minimum. The jazzinflected keyboard freewheeling and frenzied guitar heard on Falling Satellites are less in evidence, and while the celebrated percussion skills of King Crimson’s Pat Mastelotto have been enlisted on Skywards and Repeat To Fade (the band have been officially drummerless since Craig Blundell’s departure in 2019), there’s little indulgence on display here. On occasion, it even feels like they’re deliberately avoiding it: the title track culminates in a promising guitar solo that fades out before it gathers a head of steam. Leaving us wanting more? Mocking prog cliches? Trolling fans begging for a big fat blow-out? Only Jem Godfrey can answer that. 

Godfrey has famously made a living from writing pop hits in the past. But while there’s no shortage of progressive tropes on display here, accessible hooks are also plentiful. It feels like an album led by songwriting rather than players or lyrical narratives – and it succeeds handsomely as such. Beautifully wintry undulations of piano underpin Waiting For The Lie, latterly enhanced by cinematic strings, in a real melodic highlight of the record. But again, the lyrical mood is disillusionment. Godfrey intones, ‘these are the games that we play’ as he despairs of modern society’s capacity for mutual deception.

Equally striking – and again offset by dark lyrical clouds – is the yearning opening passage of Kill The Orchestra, which starts with delicate synths accompanying a lament wherein Godfrey warbles, ‘The boy I was has gone and blown his happy brains out.’ Then as the same memorable melodic figures are fleshed out, he croons, ‘I’ll be singing as they string you up.’ Rarely do such ugly sentiments sound as seductive as they do here.

This is certainly not an album light on stylistic adventure, though. The Boy Who Stood Still is a wonderfully odd diversion, employing knotty electro-funk rhythms redolent of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts or Talking Heads’ Seen And Not Seen to soundtrack a Radio 4-like voiceover – courtesy of Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs – recounting the protagonist’s ‘ability to remain perfectly still… he became part of the furniture… invisible’. Fripp-ish guitar angles and fizzing synths add further colour to a track that evokes a short period in music that’s too seldom mined for inspiration –a time when electronica and post-punk adopted prog’s adventurous approach to song structure.

The album concludes with Repeat To Fade’s instruction to ‘stop pouring out your heart, repeat to fade… there’s only one way out, repeat to fade,’ as if Doves had been enlisted to write a cynic’s anthem. Meanwhile, chaos swirls overhead as a soprano twitters operatically and a voice screams ‘enjoy yourself, you scum!’ like the schoolteacher from The Wall meeting Basil Fawlty at the end of the world.

A suitably alarming snapshot of our uncertain times, then, but a thrillingly immersive one at that. You will greatly enjoy yourselves. You scum.

BRUIT <_

The Machine Is Burning And Now Everyone Knows It Could Happen Again ELUSIVE SOUND

Intense French outfit serve up first-class post-rock.

On first listen, BRUIT <_’s album The Machine Is Burning And Now Everyone Knows It Could Happen Again may not come clearly into focus. It’s cinematic, ambitious art rock meets post-rock of the first degree, and it’s almost too big, too expansive, to take in on a single listen. Successive spins reveal that, for all its grandeur and bombast, not a single element is out of place. There’s careful attention to detail not only in the sound design – as is commonplace in post-rock – but also in the melodies and structures of the songs.

“Thematically, it’s rock solid; musically, it’s close to flawless.”

Opener Industry may toy with some of the tropes of crescendo-core, but the French band manage to avoid a simple linear progression, while still creating a sense of relentless, creeping build. This continues across the album, in a rising tide of tension that eventually finds release on the closer, The Machine Is Burning. BRUIT <_ also manage to wrong-foot the listener a couple of times with abrupt left turns with the folk guitars on Renaissance and the spoken word passage that closes Amazing Old Tree.

Pairing the destruction of the natural world with a strong environmentalist message isn’t an entirely new idea: it’s been done before in progressive music, most notably by fellow countrymen Gojira. However, BRUIT <_ are doing something a little different here. Their message, and indeed its delivery, are both more subtle and more blunt, depending on the moment. Although the spoken word passages starkly convey a warning about the near annihilation of wild spaces, the instrumentals do most of the talking. Even without the audio samples, the listener would still be able to understand the apocalyptic vision this album provides.

Thematically, it’s rock-solid; musically, it’s close to flawless. It’s a dense listen, but the band aren’t afraid to pare the textures completely back to something very sparse if that suits the song. For every explosive instrumental, there’s a break to avoid fatigue, with reflective sections driven by gentle synth arpeggios that are used to counterpoint the more full-on, guitar-driven material. That said, in their rush to make the biggest noise possible in those climactic sections, some things are missed. While it makes for a more intense atmosphere, nevertheless many of the instruments and layers blur together at the peaks of the album. At times, the drums get completely swamped in the mix, and the bass becomes overpowering. Then again, this could be an aesthetic choice, and it does seem to lend the theme of complete disintegration that develops on the record even more dynamic and visceral support.

ALEX LYNHAM

ACOLYTE

Entropy WILD THING RECORDS 

Emotional and effective conceptual outing for Australian power proggers.

While many concept albums deal with a defined narrative and others are linked by a set of themes, Melbourne-based Acolyte’s second full albumEntropy uses the stages of coming to terms with loss as its central thread, with each of its nine tracks representing another step along a path of recovery. The band touch upon all manner of styles and influences along the way while retaining a consistent authenticity and identity.

At one end of this stylistic spectrum are Solitude and Recovery which hint at Floyd at their most reflective, while at the other are the powerful prog metal statements of the brooding Resentment, the impressive sweep of the title track, and the classic rock-meets- Middle Eastern lilt of Idiosyncrasy. Vocalist Morgan-Leigh Brown is the focus throughout, her performances moving assuredly between theatricality, anguish and fragility. However, keyboard player David Van Pelt does much of the heavy instrumental lifting here with a masterful use of sounds.

Somewhat reminiscent of Riverside in its scope and diversity, Entropy is a potent and impressive collection of beautifully crafted tunes. 

GMM

CALIGONAUT

  Magnified As Giants APOLLON 

Scandinavian soloist delivers difficult subject matter and delightful classic sounds.

Singer/guitarist Ole Michael Bjørndal may be familiar from his work with Airbag and Oak, but Magnified As Giants is the debut outing for his Caligonaut project. With help from musician friends including members of Wobbler and Airbag, Bjørndal creates soundscapes redolent of the sounds and textures of classic 70s prog and folk rock.

This collection contains just four songs, with only the achingly delicious title track (which could pass as a Trespass-era Genesis outtake) dropping below the 10-minute mark and there’s still quite a lot of music to get to grips with. An airy melancholy pervades as Bjørndal taps into issues of loss, feelings of inadequacy and his grapples with inner demons. Even when things take a turn for the lively – such as around the halfway mark of 20-minute epic Lighter Than Air – there’s still a decidedly languid, unhurried lilt to proceedings.

Although seeped in the stuff that prog is made of, what this album misses in originality, it more than compensates with in terrific, uncompromising performances, transportive sounds and Bjørndal’s channelling of his raw vulnerabilities. 

GMM

CARL VERHEYEN

Sundial DEADTECH RECORDS 

Former Supertramp guitarist showcases his diversity.

Carl Verheyen’s back catalogue is scattered with a variety of styles, from blues to improvisational jazz, and the ex-Supertramp guitarist’s latest solo album will appeal to those with similarly wide-ranging tastes. Every track has an individual feel, from the pop rock pulse of the title track to the tribal beat ofKaningie, the funk undercurrent of Clawhammer Man and even the hint of reggae on People Got To Be Free.

It all has the joyous ring of someone celebrating his love of music, and no song offers more than Garfunkel (It Was All Too Real), which tells of the time the teenage Verheyen got to perform Bridge Over Troubled Water with Art Garfunkel. Aptly, the song radiates with the sort of folky colouring that Simon & Garfunkel themselves would appreciate.

Going in so many different musical directions could have resulted in an inconsistent record, but Verheyen avoids that trap. Sundial is the work of a man who knows exactly what he wants to achieve, which is to express himself as a fan of so many different types of genre. It ensures each song is very personal, adding a layer of believability to the expected virtuosity. 

MD

CICCADA

Harvest BAD ELEPHANT 

Lovingly recreated retro sounds from Greek proggers.

T here’s something ethereal about Ciccada. The Athens band’s third album beautifully melds a multitude of vintage influences, from Jethro Tull, Gryphon and Gentle Giant, to traditional Greek music.

The introduction of the latter could easily have resulted in a disjointed sound, yet the combination of Yorgos Mouchos’ guitar work and Nicolas Nikolopoulos’ flute and keyboards give this a balance and a sense of place. The twin vocals of Dimi Spela and Evangelia Kozoni – imagine Sonja Kristina and Annie Haslam in tandem – add both a sensual sophistication and an earthy dimension to the dreamscape instrumentation.

The six tracks here each have their own flavour. Enenia is a haunting introduction that eases into the genteel Open Wings, before The Old Man And The Butterfly parades around jazzier inflections. No Man’s Land has the pastoral qualities of early Curved Air, Who’s To Decide? serves up an arrangement that’s almost gothic in its charm, and Queen Of Wishes has a majesty and sedate pacing that’s a fine way for the album to reach its climax. The result is a record that may seem simplistic on the surface, but has sumptuous depth. 

MD

THE CORAL

Coral Island RUN ON 

Merseysiders’ tribute to a bygone seaside universe.

I t’s surprising that The Coral haven’t previously attempted a double LP, or indeed anything resembling a concept album. On this 10th outing, though, the Scousers have come up with an idea to thread their new songs together: the rise and fall of a seaside funfair isle – something that suits their talent for sepia-toned, faintly psychedelic folk-pop.

Interspersed with narration from “The Great Muriarty” (aka frontman James Skelly’s granddad Ian Murray), the evocation of the Island’s good times on part one (Welcome To Coral Island) is full of sunny-dappled harmony pop, while the rich harmonies and gentle acoustica of Mist On The River begs the question, “What if Crosby, Stills and Nash relocated to New Brighton?”

They strike just as resonant a chord when the mood darkens amid the faded glamour of the second part, The Ghost Of Coral Island. Faceless Angel resembles a Joe Meek tearjerker swathed in the echoes of fairground organ and Land Of The Lost is a beautiful harmonica-laced lament. It all makes for an intoxicating tale that will surely drive listeners to the nearest rundown boardwalk arcade as soon as legally permitted. 

JS

DECKCHAIR POETS

The Crop Circlers’ Guide To Abstract Expressionism SINGSONG MUSIC

 Jokey, bonkers playfulness from prog ‘supergroup’.

Anyone who’s heard Deckchair Poets’ previous two albums will know what to expect here – amusing unpredictability. Led by vocalist Lynden Williams, the Poets (who include members of Yes, Spock’s Beard and Big Big Train) revel in their barminess on every track.

It begins with Deckchair Poem, a pastiche of 60s rock, before Beam Me Up slips into Joe Meek territory. A cover of The Rutles’ Unfinished Words is chortlesome, as is their version of The Humblebums’ Joe Dempsey (written by Billy Connolly). Dictators Poor Image Projection is out of the Bonzo Dog playbook, while Sheepless In Seattle is an excuse for all manner of farmyard noises. Roobaron is an Australian jig, while Mr Future has Williams crooning and Shadows nicks from The Beatles and the Sex Pistols, and Bye Bye Fly is a strangely jaunty tale of the life and death of an insect.

Nothing is taken remotely seriously. This is about a bunch of high-class musicians having fun in a pub rock fashion: everyone involved clearly had a blast getting away from the usual serious stuff. Pointing Percy sums it all up –a 19-second commemoration of a certain bodily function. 

MD

JANE GETTER PREMONITION

Anomalia CHERRY RED/ESOTERIC ANTENNA 

Fusion guitar star puts her songwriting in the spotlight.

It’s been a six-year wait for new material from Jane Getter, following her last studio release, On, in 2015. With a career spanning jazz and progressive fusion, Anomalia finds the guitar hero showcasing her voice and songwriting alongside her always impressive playing. Getter shares vocals with Randy McStine and gospel singer Chanda Rule, who appeared on 2017’s On Tour live album.

“It shows Getter’s evolving strengths as a writer.”

Given the events of the intervening period, much of Anomalia feels like a riposte to the Trump years. Dissembler never names the recently removed occupant of the White House, but as Getter uses the lyrics to attack a narcissist for their greed and lies, it’s easy to imagine her intended target. Similarly, Alien Refugee is an appeal for kindness, centred around a woman displaced by conflict searching for a haven. It’s not a big leap to read the song as a rebuke of the antiimmigrant policies of the previous US administration and populist governments everywhere.

Getter isn’t a verbose or overly literal lyricist, approaching her subjects as a songwriter first, rather than delivering a sermon. This is certainly not an album of protest songs. Still Here is about facing challenges in life, Disappear speaks of loss and absent loved ones, while the excellent Answers is an ode to female empowerment. Rule’s voice on the latter is rich but restrained and services the song; she never indulges in the showboating that some gospel singers can be guilty of, leaping up to the limit of their register at every opportunity. 

Musically, the album has a sombre mood, touching on Porcupine Tree’s melancholic prog with a penchant for minor keys. The band includes Testament’s Alex Skolnick on guitar, drummers Chad Wackerman and Gene Lake, Mark Egan and Stu Hamm on bass, and Adam Holzman, who produces with Getter, on keys. Getter is a generous leader, giving everyone their moments to shine. The opening instrumental Kryptone sees Holzman and Getter vigorously trading fours in the first solo section, borrowing the motif from jazz, while guest guitarist Vernon Reid (of pioneering US funk rockers Living Colour) lets fly with an invigorated featured spot in Dissembler. McStine takes the lead vocal in that song, delivering a very angsty performance that seems to be his forte, both here with Getter and on his two recent collaborations with Marco Minnemann.

With the greater focus on songs with lyrics, Anomalia feels like a step away from the progressive fusion of On, but it shows Getter’s evolving strengths as a writer and there are still more than enough chops busted to keep her fretboard fans satisfied.

DAVID WEST

PETER HAMMILL

  In Translation FIE RECORDS 

A collection of cover songs made new and bold.

As tour dates fade further away into a still uncertain future, Peter Hammill, like other artists whose live work has been put on hold, has busied himself in the studio. Recorded between March and December 2020, In Translation is unusual for a PH record in that its material is written by other composers.

“This isn’t Hammill knocking out old faves like Bryan Ferry.”

Hammill took up these cover versions partly as a means of maintaining some artistic equilibrium in the face of the pandemic overwhelming the outside world. However, this isn’t simply the Van der Graaf Generator linchpin knocking out a few old faves like a latter-day Bryan Ferry. A fair portion of the material looks to the darker corners of Italian pop as well as other off-piste paths including Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, Faure, and even some lieder from Mahler. These Foolish Things this ain’t.

Even when tackling the Great American Songbook, Hammill eschews the neon for the noir. Though gently evoking Nelson Riddle’s wistful arrangement for Peggy Lee’s The Folks Who Live On The Hill, he injects something darker that curls the smooth edges of the lyric’s picture-perfect idyll. Just how dark he goes is immediately indicated by the spikier contours of Fabrizio de Andre’s Hotel Supramonte, containing the memorable line, ‘If you stay at Hotel Supramonte take a look at the sky, there’s a woman going up in flames and a man stands aside.’ On Piazzolla’s Oblivion and Ballad For My Death, jittery synths, glowering keyboards, brittle strings, and shards of hallucinatory guitar shimmer, articulating the melancholic ache seeping out of slow tango melodies that stalk off in unexpected directions.

Faure’s After A Dream stirs with driving piano and turbulent energy, while a lattice of topsy-turvy guitar and plaintive strings etch opaque shapes against his fervent vocals on Mahler’s Lost To The World. The very unfamiliarity of these choices effectively makes the experience not unlike listening to new or previously undiscovered selections from Hammill’s famously prolific output. Covers they may be but the sonic ground he maps out means this record couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else.

Ultimately, what could have been a disparate collection is held together by the unifying passion and intensity of a vivid artistic voice. Frank Sinatra, who built a career on interpreting and making anew the writing of others, once observed, “When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.” When Hammill gets close to the mic and sings, that kind of honesty and integrity comes through loud and clear, making the rest of us true believers too.

SID SMITH

ALEX HENRY FOSTER

Standing Under Bright Lights HOPEFUL TRAGEDY

Post-rock soundscaper’s extended stage show captured.

What a beautiful, long-lost sound: a crowd. When this 2019 live performance from Alex Henry Foster is introduced with roars and whoops, it’s a reminder of what the world is sorely missing right now. We join Foster in Montreal performing his debut album Windows In The Sky, a contemplative post-rock meditation inspired by the loss of his father.

Here, it’s expanded to nearly two hours in length, prologued by a slowbuilding new song. The Son Of Hannah offers prayers for those we’ve lost with Old Testament references, and the vibe only gets more apocalyptic from there.

A 19-minute reading of Shadows Of Our Evening Tides is shrouded in swells of guitar noise before Foster, his voice cracking with emotion, reaches the heart-wrenching conclusion: ‘Oh love, love, love, we must let go.’ Winter Is Coming is blessed by an insistent melodic hook, but once again it culminates in an intense melancholic climax. Summertime Departures verges on space rock territory, as if this were all a bad trip that he’s struggling to escape from. The listener, on the other hand, feels exhilarated, if a little exhausted, after being invited along for the ride.

  JS

LISA GERRARD & JULES MAXWELL

Burn ATLANTIC CURVE 

Dead Can Dance partners dream up diverse soundscapes.

Lisa Gerrard is best known to art-indie fans as the gifted singer of Dead Can Dance, the Australian 4AD duo who for years were overshadowed by Cocteau Twins but by 1993 were the label’s biggestselling act. After the late- 90s, Gerrard worked with Hans Zimmer on the Gladiator score, gaining an Oscar nomination, which probably put the influence of eulogies in the inkies into perspective.

Having since worked with Morricone and on Grammy-nominated new age music, she’s still with Dead Can Dance but takes a sidebar here with composer/ keyboardist Maxwell (who joined DCD in 2012) and producer James Chapman (aka Maps). It’s a gorgeous blend of calmly constructed, gently building soundbeds and astonishing improvised Gerrard vocals. In one sense it’s what listeners would expect – cinematic, with lapping waves of electronica and world music – and could be filed next to Enya or Vangelis. Yet what’s really impressive is how instantly affecting it is. This isn’t abstract, or preciously overthought. It’s beautiful, yes, but its seven tracks are also warmly, easily enjoyable, never overstaying their welcome. Precision-tooled splendour. 

CR

GOJIRA

Fortitude ROADRUNNER 

French metal pioneers play big prog hand.

Metal bands throwing in their lot with progressive music isn’t a new phenomenon – Opeth, Katatonia, Enslaved and more spring to mind – but when an act rightly hailed as one of heavy metal’s more extreme forerunners crosses the divide it does make you sit up and take notice. Signs have long hinted there’s more to French quartet Gojira than crushing brutality, and on Fortitude they throw caution to the wind, not just embracing a far proggier approach than before, but also aiming for the mainstream in a similar manner to Mastodon on Crack The Skye. Not only are the likes of Sphinx, Amazonia and Into The Storm festooned with twisting, tricky prog metal riffs, but the elegant Hold On sounds like a revved-up outtake from 90125. The Trials is mesmeric and haunting, while the epic two-parter Fortitude/The Chant reaches for and attains bold new heights for the band. Vocally they steer clear of the growls, so often a bugbear for the more nit-picking progger, and the entire sound is one that should attract the band a far bigger audience than they’ve achieved thus far. Fortitude isn’t just a very heavy album, nor Gojira’s proggiest yet. It’s easily the best album they’ve made to date. 

JE

HAIL THE SUN

  New Age Filth RUDE/EQUAL VISION 

US  post-hardcore band dip their toes into prog waters.

Hail The Sun are now five albums in, and the spunky mix of posthardcore and math rock on New Age Filth is a fresh tonic for the weary among us. They may cite Yes as an influence, but this is music most definitely rooted in the 21st century, with the sweet-then-shouty vocals of drummer Donovan Melero – who also plays with outward-thinking collective Sianvar – oozing modern flair.

A classic case of a band not quite prog by name but progressive by nature, Hail The Sun’s sucker punch is their knack for going off-track where some of their contemporaries might keep it simple, sharing DNA with the likes of Coheed And Cambria and Protest The Hero. Highlight Slander is a fine slab of perky altmetal with unexpected musical sideswipes, and Misfire lobs in some welcome nods to the slithering rhythms of The Mars Volta – don’t expect any of the latter’s spacey, 10-minute blow-outs here though. New Age Filth can sometimes feel a tad secondhand, but those who salivate at the thought of catchy, forward-thinking modern rock will lap it up, while the tasty dynamics and deep production should tickle the interest of the uninitiated too. 

CC

HOOVERIII

Water For The Frogs THE REVERBERATION APPRECIATION SOCIETY

LA troupe’s hip and inventive hodgepodge of vintage styles.

Compared to their 2018 self-titled debut, Water For The Frogs scales back Hooveriii’s avant-garde psychedelic madness in favour of a simplified and digestible post-punk/prog rock experience. This is especially clear on Hang ’Em High and Erasure, both of which conjure Iggy Pop and Television via raucous guitar work, straightforward percussion and appealingly messy singing. Cindy has a stronger melodic focus that makes it feel like an early Todd Rundgren gem.

That’s not to say that there aren’t greater flights of fancy or moments of vibrant dreaminess elsewhere, as Control and Gone pack plenty of artsy arrangements (complete with cosmic sound effects and disorderly horns). The krautrock fun of instrumental We’re Both Lawyers demonstrates Hooveriii’s playfulness while providing an appreciated change of pace, too.

Water For The Frogs isn’t perfect: it could be more diverse and challenging, it lacks the adventurous intricacy of its predecessor, plus the subdued Shooting Star is simply boring. Yet it pleases more often than not, and shows promise for where Hooveriii could go next. 

JMB

THE INVISIBLE OPERA COMPANY OF TIBET 

The Bardo Of Becoming DAKINI

Gong spin-off pulls off Buddhist concept work.

The Invisible Opera Company Of Tibet was conceived by Gong founder Daevid Allen in the 70s when, feeling a higher intelligence guiding the band, he started a global network of likeminded artists. After forming the first line-up in Australia in 1986, Allen gave his blessing to TIOCOTs in Brazil, America and this UK branch formed by Glissando Orchestra guitarist Brian Abbott in 1992.

Reading Kalu Rimpoche’s Buddhist tome, Luminous Mind, inspired Abbott to demo this album in 2012, only to leave it marinating for several years until recording with his wife, singerpoet Jackie Juno, and keyboardist Julian Veasey, bassist Philip Whitehouse, drummer Tracey Austin and flautist Vivien Goodwin-Darke. Kicking off with Dissolution’s hushed drone and Song Of The Bardo’s acoustic English folk, the concept is evocatively explored through space rock (World Of The Living), eerie ambience (The Little Deaths), peaking with the two-part Abysses (one flute-garnished flotation, the second organ-swirling prog). The Approaching’s chant of ‘It is time to go’ closes one of the most satisfying Gongrelated sets in years. Daevid Allen would be proud. 

KN

KAYAK 

Out Of This World INSIDEOUT 

Another stellar instalment from Holland’s premier pomp proggers.

For many, a strong memory from the mid-70s is that of listening to the title track of Kayak’s third album Royal Bed Bouncer on transistors late at night on the newly refloated Radio  Caroline, and especially its Dutch counterpart, Mi Amigo. The song’s strange, off-kilter tale was simply intriguing. Keyboard player and co-founder Ton Scherpenzeel is still part of the band who made that record (his partner in Kayak, Pim Koopman, died in 2009); and although the personnel has shifted greatly across their 20 or so albums, Kayak’s production values and quality of intriguing writing and playing remains exactly the same, if today it is somewhat less off-kilter.

“Strident pomp rock packed with melodic flourishes.”

With the Kayak class of 2017 – Bart Schwertmann on vocals, guitarist Marcel Singor, bassist Kristoffer Gildenlöw and Hans Eijkenaar on drums supporting Scherpenzeel –

Out Of This World picks up where 2018’s Seventeen left off with its strident pomp rock, packed with melodic flourishes. Although Schwertmann is the lead vocalist, there are also leads from Singor, Gildenlöw and Scherpenzeel, giving very much the feel of 10cc and Supertramp, two bands to which Kayak were frequently compared.

Out Of This World is a stylistically mixed bag. The nineand-a-half-minute A Writer’s Tale is cut from the same cloth as 1981’s Merlin suite; while Cary has a simple shanty-esque pop quality to it and Mystery feels destined to be on driving rock playlists. It’s all quite theatrical at times – there’s much drama in the vocals and arrangement. One could imagine Stephen Toast having a go at Critical Mass while Red Rag To A Bull is unafraid to flaunt its blustering might.

Of the shorter, rockier tracks, the bluesy Distance To Your Heart is an extraordinary concoction of strings and pounding piano with a howling, multitracked guitar solo rearing up in its middle. The anthemic One By One, an emotive rumination on death and mourning, sounds not only positively festive, but also could have come from the pen of Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.

The keyboards of Ton Scherpenzeel – who suffered a heart attack at the end of 2019 – rightly dominate the album, playing Tony Banks-esque synthesiser embellishments one moment, warm Hammond block chords the next, and then the expressive piano that he brought to Camel in the mid- 80s. Anyone yearning for 10cc or Supertramp still being together and making music that successfully approximated the peak of their career should listen to Kayak instead – Out Of This World is a well-made, well-played and thoroughly enjoyable record.

DARYL EASLEA

JORDSJØ

Pastoralia KARISMA 

Nordic prog psych with a brilliant mind of its own.

N orway’s best kept prog secret for a while now, Jordsjø share many of their Scandinavian peers’ love for the warm, analogue rush of the early-70s, but as with each of their previous four records, Pastoralia exists in an idiosyncratic mini-universe of its own.

Fans of the overzealous use of Mellotron and wonky, jazz-inflected Canterbury melodies will feel immediately at home within the hazy but eventful ambling of Skumring I Karesuando. But Jordsjø are an inventive bunch and the familiar is nearly always interrupted by something deliciously odd and unexpected, whether that be detours like acoustic instrumental Fuglehviskeren, or moments of bullish, protometal riffing. The prevailing atmosphere is one of slightly stoned tranquillity: breezily psychedelic but structurally symphonic songs such as Mellom Mjodurt, Marisko Og Sostermarihånd are much easier to fall in love with than they are to pronounce.

Pastoralia is almost comically overstuffed with bright ideas and wonky hooks. It may be knowingly retro by design, but this album’s creators exist squarely in a fusty, corduroy-clad world of their own. 

DL

KITTEN PYRAMID

Koozy!! FLIP FLOP 

Derbyshire prog-pop eccentrics’ enjoyably off-kilter return.

Unlike some musicians featured in these pages, Scott Milligan can’t play 16 instruments while conducting a choir. But Kitten Pyramid’s chief songwriter makes up for his technical limitations with a surfeit of ideas and a singular world view that makes his band a unique proposition.

On this follow-up to 2013’s equally bipolar Uh-Oh!, the shimmying harmony pop of the title track is punctuated by daffy bass sax as Milligan gently relates a tale of bees escaping a Jacuzzi. Leggy Friend is more direct, as a gentle acoustic thrum asks the listener to ‘Take my hand and jump off a cliff with me.’ While we’re not yet quite that invested, by the end of the song we’ve come round to the notion that this is a band that wanders where they will, as it ends in swaying, choir-enhanced symphonics. The wobbly folk of Seven Day Duvet is juxtaposed with the dreamy anti-hymn to everyday monotony of Doughnuts, before we’re hit with Aunty Mabel’s anarchic glam-punk bluster.

Such handbrake turns make as much sense as the album title, but a surfeit of nagging hooks, arresting musical quirks and WTF lyrics ensures Koozy!! is an album that keeps demanding the attention. 

JS

LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO 

Trivial Visions SVART 

Cinematic sci-fi cloaks multihued invasion courtesy of Hawkwind-esque Italians.

Named after Italy’s first sci-fi film, 1958’s Death Comes From Outer Space, Milanese quintet La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio’s frequently stunning followup to 2018’s Sky Over Giza presents eight densely wrought yet widescreen mini-movies as likely t change gear into guitarist-producer Stefano Basurto’s black metal riffs as billow into singer-keyboardist Melissa Crema’s whirring theremin attack.

The diverse flavours teeming deftly within the towering walls of sound add to their heady evocative onslaughts, from the motoring krautrock of Cursed Invader to the title track’s avant-garde metal clamour. Their love of horror and sci-fi manifests in Crema’s sparsely deployed vocals, but mostly through her interstellar electronic arsenal, ranging from twinkling musique concrète over Spectrometer’s doom chords to Oracollo Della Morte’s cacophonous Middle Eastern-tinged procession.

The theremin remains unequalled as music’s most alien-sounding instrument but few have handled it like Crema, whether that’s the electronic meteor shower that introduces the ominous Lost Horizon or splattering Altered States’s monolithic doom slabs. Otherworldly, in every sense. 

KN

 PSYCHEDELIC PROG

Take a trip with Rob Hughes as he seeks out the latest mind-expanding music.

Ripley Johnson’s response to lockdown has been to focus on the micro and get back to nature. Earth Trip (Thrill Jockey), the US singer-guitarist’s third outing as Rose City Band, is a celebration of the stillness and wonder of the natural environment, with Johnson offering spacious, gliding meditations with a psych-country feel. More horizontal than his other work with Wooden Shjips or Moon Duo, it’s blissfully unhurried stuff, nudged along by drummer John Jeffrey and featuring telling contributions by pedal steel player Barry Walker.

Australian combo Babe Rainbow mine a similarly mellifluous vibe on fourth effort Changing Colours (AWAL). As befits a bunch of surf dudes who split the recording sessions between Byron Bay and Topanga Canyon, the songs are blissed-up odes to coastal languor, from the Simon & Garfunkel-ish California to the chilled Your Imagination, which sounds like a descendant of something by The Millennium or Sagittarius.

California is also home to the impressively named Grave Flowers Bongo Band. Their take on psychedelia, as showcased on terrific second album Strength Of Spring (on Osees captain John Dwyer’s Castle Face label), is altogether more rowdy. Produced by the prolific Ty Segall, it’s a feast of busy garage psych, rammed with lightning riffs and distorted guitars. Bleats of brass shunt Sleepy Eyes into Stooges territory; VATMM is screeching space rock; Inner Bongolia is a schizoid mix of eastern trippiness and metal grooves. The slashing sub-glam of Tomorrow, meanwhile, is cast in Segall’s own image.

Rivalling them for intensity, Mythic Sunship are a quintet from Copenhagen who specialise in punishing jams of a cosmic slant. Sixth effort Wildfire (their first for Tee Pee) exists at the confluence of heavy psychedelia and honking free jazz. Their self-styled “anaconda rock” is at its exhilarating best on the riffy squawk of Maelstrom and the surging Olympia, both of which exceed the 10-minute mark without ever letting up. The fuzzy funk of Landfall is heroic too, as is Going Up, whose flashing arpeggios mask a monolithic drone.

Gothenburg four-piece Acid’s Trip take no prisoners on debut Strings Of Soul (Heavy Psych Sounds). More straight-up rock’n’roll than they are trippy, the band are led with some panache by female singerguitarist Acid, who burns through Faster, Chopper, Boogie and, together with fellow shredder Mike (first names only here), gets resolutely old-school on the self-explanatory The Kiss Riff.

And look out for Solace (People.Parties.Places.), a four-track EP from Texan trio Cactus Flowers. When they lock into a fierce groove, as evinced on the heaving Swimming Through The Sea Of Mercury, they’re truly something to behold.

MOTORPSYCHO

Kingdom Of Oblivion RUNE GRAMMOFON

Rampaging rifferama from prolific Norwegian shapeshifters.

On the opening bars of The Waning (Pt.1 & 2) the chugging riffs and dual lead guitars winding around Motorpsycho’s trademark harmony vocals sound like a cross between Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple. And even though there are some oddly timed chord changes thrown in to wrong-foot the listener, this song signals the fact that Kingdom Of Oblivion finds Motorpsycho at their rockiest, and that’s very rocky indeed. But typical of the group it’s a lengthy collection and the whole story reveals itself to be even more complex than that.

"It finds them at their rockiest, and that’s very rocky indeed."

It comes as no surprise to find out that the album is largely constructed from riff ideas that didn’t quite fit the more psychedelic moods of last year’s The All Is One, but have now found a home. Motorpsycho have always been adept at relentless motorik riffing, but on the title track they err more towards heavy rock swagger with chord sequences like sheets of steel riveted together, decorated with keyboard countermelodies, which leads into a flamboyant wah-wah guitar section and then more guitars join in for extra weight. The United Debased sounds like they might have recently dusted off their vintage Black Sabbath albums, with guitarist Snah incorporating a number of Iommi-esque filigrees into his guitar solo.

But it’s not all boot-on-the monitor material. On many of the compositions, melodic themes get recast in different metres and the band can get sidetracked down unexpected avenues. And, as Kingdom Of Oblivion progresses, contrast is provided by songs such as Lady May, a concise acoustic piece with busy bass that wouldn’t be completely out of place on the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. The Hunt is a folky curiosity, with tuned percussion and Mellotron flute, which contributes to a kind of Led Zeppelin III vibe, and the short solo guitar instrumental After The Fair provides listeners with another pastoral interlude.

Motorpsycho pull out all the stops on the 11-minute The Transmutation Of Cosmoctopus Lurker, a mini-epic with a title that alludes to HP Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror. An ominous intro leads into a riff fest with synth warning sirens and guitar figures so gnarly it feels like they could have been played by the elder god Cthulhu itself. It’s a breathtaking ride with the rhythm section of bass player Bent Sæther and drummer Tomas Järmyr on formidable form. But just when it feels like the song is about to peak in spectacular fashion, it winds down to contemplative wah-wah figures and into virtual silence, before a hushed guitar and bass instrumental Cormorant brings the album to an enigmatic conclusion.

MIKE BARNES

LEWIS

Inside KLONOSPHERE

French maverick’s beguiling debut.

It’s always tempting for talented multiinstrumentalists who enjoy dabbling in different sounds and styles to include them all on the same record. Marseille-based dilettante Lewis Feraud seems to succumb to that temptation on his solo album, but thankfully, he’s keen to create a vivid, heady atmosphere whatever genre he’s dipping into.

Entrance stumbles elegantly in with drowsy horns and dizzy woodwind, as if by way of a warning that straights need not apply, before teleporting the listener from Canterbury to Cambridge as Time, Money And Fear Part 1 creates a Floydian vista laced with sweetly psychedelic organ. On Fox a jazzy organ sashays around before being enveloped in a fuzzcaked stomp. Contrast that with Again, an acoustic lament whose simple charms are suddenly joined by haunting avantsymphonics as it develops, like ghosts of a bad trip looming in the distance.

Then at various points the mood swings in other directions, as when the howling angst rock of CryA Man breaks down into Tangerine Dreamscapes of bubbling electronica. Either way, though, listener advice is clear: respect the unexpected.

JS

MAGNET ANIMALS

Fake Dudes RARENOISE

Left-field psychedelia from American quartet.

One thing Magnet Animals showed on their 2016 debut Butterfly Killer was a penchant for embracing surprising detours in their musical journey. The same is also true of their second album: Fake Dudes keeps the listener constantly on edge.

A psychedelic heart beats at the core of their sound that brings to mind the 13th Floor Elevators and Red Crayola, yet they have a style all their own. Nothing proves this more than the atonal atmosphere of Man And Machine. Mainman Todd Clouser narrates rather than sings, using a megaphone-style effect as he gets the listener to think about the fractious relationship between humanity and technology. Behind him, the music gasps and burps on the edge of losing total control. It’s unnerving yet also so enticing.

It’s an approach that’s repeated throughout, with Clouser’s vocals intoned using the same echoing effect throughout as the instrumentation satisfyingly strays off a straight path. It’s as if the whole album was born from a jam session, thereby giving it the feel of something that can never be repeated. The result is psychedelia that’s not overthought, but offers expressive intuition.

MD

MONO

Beyond The Past – Live In London PELAGIC

Japanese post-rockers 20th anniversary show, with added orchestra.

MONO’s signature style is based on heavily FX’d guitars, producing sheets of sound with a steadily unravelling grandeur that’s invited comparisons with Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, while the band would like to add Beethoven and Górecki to that list.

Beyond The Past, recorded live at the Barbican to mark the Japanese band’s 20th anniversary, shows how vast MONO’s dynamic range is, from the delicate mesh of spacey, echoed guitars and voice on Breathe to surges of enormous power. Across its two hours, the drolly-named Platinum Anniversary Orchestra – in fact a 10-piece string section – don’t strive for classical complexity as such, but their long flowing lines bolster MONO’s dual guitars, creating some astonishing textures.

The 17-minute Ashes In The Snow is the grand finale of sorts, but the encores go beyond, with AA Williams adding vocals to the spartan Exit In Darkness before she and cellist Jo Quail join in on Com(?). Over 19 minutes, it goes from meditative keyboard arpeggios to a climax on which the entire ensemble sound like they’re lifting off into the night.

MB

NEEDLEPOINT

Walking Up That Valley BJK MUSIC

Calm and colourful throwbacks from Norwegian prog/jazz quartet.

Formed a decade ago by guitarist/vocalist Bjørn Klakegg, Needlepoint put a modern spin on the soothing sounds of the 1970s Canterbury scene Walking Up That Valley is their greatest realisation of that goal, following up 2015’s Aimless Mary and 2018’s The Diary of Robert Reverie as an even more tranquil and fluidly flowing collection.

Right away, Rules Of A Mad Man and Where The Ocean Meets The Sky evoke the silky momentum and catchiness of Caravan, whereas the sparser I Offered You The Moon leans more toward the reserved romanticism of early Camel. At the other end of the album, the closing title track is a culmination of all that’s come before, faultlessly fusing its acoustic ballad beginning with a bustling and exploratory instrumental jam during its second half.

It’s all lovingly peaceful yet decorative and sophisticated, with Klakegg’s wispy singing recalling the charming elegance of Al Stewart, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake throughout. His presence is one of many sublime things that make Walking Up That Valley a gorgeously nostalgic trip worthy of its predecessors and the celebrated artists who inspired it.

JMB

CLIVE NOLAN

Song Of The Wildlands CRIME RECORDS

Veteran keyboard warrior revisits the Beowulf myth in rock opera form.

Seasoned prog fans will be accustomed to albums that weave a pretty woolly narrative thread through the course of an LP. There’s no such ambiguity here from Clive Nolan. The Arena and Pendragon man’s lyrics for this operatic account of famous medieval poem Beowulf are accessible enough to form a Wikipedia synopsis of the story.

The relation of the yarn is helped considerably by an enjoyably theeeatrrrical narrrration from Ross Andrews – imagine a slightly less deafening Brian Blessed. But Nolan, with several operas now under his belt, also knows that to get the listener truly gripped, the music needs to do the heavy lifting.

He takes to that task with relish: The Story Begins is a compelling central theme full of sweeping synth-led drama, while volleys of stringsoaked folk rock meet explosions of symphonic metal on Celebration. Magenta’s Christina Booth lends a captivating vocal to the thunderous The Hag’s Revenge and Funeral Pyre, the latter offset by Gregorian chants and swirling strings. Timelessly compelling stuff, then, just like its source material. And no need for a Masters degree in Old English to enjoy it.

JS

THE REASONING

Battles Fought & Conquests Won THEREASONING.BANDCAMP.COM

Posthumous live reminder of Brit prog heroes’ 2009 gig.

The Reasoning’s Battles Fought… is truly live: unearthed by bassist Matt Cohen during lockdown, it remains untouched by studio wizardy. As such, there are occasional moments when things are slightly off kilter, but that never detracts from what’s an enjoyable experience.

Recorded in 2009 when the nowdefunct band appeared at the Marillion Weekend in Port Zélande in the Netherlands, it finds The Reasoning in top form. At the time, the band had only released two albums, and the setlist of six songs bounces between them. Awakening starts it all off in splendid fashion, with Aching Hunger and Breaking The 4th Wall capturing the band at their best and singer Rachel Cohen in excellent voice. The final track, A Musing Dream, gives Owain Roberts the opportunity to let rip and display his guitar skills, prompting an ovation at its conclusion.

Battles Fought & Conquests Won should be viewed as an official bootleg from a fondly remembered band rather than a top of the range live album.

However sometimes the warts ’n’ all reality of a gig recording is exactly what’s needed if only because it retains the atmosphere of the performance.

MD

ART ROCK

Chris Roberts samples the new releases on the prog/rock boundary.

It’s actually 41 years since the inception of 4AD Records, but we live in an era where time is elastic, so their 40th anniversary is celebrated in 2021. Current acts on the label cover songs from its illustrious past on Bills & Aches & Blues (4AD). That title’s from a Cocteau Twins lyric, but nobody among today’s youth is stupid enough to attempt a Cocteaus cover. SOHN, however, pulls off a serene Song To The Siren while Future Islands bathe in Colourbox’s The Moon Is Blue. Jenny Hval inhabits Lush, Bing & Ruth’s neo-classical take on Gigantic is unrecognisable, and three artists (Big Thief, Tune-Yards, Bradford Cox) choose The Breeders. It’s telling how female-led the 18-track collection is, but then 4AD wasn’t exactly a patriarchy back in the day either.

4AD also release their most thrilling debut in ages. Dry Cleaning are a south London four-piece whose New Long Leg, produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey) is both heroically depressing and deadpan funny. Florence Shaw delivers scattergun spoken word phrases over touch-tight post-punk, and there’s a telepathy to their timing. ‘Do everything, feel nothing’, she sighs, taking tangents into oven chips, insults, ‘an exhausting walk in the horrible countryside’, Antiques Roadshow and Sainsbury’s. Eeyore-esque poetry is the new rock’n’roll, again.

Two other south London spawned outfits also address the state of the nation, in contrasting ways. Band Of Holy Joy probably count as veterans now, but their 20-somethingth (counting cassette-only curveballs) album Dreams Take Flight (Tiny Global) sees their urban prog folk re-energised by pandemic paranoia. Heatedly political, intensely personal, it’s an expansive set of epic songs, Johny Brown’s voice cynical on This Is The Festival Sce ne but emotional on the Arcade Fire-like Rhythm Of Life. Meanwhile, Phobophobes have survived their guitarist’s death and touring with Killing Joke to create Modern Medicine (Modern Sky). Darkly focused and Cave/ Velvets-influenced, it’s as brightly inventive as it is broody.

Long labelled a “singer-songwriter”, Novello-winner Scott Matthews shakes things up on New Skin (Shedio), replacing his old ceremony of angsty acoustics with an electronic wash. It opens fresh terrain for his torchy voice, bearing flashes of Jeff Buckley. Also blurring lines between song and sound is Dutch singer/producer Tessa Douwstra, under the name Luwten. Draft (Glassnote) is an original fusion of nu-soul (Erykah Badu) vocalising and minimalist Steve Reich-style arrangements. Curiously affecting. Liverpool’s Andrew Hunt goes by Dialect, and on Under~Between (RVNG) he laces together skittering field recordings, like a restless art installation. One for the heads.

VOLA

Witness MASCOT

Scandi art rockers deliver heavy music for heavy times.

An abstract image dominates the cover of VOLA’s third album, Witness. An inky black circle sits dead centre, a vast empty hole of ominous nothingness ringed by spidery grey lines radiating outwards like spokes or tendrils. It could be an image of a distant star or a close-up of a flower, rendered in negative. Given the album’s title and its overarching theme of watchfulness on both a societal and a human level, it’s most likely a dilated pupil, vigilant and unblinking: who’ll look away first?

"Witness is an album that’s easy to admire but harder to love."

The blackness at the heart of the image mirrors the music on Witness. While the Danish-Swedish four-piece have always skewed towards the heavier end of the modern prog spectrum, many of the nine tracks here are deliberately dense and challenging. Guitars grind and jar like sheets of steel rubbing up against one another, and everything is underpinned by the ring of a gleaming metallic bass. The moments of brightness and melodicism that have always underpinned frontman Asger Mygind’s songwriting are still present, but they’re scattered further apart this time around. Everything seems deeper, darker, more oppressive – as black as that circle on the cover.

Opening track Straight Lines lays down the challenge straight off. It begins with a brief, escalating whirr of dentist-drill noise before a riff that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Meshuggah album kicks in. The chorus, when it eventually arrives, is epic: towering banks of synth and Mygind’s swooping vocals take over, a sound made all the more welcome by what frames it. Similarly, Stone Leader Falling Down –a songtitle that seems thankfully out of date in this cautiously optimistic post-Trump era – is jagged and knotty, offering even less of a way in.

In this context, when the moments of respite do come, they’re all the sweeter. The skittering fractal pulse of 24 Light- Years provides a nice change of gear, though the clouds only truly part on Freaks, a song that billows upwards on a bed of deft electronics and the album’s most evocative guitar solo. The flipside is These Black Claws, a turgid art metal/hip hop mash-up featuring a guest spot from US rapper Bless that’s salvaged only by another blockbusting Mygind chorus.

VOLA’s great strength has always been their ability to combine multiple ideas in one song. That hasn’t abated, but the sonic shifts between the individual songs here aren’t as pronounced as they have been in the past – the ECG readout across its nine tracks is flatter, less varied, a plateau of heavy sonic claustrophobia. It all makes for an album that’s easy to admire but harder to love.

DAVE EVERLEY

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF

The Soord Sessions Volumes 1-4 KSCOPE

Bruce Soord locked down, unplugged and collated.

If nothing else, these blighted times have forced musicians to get creative. In a Covid-free world, 2020 would’ve seen Bruce Soord lead The Pineapple Thief out on tour in support of their most recent album, Versions Of The Truth. Instead, he found himself in his attic studio livestreaming a series of acoustic shows to the band’s army of fans.

Initially intended as a one-off, such was the demand that he ended up recording four of these intimate events, captured here in a four-disc, 36-track hardback book edition. With an array of looping pedals in front of him the affable Soord plays through highlights such as Magnolia, Alone At Sea, No Man’s Land and Demons, and inadvertently curates a highly engrossing retrospective of the band’s back catalogue.

Much of TPT’s sound comes down to his angst and lone wolf perspective, so as he hunkers down over his trusty Taylor what you’re getting is the essence of the band. He comes over as a proggy Neil Young: there’s a subtle power to his unforced, unvarnished voice; a ragged glory to the moody The One You Left To Die and bravely sustained 14-minuter, The Final Thing On My Mind.

GRM

RURAL TAPES

Rural Tapes SMUGGLER RECORDINGS

Skilful evocation of spy film soundtracks and krautrock’s primitive futurism.

Rural Tapes is the solo project of Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, who according to his biog “has been a vital part of the Norwegian indie scene for 15 years. He’s also a member of “bi-continental jangle band” The No Ones with REM’s Peter Buck, but he makes a living composing music for dance and film, and it’s this work that clearly informs this album, a mostly instrumental collection of krautrock and soundtrack influenced songs.

While there’s a lot of music produced under that banner these days, this is an excellent debut album. The primitive drum machine and organ of opening track Reddal recalls Cluster and Roedelius, but analogue synth splutters add an anarchic element, and it builds to a big drums and horns climax. The Observer enters classic John Barry territory, all Bond guitar, theremin and accordion, while the seductive bass and electric piano of Pardon My French is an Air-esque groover, sleazy sax and swelling backing vox jostling for attention. Rural Tapes channels the naïve electronic simplicity of Harmonia, before the big strings of By Dusk signal the end credits. A must for fans of Ghost Box and Clay Pipe’s futurist nostalgia.

JB

NAD SYLVAN

Spiritus Mundi INSIDEOUT

Gentle, poetic magic from Hackett’s henchman.

While charming prog hearts everywhere as chief vocal foil to Steve Hackett and his ongoing Genesis-related exploits, Nad Sylvan has been building a sturdy catalogue of his own solo work Spiritus Mundi is the great eccentric’s seventh fulllength, and it’s easily his most accessible and cohesive.

Based on the poetry of WB Yeats, Spiritus Mundi is rooted in the same wistful but imaginative symphonic prog that his intermittently Gabriel-like voice demands. Many of the bells and whistles that made previous albums so enjoyable have been stripped back, creating a sparse and elegant backdrop for Sylvan’s vocals. He’s in great voice throughout; a versatile but often intimate presence in the sonic foreground, an irresistible eye twinkle practically audible at points.

There’s a hint of psychedelic folk in the meandering Caps And Bells, a frisson of Peter Hammilllike melodrama in the slender reverie of The Realists and, most notably during gorgeous closer The Fisherman, a strong sense that Sylvan is a man out of time, beamed here from prog’s past to make the present a vastly more pleasant and melodic place to be.

DL

RYLEY WALKER 

Course In Fable HUSKY PANTS RECORDS 

Art rock, surrealism and melodic riches from maverick US singer-songwriter.

Ryley Walker is on magnificently surreal and sardonic form on his sixth album. Course InFable brims with laidback grooves and sunny moods married to lyrics that span from the acerbic to the silly. He sings about ‘Mary, mother of crack rocks,’ and delivers lines like: ‘Fuck me and my life’ with a world-weary grin.

Walker’s acoustic guitar playing is nimble and musical, bringing out shades of folk rock. Drummer Ryan Jewell brings a jazz player’s lightness of touch, joining bassist and pianist Andrew Scott Young to lay down the beats that provide the gently rolling landscape across which Walker spins his trippy yarns. Frequent collaborator Bill MacKay handles the production, balancing the album’s art rock proclivities with an almost tangible warmth of sound. Pond Scum Ocean begins as an off-kilter, Eno-esque soundscape, but Walker’s instincts assert themselves as the song morphs into a new shape when the melody simmers up to the surface. Rang Dizzy is a highlight, with Nancy Ives’ cello adding harmonies to Walker’s beautiful finger-style guitar picking.

Course In Fable is by turns whimsical, lush and arch, a singular delight. 

DW

LYLE WORKMAN 

Uncommon Measures BLUE CANOE RECORDS 

Panoramic instrumental fusions with lashings of orchestral loveliness.

With a diverse CV embracing extensive soundtrack composition, music production, a 20-yearlong collaboration with Frank Black, and as session and live band guitarist for the likes of Jellyfish, Sting, Todd Rundgren and many others, it’s no surprise that this collection of instrumentals from Lyle Workman is a varied and remarkable outing.

Combining jazz-fusion sensibilities with a distinctly cinematic flair, and throwing in some top players (Vinnie Colaiuta absolutely kills with his drum soloing in opening track, North Star) would undoubtedly have led to an excellent selection of material regardless, but Workman ups the ante considerably with the addition of an entire orchestra recorded at Abbey Road, and he certainly uses it. The range of moods and textures is impressive, running the gamut of stately balladeering, dinner jazz with a twist and embellished funk.

While the vaguest hints of the likes of Zappa and John McLaughlin emerge, Workman’s own vision here is undeniable with the album showcasing his enviable compositional and arrangement skills. He’s no slouch with a guitar either, it turns out. 

GMM

YOO DOO RIGHT

  Don’t Think You Can Escape Your Purpose MOTHLAND 

Lively and innovative post-rock trio kick the genre into top gear.

A sa post-rocking (mainly) instrumental trio from Canada, it’d be easy to assume Yoo Doo Right are another in their homeland’s long line of Godspeed You! Black Emperor-indebted bands. Instead, their name suggests an appreciation of the mantric, freak-out side of early Can.

The truth of the matter is somewhere in between, with a love of apocalyptic soundscapes allied to a propulsive rhythmic undercarriage pulling them free of the often ponderous gravity of modern post-rock. What’s impressive here is how they don’t allow themselves to be pinned down to just one style.

1N914 blasts off with a hyper intense beat and dimension-rending chunk of space noise, then eases back into a super-saturated DSOTM Floyd-cum-shoegaze jam. In contrast, Marché Des Vivants is trippy futuristic Afrobeat. The Moral Compass Of A Self-Driving Car recalls the progressive tendency in post-hardcore bands such as Unwound before morphing into ecstatic motorik. And the title track features a few words intoned against a disquieting shimmer of synth, all slowly overpowered by a storm cloud of guitar – which is quite reminiscent of GY!BE, as is the chord sequence. 

JB

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST

Grant Moon has a rummage down the back of the Progsofa for the ones that nearly got away…

Fans of ravishing violins might have already heard Icons (orcd.co/icons), the latest EP from Anna Phoebe. Aided by cellist Klara Schumann, the prog-friendly fiddler’s atmospheric strings add a contemporary classical dimension to tunes from six of her heroes including Tracy Chapman, Neneh Cherry, Nick Cave and Faithless. This is gorgeous, classy stuff, with her takes on Roxy Music’s Avalon and Bowie’s Blackstar particularly striking.

In 2018 we enthused about Re:Psychle, the second album from Chicagoans Tautologic, and just three years later they’re back with another brainy set of pop-prog tunes. Packed with sax, violins and proggy synths, Wheels Fall Off (Turtle Down) shows off leader Ethan Sellers’ sunny-yet-smart slant on music, with The Beatles, Madness, They Might Be Giants and Gentle Giant all evoked in his seasoned sextet’s intelligent and uplifting mix.

Newly formed English four-piece A Fool’s Mockery blend prog and old-school metal on their patchy but nobly ambitious debut album Empire Of Doubt (afoolsmockery.bandcamp.com). Vocalist Emannuel Thorsen may be pitchy in parts but there’s no doubting his commitment, and there a seed of something special in the group’s sprawling, story-focused rock. We’ll keep an ear out for these guys.

Slightly further down the road with things, Russian one-man band Egor Lappo offers a big swathe of brainy heavy prog with Trancevoicer

(egorlappo.bandcamp.com), a “space prog metal concept album about two warring worlds”. The multiinstrumentalist cites Devin Townsend and Lonely Robot among his influences, and these are justified; there’s a dash of Arjen Lucassen and – on Contention – even some Mark Hollis too. This is a highly melodic, thoughtful and involving story record that’s freighted with hooks, and never forgets its audience.

Coming from Mustafa Khetty & Morpheus Project, Mozaick (mustafakhetty.com) is a rich, prog-minded album with a global sound palette straddling the East, Asia and South America. Sri Lankan-born composer Khetty is a big Yes fan, and he balances the Western and non-Western elements with aplomb, but the extremely emotive rock opera vocals – thankfully only occasional – stick out like dayglo paint on this otherwise artisan mosaic.

And finally, Most Pleasant Surprise Of The Month comes from Southampton quintet Sketchshow, whose debut album Waves (sketchshow.bandcamp.com) heralds the arrival of a really promising band. In their hands math rock’s usual smart-arsed, noodly guitars and reverb-heavy textures couch some unusually sweet and catchy tunes. The cherry on top is the pure/gutsy vocal work of Satin Bailey, who finds a fresh and compelling intersection between Björk, District 97’s Leslie Hunt and The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler. Very nice.

JON ANDERSON

Animation ESOTERIC

Anderson’s electronic 80s epiphany rarely stops moving.

Jon Anderson enjoyed a state of independence in the early 80s, throwing himself into a productive first hiatus from Yes. His work with Vangelis bled into this 1982 solo album. If his prog visions had entered more accessible terrain on its predecessor, Song Of Seven, then this was where he embraced the then newfangled electronic technology. It has that contemporaneous quality of trying out every new toy in the box whether creative or counterproductive, and there are spells later where it all gets rather shrill and frenetic. Yet the irresistibility of Anderson’s joyful worldview blasts its sunbeams through any reservations. With a wealth of giltedged musicians, that evergreen Jon’s joie de vivre abides.

"It has the quality of trying out every new toy in the box."

Recorded mostly at his home with starry friends, the album was co-produced by Neil Kernon (who’d worked with Brand X, and, somewhat versatile, later produced everyone from Kansas to Michael Bolton). He did the desk stuff while Anderson wrangled the big-idea visions. Clem Clempson (Humble Pie, Colosseum) brought guitar solos, E-Streeter David Sancious played keyboards and Simon Phillips drums. Cameos came from Jack Bruce, Blue Weaver and Greenslade’s Dave Lawson. For all that, it’s cohesive. The overall techbased sheen can be thanked (rather than spanked), despite the occasional now-dated decision.

So it’s with a characteristic breeze of Pollyanna-ish glee that the record swings in with the bounding, beaty Olympia. The surprise, given the artist’s tendencies, is that this isn’t a song about the Greek gods but about a music tech show he’d visited with Vangelis at the exhibition centre of the same name in Kensington. ‘Computer Casio overdrive’, he sings. ‘Sanyo, Sony – power multiply!’ Never let it be said he got bogged down in topographic oceans. The nine-minute title track, however, proudly highlights his spiritual side, detailing his delight at being present for the birth of his daughter. ‘There’s nothing in life to touch it,’ he declares, as the music meanders between AOR architecture and minimalist electronica, and the voice conveys the new father’s happiness. Surrender, with a funky shuffle, was a logical single choice, as was the lilting All In A Matter Of Time. The influence of State Of Independence is evident on both. There’s a dip then (Pressure Point is where those modern toys get irritating), but Tony Visconti was called in for a day to produce the gospel pop of All God’s Children, which takes us out on a cheerful high.

This remastered edition includes regular add-ons The Spell (a weird, wandering, very Yes, 11-minute demo) and Spider (a brief, busy, worldbeat whirl). Even now, the hyperactive Animation can’t keep still.

CHRIS ROBERTS

MAGMA

Retrospektïw I-II-III SEVENTH RECORDS

More songs about umlauts and Zeuhl.

An obvious first step when encountering any band with a discography as vast as Magma’s might be to go back to basics, heading directly to such landmark releases as their 1970 self-titled debut breakthrough epics, Mëkanïk Dëstructïw Kömmandöh and Köhntarkösz. Yet this sparkling remaster of the live set Retrospektïw I–II–III should provide the curious with a pretty definitive guide as to what Magma are all about.

Recorded at a series of concerts in Paris in 1980, when Christian Vander convened the ensemble in a celebration of their 10-year anniversary, the recording shows just how well jazz fusion, pop and rock are all distilled into a sequence of suites whose contents burn with an intensity that’s nothing short of incandescent.

While the original studio versions aren’t exactly easy listening, in comparison to what’s presented here they sound decidedly tame. These performances rattle with a quality that outstrips their studio forebears or even those collected on 1975’s Magma Live, itself regarded by many fans as something of a high watermark of the period.

The reasons for this have something to do with the limitations of studio technology attempting to put Magma’s lightning into the bottle and the adrenalised wave that comes from the material being honed and refined in concert. The pace is energetic, almost ritualistic. Bernard Paganotti’s soupedup bass sounding like a cross between an outboard motor and a pneumatic drill adds not only a masterly precision but a surly ferocity.

While this set has been previously available the main draw here, aside from the remastering, is the appearance of a studio demo of Retrovision. Here, Vander’s skittering beats come with the characteristically pin-sharp attention to detail from which everything else springs. Absolute beginners and grizzled veterans alike can revel in the frenetic whorl of a group who truly don’t sound like anyone else, either then or now.

SS

NOLAN & WAKEMAN

Tales By Gaslight BURNING SHED

Superb edition collects neo-prog duo’s literature-inspired keyboard onslaughts.

More than 20 years ago, Clive Nolan (Arena, Pendragon) and Oliver Wakeman (a future member of Strawbs and Yes) teamed up to produce a musical interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s poe Jabberwocky, followed in 2002 by a similar release that took Conan Doyle’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles as its source material. A mouthwateringly talented troupe of performers joined them, including original Yes guitarist Peter Banks, Magnum’s Bob Catley, singer Tracy Hitchings and Arjen Lucassen, with actor Robert Powell providing narrative links for …Baskervilles. Fans of quasiclassical bombast, the sort of musical storytelling found in Rick Wakeman’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, portentous vocal delivery, big rock balladeering, oodles of keyboards, nods towards both old-time British music hall and musical theatre with a prog gothic twist are very well served here.

Giving them a much-deserved re-release, Tales By Gaslight bundles these albums together with a third disc, Dark Fables, containing a mix of tunes intended for an abandoned Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein project, with unused tracks from The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Although some familiar tropes run through the Dark Fables tracks, they also provide a bit of contrast, with the ominous backing to the otherwise popfriendly hooks of Why Do You Hate Me?

Each disc is complemented by a 16-page booklet, with beautifully evocative artwork provided by Rodney Matthews for Jabberwocky and Peter Pracownik for everything else. It’s a terrific package, which serves as a reminder that, although such ambitious, cross-genre, slightly over-blown projects are relatively commonplace among the prog fraternity nowadays (Ayreon and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra come most immediately to mind), in the late-90s very few artists were even contemplating this sort of undertaking, which puts Nolan & Wakeman very much in the role of prog rock trailblazers. Splendid stuff.

GMM

OZRIC TENTACLES

Vitamin Enhanced KSCOPE 

Ozrics’ abled 80s cassette albums remastered in box set reissue.

Since forming at 1983’s Stonehenge festival and naming themselves after an imaginary alien breakfast cereal, Ozric Tentacles have operated below the radar and outside the music industry. As UK free festivals embraced their Gong-influenced sets, the band supported themselves through the 80s selling cassette albums at gigs, thousands purchasing rainbow label C60s that gained collectible mystique.

To satisfy demand, all six cassettes were gathered on 1993’s Vitamin Enhanced CD box set (withdrawn after Kellogg’s objected to the cover’s similarity to Corn Flakes), and since been reissued in different combinations. This latest incarnation marks the first time mastermind Ed Wynne has personally remastered them.

Drawn from untitled tracks recorded over three years, 1985’s Erpsongs surprised anyone expecting endless crusty jamming with its sleek jazz fusion, effectively mated with dub reggae on Thyroid. Conceived as an album, much of Tantric Obstacles resulted from Wynne overdubbing guitar, bass and synths on his TEAC four-track recorder, veering between Sniffing Dog’s charging rock and Mescalito’s Tangerine Dream-like sequencer frolics. With the Ozrics’ popularity rising, Live Ethereal Cereal collated live recordings from 1985-86, including storming space rocker Aumriff.

Upgrading to eight-track to allow band overdubbing, There Is Nothing widened the sonic smörgåsbord, O-I exploring funky exotica, Travelling The Great Circle spacing out over upfront bass and drums. Sliding Gliding Worlds (1988) minted a live dance craze with Kick Muck’s riotous celebration of getting dirty at festivals. The Bits Between The Bits (1989) filled in with unreleased recordings as the Ozrics prepared to launch their Dovetail label the same year, including pastorally ambient Floating Seeds.

Ozric Tentacles have since released more than 30 albums, with sales totalling more than a million. Their humble beginnings never sounded so good. 

KN

PORCUPINE TREE

Octane Twisted TRANSMISSION 

Late-period live double makes its vinyl debut.

The final album to emerge during the art prog giants’ lifetime, Octane Twisted was released in 2012, essentially a live document of Porcupine Tree’s last studio album,

2009’s The Incident. Originally a two-CD/DVD package, it’s now on vinyl (in a four-LP box set) for the first time.

While there are several different brushstrokes, the simple fact is if you liked The Incident you’ll like this; if not, you won’t. With the bulk recorded at Chicago’s Riviera Theater, it includes other fan favourites from that show (including Hatesong and Stars Die) plus three tracks from the Royal Albert Hall swansong, notably the stirring Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. It’s a solid souvenir of a band who, as Gavin Harrison has put it, were “well played in”. John Wesley was in this phase the lead guitarist, with stalwarts Richard Barbieri and Colin Edwin providing, respectively, subversive twists and necessary pulses.

Regarding Steven Wilson, it’s an interesting record in that you can hear him both pushing Porcupine Tree’s music as far as he possibly can – it doesn’t shirk on the heavy riffs – yet straining to find a door into another area. As most of The Incident was a 55-minute song cycle made up of 14 linked pieces, he’s already tentatively exploring multiple pathways. While the mood is often close to Pink Floyd circa Animals, Wilson’s testing out ways he can deliver conceptual state of the nation addresses in his own voice. In 2021, as The Future Bites proved, he’s doing that. Back in 2010 (when Octane Twisted was recorded), he’s clearing his throat: in the lyrics, which are dark, cynical, and bemoaning our modern malaise, he’s about as chirpy as Philip Larkin if he’d had his jazz records taken away.

With hindsight, it makes perfect sense that Wilson wanted to go solo. Yet such is the dynamic chemistry of the ensemble here, who after all had helped lift this project from an idea to a huge live attraction, that you’d never – quite – write off another twist in their tale. 

CR

JETHRO TULL 

A (A La Mode): 40th Anniversary Edition PARLOPHONE

 Live set and Slipstream video included in box set of Tull’s 1980 album.

Ais arguably the most controversial album in Jethro Tull’s extensive back catalogue. In what seemed like a pretty radical “Tull into the 80s” move, it not only heralded a spikier, more synthetic sound, but also a significant – and sudden – change in line-up. Out went long-serving members John Evans, Barrie Barlow and Dee Palmer, in came Roxy Music/Zappa/UK keys and violin player Eddie Jobson and American drummer Mark Craney. The reasons why have subsequently been well rehearsed, though even now the details seem a little strange: A was originally to be an Ian Anderson solo album, but at some point Chrysalis insisted it should be a Jethro Tull record, and thus the new band was rather messily birthed.

“An album full of anxious songs steeped in Cold War paranoia.”

Also out was Tull’s image as rustic gentlemen, replaced by the band as boilersuited technicians confronting some futuristic peril –A no longer for ‘Anderson’, but for ‘Armageddon’, and an album full of anxious songs steeped in Cold War paranoia. But perhaps more terror-inducing for veteran fans was the full-on disco bass and drums of opening track Crossfire, its nervy arrangement full of rapid cutaways. Yet heard today, it’s a rather wonderful production with a killer chorus and lyrics inspired by the recent Iranian embassy siege. Fylingdale Flyer is another winner, its dramatic piano stabs and jerky riffing tempered by a folky, almost choral vocal line – Anderson’s voice and trilling flute ensure that the new sound isn’t a complete break with the past.

The album’s highlight is Black Sunday, a sinister fanfare of steely synth leading into a driving riff and an outpouring of words barely accommodated by the melody. It’s a bewildering but exciting rush, and a fine showcase for Jobson’s talents. However, A is very much front-loaded, with the later tracks not landing so well, despite plenty of invention – the quirky, blues funk catchiness of 4.W.D. (Low Ratio) is probably the best of them.

As with the other Tull anniversary editions, this is a very desirable, book-encased box set, with tons of extras. The main album gets a pristine Steven Wilson remix, along with the interesting instrumental outtake Coruisk. There’s also a two-CD contemporary live set recorded at the LA Sports Arena, with some great instrumental and solo spots, and the chance to hear Jobson’s violin on classics such as Aqualung. But maybe best of all is a DVD of Slipstream, a long-form video from 1981 directed by Bowie collaborator David Mallet which combined footage from the A tour with filmed inserts, including Anderson playing both Aqualung and Dracula in the wonderful sequence for Sweet Dream.

JOE BANKS

TAME IMPALA

  InnerSpeaker 10th Anniversary Edition FICTION 

Kevin Parker’s Aussie psych project’s first big noise revisited.

Is it really a decade since InnerSpeaker came out? The very thought of it sends this writer straight back to when this multicoloured gem, with its trippy Drost-effect sleeve, landed on the editor’s desk. It was our first encounter with the Perth-based ‘band’ (who we now know is just one person – writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Parker) and it instantly became a Prog office stereo favourite.

“Warm, psychedelic pop oozes from each groove.”

InnerSpeaker followed Parker’s self-released debut EP, which landed him a deal with hip Sydney label Modular and found him and his housemates/Impala contributors Jay Watson (drums) and Dom Simper (bass) relocated to Wave House, a gigantic beach pad by the Indian Ocean, where Parker strived to make his tracks as lush and transportive as he could.

Raised on a diet of The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and the Shadows, and with Silver Apples, Dungen and The Doors as later influences, Parker’s vision is immediate from lead-in track It’s Not Meant To Be. Warm, psychedelic pop oozes from each groove, while Lennon-esque vocals emphasise themes of isolation, confusion and unrequited love.

This anniversary edition comes with several bonuses. Alter Ego and Runway Houses… have a layer of cosmic grime removed for a shinier listen. Parker has admitted that, while producing InnerSpeaker, he “didn’t know what he was doing” and only understood reverb and distortion, yet instrumental versions of Why Don’t You Make Up Your Mind? and It’s Not Meant To Be show how intricate his compositions are.

Then there’s a 20-minute collage titled Demos/Ideas. Parker’s stated of the time in Wave House as having “everything set up in the living room, to wake up and record for six weeks on end.” But instead he’d make a 30-second clip, then get distracted by scenery that was “too beautiful”. This rounds up those sounds, experimenting with abstractbathetic lyrics, Oldfield-like guitar melody lines and percussive breaks, the origins of songs such as Alter Ego having a White Album feel alongside some cinematic doodles and fragments of fuzzed-out groovers. (One segment is like a great, blown-out Manic Depression by Hendrix.)

This edition is completed by Wave House Jam Live. Here, Parker, Simper and Watson play out nearly 18 minutes of Can-meets-Floyd improv. It’s pretty good, with jazzy rounds on the kit, Simper hitting rise-and-fall bass patterns and Parker tremoloing his way around the cosmos before a slower second section of spaced-out blues.

A snapshot in time, this was the start of this solitary romantic’s journey to becoming one of the most influential songwriters, producers and collaborators of the 21st century. 

JO KENDALL

RARE BIRD

  Beautiful Scarlet: The Recordings 1969-1975 ESOTERIC

 Comprehensive collection of bridesmaids-not-brides of prog rock.

I n their initial incarnation, as one of the first bands to release an album on Charisma, Rare Bird offered the missing link between The Nice and Genesis. “Graham Field and the boys walked in off the street and laid a demo tape on me. It happens all the time. Only this time it was good, very good,” wrote maverick label head Tony Stratton- Smith in the sleevenotes for their selftitled debut.

This singularity can be heard throughout this collection. With John Anthony as their producer, on 1969’s debut Rare Bird, it’s possible to detect the roots of what we now know as a very particular strain of British prog rock – epic multiparted pieces, novelties and plaintive ballads. And their premier plaintive ballad, Sympathy, featuring Steve Gould’s remarkable vocal delivery was released as a single in early 1970, reaching the UK Top 30, topping the chart in Italy and Holland and even making inroads across the Atlantic in the USA. Yet rather than building on this success, by a series of minor misfortunes, fame never materialised. Their second album, As Your Mind Flies By, contains their über-prog moment, the 20-minute, multipart Flight – including Ravel’s Bolero, of course.

When founders Graham Field and Mark Ashton left, vocalist and bassist Gould took the band on a more conventional route with other original member Dave Kaffinetti on keyboards. 1972’s Epic Forest has some lovely moments, including the in-era Hey Man and the powerful 10-minute title track. The following year’s Somebody’s Watching featured Van der Graaf’s Nic Potter on bass and an outstanding funk-rock reading of Ennio Morricone’s A Few Dollars More. By the time of Born Again, sadly, it was all over.

Beautiful Scarlet gathers together the band’s five albums and adds the previously unreleased Live At The Theatre Royal Drury Lane. With a booklet crammed with interviews, adverts and pictures, Beautiful Scarlet is a poignant reminder of the group’s brief but beautiful flight. 

DE

DEVIN TOWNSEND

Devolution Series #1: Acoustically Inclined, Live In Leeds INSIDEOUT 

Ziltoid’s boss plays the hits and more, with no frills and extra reverb.

He may be an unparalleled master of self-deprecation, but it seems likely that Devin Townsend is fully aware of how loved he is. You can almost inhale the waves of love that flow between crowd and Canadian during this wonderful live show, which was captured at Leeds City Varieties Music Hall in April 2019 and originally released as part of the Empath deluxe box set.

With gargantuan quantities of reverb on both his sparkling acoustic guitar work and his multi-octave vocal range, he begins with a welcoming wall of hazy chords and arpeggios, before meandering through some of the most elegant moments from his vast catalogue. Stripped down to their bare bones, the mercurial essence of these songs becomes ever more apparent. Epic and muscular on record, early gems like Funeral and Deadhead become ghost-psych reveries here, albeit with regular mid-song interruptions from Townsend’s ruthless internal bullshit detector. Similarly, the somnambulant drift of Terminal is rendered even more hypnotic in this context. 

Always happy to subvert his own music, Townsend’s gloriously unhinged reworking of Strapping Young Lad’s fan favourite Love? replaces the original’s extreme metal onslaught with ululating waves of guitar and falsetto, and gets the rapturous applause it deserves. But when it comes to delivering the real crowd-pleasers, his delicate readings of both Ih-Ah! and Hyperdrive! are simply immaculate, while a closing brace of Solar Winds and Things Beyond Things (both originally from the much-revered Ocean Machine) hammers home exactly what a great writer of pop songs Townsend has always been.

As regular attendees will know, Devin Townsend’s shows have become like family get-togethers over the last couple of decades. As we exchange overexcited WhatsApp messages about the prospect of the Empath tour springing back into life in the near future, this lush and languorous love-in is a perfectly soothing soundtrack. 

DL

THE CANTERBURY SOUND IN POPULAR MUSIC: SCENE, IDENTITY AND MYTH 

Asya Draganova, Shane Blackman & Andy Bennett

EMERALD PUBLISHING LIMITED 

In the land of page and ink.

Bringing together a series of fascinating, readable essays from academics, musicians, and dedicated Canterbury chroniclers, this 320-page study does a pretty good job at conveying the essence of a nebulous subgenre within progressive music.

Real and imagined perceptions of ‘Englishness’, historic and current players operating under the Canterbury banner, the emergence of connected pocket scenes, humour and the everyday sexism lurking within parts of the accumulated canon all receive thoughtful and often illuminating consideration. Accounts from musicians connected to the scene’s past and present, including an engrossing personal history by Caravan’s keyboardist Dave Sinclair, are especially welcome, as are the insights of Phil Howitt, founder of the Facelift fanzine, and Aymeric Leroy of the Calyx website, whose respective work continues to be a precious resource.

While not purporting to be an exhaustive history this successfully illustrates some of the themes and motifs that continue to imbue the scene with its distinctive personality. 

SS

GONG: EVERY ALBUM, EVERY SONG

  Kevan Furbank SONICBOND 

Evergreen prog collective given entertaining step-by-step treatment.

In keeping with the style of several other books in the ‘On Track’ series, this is a fairly linear, they-play-thisbit-and-then-this-bit account of Gong’s output, walking the reader through the 16 albums under that name, plus notes on the many offshoot releases.

Despite that, it never gets bogged down in anorak-ish detail, even when getting granular, because it blends touches of musicological insight with dry humour and subjective opinion when evoking the pungent vibes Daevid Allen and co create – whether it’s the use of “the devil’s interval” on the debut album or the ramshackle feel of the communally created compositions “as if the entire thing is taking place in a pub full of drunken pixies”.

Furbank doesn’t just pinpoint the effect of a minor third but also neatly sketches the real life backdrops and line-up turbulence that informs each recording. And despite being a clearly knowledgeable fan, he’s frank about the musical shortcomings sometimes resulting from the anything goes approach of some recordings (“Sadly, someone let Dieter stroke his double bass”), while also recognising its importance in producing the freewheeling exotica that made Planet Gong such an intoxicating place to visit. 

JS

RPWL

  God Has Failed – Live & Personal GENTLE ART OF MUSIC

 German prog mainstays mark 20 years in classy but intimate style.

Faced with a potentially wasted period of rehearsal when their God Has Failed 20th anniversary tour was pulled last year, RPWL got creative.Convening on a blacked-out soundstage, they filmed this buffed-up version of their debut album for posterity.

Set up in the round, the current lineup are joined by Frank Thumbach on bass and additional vocalists Bine Heller and Caroline von Brünken. It keeps showiness to a minimum: no lasers, pyros, costumes or excess gurning; just a band giving an honest, polished and gorgeous-sounding performance. With about 20 dimmable white spotlights set in an outer circle, the vaguest suggestion of a smoke machine, multiple camera angles and loads of backline visible, it feels in many ways more intimate than a straight live concert film.

Little details help the viewer to feel part of proceedings – the discarded coffee mug tucked away at the back of guitarist Kalle Wallner’s amps, singer Yogi Lang apparently having to read the lyrics for It’s Alright, the whirling cones in Markus Jehle’s rotary speaker cab, and much more. Sound and visuals are crystal clear in what is surely a must-see for RPWL aficionados.

  GMM

FRANK ZAPPA

Zappa ALTITUDE FILM ENTERTAINMENT 

Alex Winter’s gentle portrait of a very prickly musical maverick.

Alex Winter may be best known as lovable heavy metal doofus Bill S Preston, Esq in the Bill & Ted movies, but he’s both an acclaimed documentary director and a lifelong Frank Zappa fan. Zappa brings together those latter two strands. Six years in the making and funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, it truly is a labour of love.

“It brings warmth to a man not known for that quality.”

With the blessing of the musician’s widow Gail, Winter became the first filmmaker granted access to The Vault, Zappa’s extensive personal archive, and as a result this two-hour film benefits from the assertive, acerbic presence of its subject. Frank’s voice is the main narrator and Winter captures his personality in vibrant detail, from formative stories about the musician trying to blow up his high school, to his unapologetic promiscuity, absurdist humour, and determination to defend artistic expression from censorship.

While the film isn’t quite a hagiography, it’s clear that Winter wants to highlight Zappa’s best qualities, while minimising his worst, entirely avoiding any of the controversies around the misogyny expressed in some of his lyrics. The story behind the creation of his only hit single, Valley Girl, is really quite sad, born out of his daughter Moon’s plea for her father’s attention, but Winter briskly glosses over the subject. The four Zappa kids – Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva – only appear in archive footage. While Ahmet has a producer credit, none of them contribute interviews, possibly a reflection of the legal battles over the Zappa estate that erupted among the family after Gail’s death, an undoubtedly touchy topic that goes unmentioned.

Prominent contributors that do appear include Zappa band members Ruth Underwood, Mike Keneally, Steve Vai, and Bunk Gardner. Their recollections paint the portrait of a man who was much admired and revered, but someone who remained distant and demanding. Vai describes the musicians as tools that Zappa used when they fit his purpose, and the overriding impression that emerges is of an artist who spent his life constantly striving to realise the music he heard in his head, but who was never satisfied.

Where the documentary succeeds best is in asserting Zappa’s place in the pantheon of 20th-century music, from attracting the admiration of David Bowie and John Lennon, to the acclaim his later classical works enjoyed in Europe.

It’s to Winter’s credit that the film brings such warmth to its subject, given that’s not a quality anyone attributes to a man who once remarked that he didn’t have any friends. As Zappa proves, he remained, to the last, obtuse, obsessive, and, in the truest sense, unique.

DAVID WEST