Trollheart's Listening Booth

[Trollheart]

Kind of resurrecting the old Trollheart's Listening List idea for 2018, but perhaps somewhat less structured. I'll be listening only to albums I've recently downloaded (these should mostly be new ones, but may not all be) - and by recently I mean over the last one, two or even three years! - and have never heard before, and the reviews will be short and succinct, like the ones in my Albums of 2017 thread. As that particular thread is still well in progress, don't expect anything like the frequency you see there. I might post one album a day, or one a week, or anything in between, and there may in fact be no set regularity at all: one week I might do one every day (or more) and the next week one for the whole week, or even none. It all depends what I can fit in as I try to manage my other threads, The Album Club and so on.

The main point of this thread though is to get (force) me to listen to all the albums I've downloaded over the last year or two, many of which lie unopened as it were on my hard drive. The last time I looked, my “downloaded albums” queue showed 2,754 albums. That's a lot of music to just sit there and be ignored, forgotten or put on the long finger. So hopefully this will allow me to hear at least some of what I've downloaded, and say what I think of them. They won't be in any order, as a matter of fact I'll be using a random number generator to pick which one I listen to, so it will be very, um, random.

I'll use the same get-out clauses I use in my album thread, ie Oh Hell No!, Three Strikes and Bailing Out, and the same rating system. In fact, in many ways it will be a copy of the format of that thread, though without the deadline and therefore also without the frequency. Also, I will NOT be taking suggestions for albums here: these are purely the ones I've personally downloaded and not yet listened to.

Up next:


Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Rick Wakeman (1974)
Genre: Progressive Rock/Symphonic Rock

INDEX

Unicorn - Emotional Wasteland

[Paedantic Basterd]

Jesus, and I feel guilty with 18 albums sitting on my hard drive unheard.

[Trollheart]

Originally Posted by Paedantic Basterd

Jesus, and I feel guilty with 18 albums sitting on my hard drive unheard.

I know: it should be an offence punishable by hanging, shouldn't it?

[Trollheart]

Album title: Emotional Wasteland
Artist: Unicorn
Genre: Progressive Rock
Nationality: Swedish
Year: 1995
Position in Discography: Second of three
Familiar with this artist? No
Familiar with the genre or subgenre? Extremely
I'm really not sure what this is doing on Metal Archives, as it's certainly not any kind of metal, never mind progressive, but what it very much is is progressive rock, and very good too. Nothing immediately different to any of the other prog rockers I've listened to, but very competent and listenable. The vocalist is Dan Swanö, apparently “one of the best respected musicians in metal”, but looking at his other bands, though the name is familiar, I don't see any that I really recognise and could say, oh so it's THAT Dan Swanö!

There are some nice Floydesque backing vocals on “The Boy and the Impossible”, and flute and cello colour the ballad “Hiding Again”, which is really quite lovely. Actually, it's quite long – nine minutes and change – and picks up in speed partially as it goes along, so I don't know if I'd call it a true ballad, but it certainly started off like one. There's a nice folky/sort of pastoral-early-Genesis-Big-Big-Train sound to the rather unoriginally-titled “The Sorrow Song” (title sounds like something off Nick Cave's The Good Son), but it's a nice song with some sweet vocal harmonies. Again, it kicks up quite a bit as it heads into its conclusion. “Waterfall” puts me in mind of a song Asia might have discarded, not really much to talk about, and a terrible, abrupt ending. Will the album end well I wonder? Well, “After Before” (who the hell makes up these titles?) is a decent closer with rather a lot of The Alan Parsons Project on it, and some fine guitar, so yeah, I guess. No idea what all that gibberish is at the end though; kind of ruins the effect.

Check out more from this artist? I would. I wouldn't be desperate to hear all their other albums, mind, but I wouldn't avoid one if it came up again.