Coven of the wolves --- When Bitter Spring Sleeps --- 2013 (Pagan Flame)
http://www.metal-archives.com/images...84171.jpg?5802

Hmm. The joke may very well be on me. When I sampled this before buying it I was intrigued by its laidback, lush, pastoral feel and thought it might all be like that --- kind of Antimatter or Lake of Tears --- but when I checked for this review I see they are listed as (gulp!) Black Metal and that their front (and only) man has been in other bands called, er, Satan’s Almighty Penis and Destroy Humanity Now. Um. Doesn’t sound too pastoral to me. Has Mister Cock-up checked in for a single room with bath, I wonder? Hold onto your hats, people: we’re goin’ in!

Interestingly, after their demo released in 2008 When Bitter Spring Sleeps (we’re obviously going to be calling them WBSS from now on) shared an album with Panopticon, which those of you who are following the “Recommended by…” thread will know really impressed me with its mix of country and death metal. Also interesting is that as Panopticon is apparently one guy, WBSS is also a one-man show. So will this album be anything like "Kentucky" I wonder? I really don’t know what to expect, so let’s just push play and see how we get on.

Ambient sounds greet us and are joined by a nice acoustic guitar as “Like a flame in the fields” opens the album, some really nice keyboard sounding like pipes or flute coming in too, making a nice sort of medieval atmosphere. I hear feedback electric guitar getting ready to snarl though and percussion ramping up, and now yes it gets harder and more aggressive, the electric guitar punching in and the drums slowly pounding away. With a sound like a wounded animal, one-man-band Lord Sardonyx brings in the vocal, and you know, it’s not at all bad. I can understand it: sort of viking or pagan metal is what it puts me in mind of. The song is a slow grinder with a lot of power, and let’s remember this is one man doing all of this.

It’s said about WBSS that they (or he; which should I use, as this is one guy? Let's go with they, as a band or project) really espouse the old pagan ways in their music and retain a reverence and respect for nature and the Earth, so it’s kind of eco-metal maybe? At least, though the tag is shown as Black Metal, they don’t seem to be singing about Satan. Yet. It’s powerful stuff though, and His Lordship is clearly upset with Man as he snarls ”We've honoured your gods/ Far too long/ And now we sing /The Earth's own song.” Fair enough really. The electric guitar and indeed the percussion drops out entirely in the sixth minute of the almost nine this runs for, leaving the pipes and acoustic guitar, then just the guitar to carry the tune with the pipes coming back in right at the end as it fades out.

There are only seven songs on this album, but apart from two short instrumentals nothing is less than eight minutes, and the longest runs for over eleven. The next one is just short of ten, with Lord Sardonyx again railing against the misuse of Earth’s resources in “Rest in the ground” as he asks ”Why do you condemn /The ground you walk upon? /Why poison the soil /That brings you life?/ There is magic in these trees /And lost wisdom /No longer able to see /Through your sleeping eyes.” Sentiments you can’t really argue with. This too starts off gentle but soon kicks up into a harder, faster metal tune with lots of buzzy electric guitar. Sardonyx actually seems to have a really good voice, almost like an operatic tenor, but he uses it in a different way, nearly drawling the lyrics as he sings, and it’s very effective.

It’s also quite incredible how quickly a ten-minute song goes by, and before I realise it we’re at the end, with a quote from Edvard Munch that surely encapsulates the Lord’s beliefs here: "From my rotting body/ Flowers shall grow /And I am in them /And that is eternity". A short instrumental, complete with birdsong effects and some nice acoustic guitar takes us into the title track, which starts off with the sort of walking tread we heard in Moonsorrow’s “Varjoina kuljemme kuoilleiden maassa” back during Metal Month, then a sort of gypsy camp revellery punctuated by the cries of wolves and the shriek of crows, before hard guitar smashes in and takes the melody in a heavy, powerful direction, Lord Sardonyx’s vocal almost chanting as he sings about the lord of the wolves: ”He is father to the mighty wolves /Raising only grey sons/ Hidden deep in forgotten lands /In caverns there he feeds revenge.” Good uptempo percussion joins the guitar and it’s quite the headbanger with some Maiden/Lizzy style fretwork in it. As we move into the third minute the tempo picks up and the song changes from marching through the forest to trundling along on metal rails, possibly in a sled of some sort pulled by wolves, who howl in the background. Again, powerful stuff. There might be an element of Ragnarok, the Norse legend of the Twilight of the Gods here, as His Lordship declares ”Hammer of hearts and steaming breath /They thunder into nighttime fields /To conquer this world of man /A ravenous sea of blood and fangs.” Ragnarok is also called The Time of the Wolf. Hmm. Could be just coincidence?

The song slows down for a bit of ambient instrumental amid the baying of the wolves in the seventh minute, then it's just their calls that take it to its end. Sort of a little pointless really: almost a full minute taken up by nothing but wolf howls and cries and barks. The second instrumental is up next, basically just native-style drums, very slow and hollow, with some recordings of speech playing under it. It lasts for just over a minute and then the epic begins. Clocking in at just under twelve minutes, “The sky has not always been this way” opens with the by-now-familiar birdsong then a nice folky acoustic guitar, suddenly blasted aside by snarling electric as the drums slide in almost unobtrusively beneath it. It’s over two minutes before the vocal comes in, the guitar remaining tough and growly, something like a violin joining it as Sardonyx wails ”The old ones they say /That the sky has not always been this way.”

Really nice instrumental break from about the sixth minute to the seventh then the vocal comes back in, and again it’s another song that though it is the longest on the album seems to be over all too soon, taking us to the closer, the just short of nine minutes “Homestead hailstorm”, which opens with the sounds of rain and muted, distant thunder, the sound of what could be an iron gate swinging in the wind and banging against its gatepost. In fact, the whole song, all eight minutes and fifty-two seconds of it, is just that: the sound of a gentle rainstorm, which, I guess, given the title we might have expected. Still, no music at all? I guess Lord Sardonyx really takes his nature worship seriously!

TRACKLISTING

1. Like a flame in the fields
2. Rest in the ground
3. Crossing paths
4. Coven of the wolves
5. Tomorrow tribe
6. The sky has not always been this way
7. Homestead hailstorm

First off, I must repeat this is all the work of one man, and it’s pretty damn impressive. Though it wasn’t quite the laidback acoustic music I had been expecting from the samples I heard it didn’t veer too wildly away from that, and though the guitar work at times (most times) was pretty heavy, at other times it was quiet and introspective, and the percussion never made itself too obvious or took things over. The vocals were certainly decent and while I wouldn’t list His Lordship as one of my favourite singers he is definitely suited to a genre of metal, maybe doom or pagan but I don’t think black. I don’t feel this album really flagged for an instant, and even though I sort of felt a little cheated with the closer, it was clever, well done and totally in keeping with the objects, aims and beliefs of the man known both as Lord Sardonyx and When Bitter Spring Sleeps. He certainly remains true to his faith, right to the end.

Most of you will probably not even regard this as metal --- I’m not sure I do --- but if you need an album that makes you think about what we’ve done, and are doing, to our home, without all that new age wishy-washy nonsense, then this could be a stepping stone you should try. If nothing else, it proves that you can love the planet and still be hard as nails: I doubt anyone would dare label Lord Sardonyx as a tree-hugger, though he might not mind.

A very surprising and indeed very satisfying album, and I look forward to more releases from this multi-talented artiste.

http://www.trollheart.com/shelf2.png
I was always a great reader. I’m not any more, for various reasons, though I do still read of course. But I started young: Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” (not the Disney cartoon I hasten to add) at about age seven. I remember waiting till I was old enough to cross the “great divide” between the junior and the adult section of the library I went to, where the books in the latter looked so much more interesting and inviting. The junior, or children’s section, was filled with what you would expect --- nursery rhymes, Ladybird books of this and that, the adventures of the Mister Men and lots of books with dogs, cats and rabbits on the covers, though they did also carry the likes of Enid Blyton’s children’s classics such as the Famous Five and the Secret Seven, and some interesting historical novels and books, suitably dumbed down for kids of course. And a lot of books about space. Sort of started me on my lifelong love affair with science-fiction really.

So I have my favourite authors of course, but you may be surprised to find that that is not what this section is about. Well, it is, but not solely. In this feature I intend to concentrate not only on my own favourite writers --- poets as well as authors --- but ones who have made the biggest contribution to the world of literature down the ages. I’ll be telling you about them and who they are, what they wrote and maybe featuring, certainly in the case of poets, one or two of their works. If there’s any way I can work in a music angle too I’ll be doing that.

The first writer I want to talk about is someone who I actually don’t like. Well, that’s not entirely true. I like the odd story or poem, but in general I find his stuff to be so unremittingly dark and disturbing that it’s like what I assume listening constantly to Depressive Black Suicidal Metal must be like. I know millions of people enjoy his work, and rightly so. But I don’t. Not much anyway. So let me introduce you now to
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...otype_crop.png
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Credited with almost singlehandedly creating the detective fiction genre and very instrumental in both the horror and science-fiction genres, Edgar Allan Poe was certainly a man who put his own life into his writing. A man dogged by tragedy, death and despair, it’s perhaps not surprising that so much of his writing is sombre, reflective and, ultimately, filled with terror, doom and dread. At an early age he lost both his father and his mother, and though taken in by foster parents at the tender age of three years they never really took to him, never formally adopted him and he fell out with them, though he remained in their care up to about 1826, at which time he was seventeen years old. After a brief spell at university, where he began running up the gambling debts that would dog his pretty miserable life, he enlisted in the army in 1827. This same year he published his first ever collection of poetry and short stories, but unlike his later work it sold very poorly, as did his second and third.

However following the death of his brother in 1831 Poe decided his future lay in writing and made an effort to knuckle down to it seriously. Between his less-than-distinguished military career and his time at university it was the most energy he had devoted to anything in his life. Having found something of a benefactor and landed a job at a newspaper he was now in a position to pursue a career in writing, however this was at the time something that had been attempted by few if any Americans: making a living as an author alone. Most who tried supplemented their income with other jobs, or wrote as a sideline, hoping to make a little money out of it. Lack of copyright laws and his own innate alcoholism hampered his efforts, and the latter robbed him of many contacts he could have made had he kept appointments with the gentlemen instead of the bottle.

Tragedy was not finished with Edgar Allan Poe, and it followed him around almost like a little puppy dog, or a black cloud intent on destroying any chance of happiness he might try to enjoy. In 1835 he married his cousin, Virginia, but the marriage would last less than ten years, as in 1842 she would succumb to consumption, dying in 1847, two years after her troubled husband had finally secured the fame and respect he had struggled to achieve all his life. In 1845 he published a poem, the first of his major works and some would say the greatest. It was called “The Raven”.

The publication of his dark, doomy poem made Poe a rich man. That is of course a lie. He was paid the princely sum of nine dollars for it, and indeed he would follow Virginia into the afterlife a mere two years later, in 1849, dying from causes which are still hotly disputed to this day. What is clear is that he was found on the streets in “a state of distress”, taken to Washington Medical College where he died at five in the morning, raving and in great apparent fear, his last words reported as “Lord help my poor soul”.

Though he had a short career, it has impacted upon, as I mentioned, at least three separate genres of literature, with a fourth if you include gothic fiction, though I tend to lump that in with horror (which is probably wrong); the one common thread that tied all his works together is a sense of dread, fear, loneliness and horror: some of his best-known works have become major horror movies, and elements of his stories have been parodied down the years. Another major theme is the loss of a loved one, usually a woman, reflecting his own loss in life. He is still seen as one of the fathers of horror writing, and his legacy stretches across a broad swathe of literature, his influence evident in everyone from Clive Barker to Stephen King: in fact, without Poe it’s doubtful if these, or any modern horror writers, would have risen to the prominence they have. Today’s horror has a lot to thank Edgar Allan Poe for.

As “The Raven” was his first published successful poem, and is even today so identified with him, I’m featuring that first. If you’re unaware of the poem, I’d be surprised as like I say it’s been quoted and parodied by everything from “The Simpsons” to heavy metal, and there was recently a movie which envisaged Poe being blamed for a series of murders which uncannily showed all the hallmarks of some of his darker stories. It was called, you guessed it, “The Raven”. But anyway the basic idea is that a man is reflecting on the loss of his wife when a raven comes into the room and scares him. It sounds stupid, but that’s the premise. However it’s the way the poem is written, the dark aura Poe constructs over the simple figure of a bird perching above his door, and the malevolent intelligence he sees or causes us to see in its unblinking eyes that makes the story so chilling. A man, alone, is brought face to face with his darkest memories and loss, and is held transfixed by them. Below is the entire thing, performed by the late great Vincent Prince. There is, perhaps inconceivably, a better version, spoken by Brent Fidler from the film “Poe: Last days of the Raven”, but I can only find parts 2, 3 and 4 so I can’t use it here. But if you get a chance and are interested in this poem I advise you to seek out the movie. You will not be disappointed.

Without meaning to be supercilious, the language used in the poem is mid nineteenth century and a little flowery, so for the benefit of any who may not have understood or grasped the meaning behind the poem, here’s a modern translation of the important bits:

As I sat reading in my chair one December night, a knock came to my door. But on checking I found nobody there. After I had settled back with my books the knock came, but this time at the window. When I opened it a raven flew in. It perched above my door, on a bust of the Greek goddess Pallas. I thought its eyes looked very odd and came to believe it was the soul of some person passed on, and asked it rather foolishly if it has seen my lost love, Lenore? But the bird said nothing except “Nevermore”. I cajoled it, I threatened it and in the end I became very frightened of it, as it did not move and said nothing but that one word. I came to believe that I was in the presence of a demon, and I cowered under its shadow, afraid to move.

This is of course a completely simplistic and abridged version of it, but it captures the main points put forward in the poem. If you have not read it, I recommend you do, or at least click the YouTube and let Vincent read it to you.

Tales of Mystery and, you know, Imagination:
some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe in brief
(Note: if you haven't read these and intend to, skip over this section, as there are spoilers for each.)

http://www.southlondontheatre.co.uk/...useofusher.jpg
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

The first of many gothic horror/murder stories that would follow a theme of revenge and betrayal. Although Poe had written some stories before this, it is recognised as his first real story and would go on to be made into a major motion picture. It tells the harrowing tale of Roderick Usher, who believes his delapidated house has a life all of its own. He is sick, and so is his sister, who later dies and is entombed in the family vault. However, strange sounds and happenings within the house soon conspire to drive Roderick and his friend, the narrator, mad, and Roderick finally reveals that his sister was allve when they buried her. She comes back then and claims him and they both die. As the narrator flees the house it splits in two and sinks into the earth.

http://www.brunswick.k12.me.us/hdwye...nail.php_.jpeg
The Masque of the Red Death (1842)

The tale of a powerful prince who, with his retinue and court, believe they will be safe from the terrible plague sweeping the land, the Red Death, which is claiming all in its wake. Amusing themselves by holding a masquerade ball, they are horrified and terrified to encounter the figure of Death himself, who has made his way into the palace and thereby takes the lives of all present.

http://covers.feedbooks.net/book/795...e&t=1382708075
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

Possibly one of the silliest stories ever written, certainly the silliest Poe wrote, and yet “Murders in the Rue Morgue” has gone on to be one of his most famous and respected works. Meh. Shows what I know. But come on! A detective rather than a horror story, it introduces us to Dupin, who sets out to solve the mystery of how two women could be horribly murdered in a fourth-floor apartment when there is no sign of entry. Turns out to be an escaped Orang-Utan. No, I’m serious. Perhaps this is evidence that even Poe liked a laugh from time to time, though the story is delivered with his characteristic dourness and fatalism. Still, the closest we come to a lighthearted tale in the repertoire of this master of the macabre.

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net...40l/206172.jpg
The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)

A strange story with a lot of inconsistencies, and yet again this has become one of Poe’s best-known and quoted works. Set at the time of the Spanish Inquisition (No I will not say it!) it concerns a prisoner who finds himself on trial and not surprisingly condemned, for the Spanish Inquisition did not tend to believe in the notion of innocent until proven guilty (still not saying it!) and thrown into a dark cell. After a while he realises there is a huge pit in the centre of the cell, and above him is a massive double-bladed scythe, which is swinging slowly from side to side and descending towards him. With the help of rats who infest his cell and eat the meat he has been left, he manages to escape the pendulum as the rats chew through the ropes binding him, but then finds that the walls have become so hot that he is forced towards the dread pit. At the last moment he is rescued as the French take the town and oust the Spanish Inquisition (NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! There! Happy now?) and he is set free.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V8eMuJ3ivY...00/3907726.jpg
The Tell-tale Heart (1843)

A classic story of guilt driving a murderer to confess, “The Tell-tale Heart” is about a man who kills an older man because he does not like his “vulture-like eye”, and after dismembering the body conceals it underneath the floorboards. A neighbour, alerted by the old man’s dying scream, alerts the police but the murderer is so calm and affable, believing he has pulled off the perfect crime and will never be discovered, that he satisfies the police officers that it was only his own cry, from a nightmare suffered in the small hours, that the neighbour heard. He invites them to sit and talk to him in the old man’s room, under the floorboards of which he has hidden the body. But though neither officer can hear anything the protagonist believes he can hear the sound of a heart, beating louder and louder, until he can stand it no longer, and believing that everyone can hear it and that he will be damned, confesses and tells the police to tear up the floorboards, whereupon they find the grisly evidence of his actions.

http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/294001447...1_s260x420.JPG
The cask of Amontillado (1846)

One of the last of Poe’s works, this concerns the efforts of one man to take revenge upon another for some insult he was paid. The first man entices the second into a wine cellar, wherein he walls him up alive. That’s it: there are no sudden or unexpected escapes or twists in Poe’s fiction, and rarely if ever a happy ending. If there is a moral here it escapes me, other than that sometimes it is possible to commit murder and get away with it, as the main protagonist goes on to live for at least fifty more years and is never caught.



This is a small selection of Poe’s stories, which number well over fifty, but all follow a general theme, of disillusionment, often disgust in mankind, of loneliness, despair, revenge and betrayal, loss and hopelessness. Few if any of Poe’s protagonists are heroes, with the possible exception of Dupin: most of them are either evil men --- as in “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The cask of Amontillado” --- or uncaring, such as Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death”. Occasionally they are innocent, or at least uninvolved, bystanders, such as the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, or the unnamed prisoner in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Indeed, that story is one of the few of Poe’s to have what could be considered a happy ending, as his characters usually die or are horribly marked by their experiences in his tales.

His poetry fares no better. Much of it is concerned with the afterlife, with such titles as “To one in Paradise”, “For Annie”, “To my mother”, “Deep in Earth” and “The conqueror worm”. Even his most famous, “The Raven”, concerns a man who isolates himself from the outside world and spends his time grieving for his lost lover to the point that he drives himself mad, thinking he has been visited by a demon in the form of a raven, and is paralysed both with fear and possibly anticipation that he may be taken to be reunited with Lenore.

The impact of the work of Edgar Allan Poe on today’s fiction cannot be overstressed. I’ve already said that the great horror, gothic and even science-fiction writers working today owe him a debt of gratitude, even if they don’t know it, and he set new standards for literary critics, as well as inspiring --- probably unintentionally --- a whole host of so-called psychics who believe they can channel his spirit and write in his style. Of course, he had his flaws, and they were many, and his detractors, among them some literary giants like WB Yeats, Aldous Huxley and of course his great rival Henry Longfellow.

But whatever you think of him, whether your read him or not, whether you enjoy what you read or not, and even if you have somehow never heard his name before, the chances are that Poe has influenced your life in one way or another. If you’ve ever read a mystery, science-fiction, horror story, enjoyed a gothic movie or even listened to early Iron Maiden, he’s in there. As I already noted, there was a movie recently using Poe as the main character, and in the latest smash US crime drama “The Following”, the serial killer uses Poe’s works as the basis for his grisly murders.

These constant adaptions and reinterpretations of Poe's work, and links to him continue to keep the man well to the forefront of the public eye, and ensure that though from time to time he may fade into the background, he will always be with us, waiting, watching, subtly influencing and opening and re-opening the doors of his dark world to ever new legions of fans and followers. Like the heart of the murdered man in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the genius and the influence of Edgar Allan Poe is still beating under the floorboards of literature, thumping loud in the ears of the human consciousness, and it’s doubtful it will ever be stilled.

Musical connections

As I said, if I could link in music I would, so here are a few songs, even albums, that have been influenced by Poe’s writings. There are in fact far too many to catalogue them all, so I’ve tried to concentrate on bands I know, or know of.

http://www.welcometothe70s.com/Image...sons_tales.jpg
Tales of mystery and imagination --- The Alan Parsons Project ---1970

This was the Alan Parsons Project’s first album, and every song concerns or is based upon stories or poems Poe wrote, including “The system of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather”, “To one in Paradise” and of course “The Raven”.


Almost half a century prior to that though, Andre Caplet was setting “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The tale of Arthur Gordon Pym” to music in his “Conte fantastique”, published in 1924.


Joan Baez recorded her version of the last poem Poe ever wrote, “Annabel Lee”, in 1967.


Queen’s “Nevermore” was based on “The Raven”


And of course Iron Maiden recorded “Murders in the Rue Morgue” for their second album.


“The Fall of the House of Usher” was made into an opera by Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill in 1991


Even the late Lou Reed recorded an album called “The Raven” in 2003, featuring spoken and musical interpretations of Poe’s work


Nightwish have a song called “The Poet and the Pendulum”...


... and Symphony X use it as the basis for their song “King of terrors”

I read some of Poe's poems just recently, including The Raven, of course. Interesting to see your take on it. I didn't read the entire post, since I have not read any of Poe's short stories and I'm not a fan of spoilers (thanks for warning us). As for Gothic fiction, I also consider it a part of horror, though I don't really think I've read any non-Gothic horror. From what I understand, Gothic fiction is a fusion between early horror and Romanticism, and I think it's more atmospheric and emotional than "ordinary" horror, though I could be wrong. Wouldn't be surprised if I am.

Thanks man. Great to know someone's reading. Makes all the difference after all the effort I put into this new section. Cheers. :thumb:

With the fourteenth Asia album released only days ago --- technically the fourth under the new/old lineup, but minus Steve Howe --- and considering how disappointed and dismayed I was by the previous outing, 2012’s godawful “XXX”, I thought it might be time to revisit what I consider one of Asia’s best albums, the seventh in an almost unbroken line that stretches back to their debut in 1982 and the last truly great album to feature vocalist, singer and songwriter John Payne. To my mind, Asia struggled with their next release, got it together with 2008’s “Phoenix”, did okay with the followup but then blew it with “XXX”. What the current one will be like I have yet to hear, but this reminds me of a time when Asia were a band you could always rely on to turn out consistently brilliant albums. The end, perhaps, of an era, did we but know it?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ront_cover.jpg
Aura --- Asia --- 2000 (Recognition)

You can say what you like, and laugh all you want, but I really feel Asia began to lose their way when they abandoned the idea of titling albums with words that began and ended with “a”. From their self-titled debut in 1982 we’ve had “Alpha”, “Astra”, “Aria”, “Arena” and then this one, after which they called the next album “Silent nation”, and since then they’ve really disposed of the idea, although 2010’s “Omega” does kind of retain echoes of the old days, both in title and quality. Now it’s probably, almost certainly coincidence, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that the first seven albums (I don’t count “Then and now”, as it’s half a greatest hits album, nor “Rare”, which is all instrumental) showed the band at their height, and even with a lineup change halfway when Payne took over for 1992’s “Aqua”, a kind of comeback album as prior to that the band had not released any material since 1985 -- again, I don’t count 1990’s “Then and now” --- the quality remained, indeed improved as the albums mounted up.

It’s hard for me to pick out a favourite Asia album. Many of them suffer from the odd weak track (I find “Astra” in particular to fall into this category) but almost all have powerful, strong ones to keep them interesting. Probably my alltime favourite would be “Alpha”, their second album, followed perhaps by “Aqua”, but this is certainly high in the rankings. I won’t say it’s a return to form for the band as the previous album, “Arena” was pretty damn special too. That album featured what I believe is the first, and to date only, example of Asia starting with an instrumental that then leads into the title track. But I’ll probably review that later at some point.

“Aura” is the first, and only, Asia album to credit only Geoff Downes and John Payne as the actual band, with everyone else who plays on it shown as “additional musicians”. But then, there are so many of these: Pat Thrall, Guthrie Govan, Michael Sturgis, Ian Crichton, Elliot Randall, Chris Slade, even Steve Howe, though I assume that’s because he played on older tracks that were used? I can’t confirm that though. He had surely not rejoined the band at this point, though he would later. Some of the above musicians would indeed join the main band and feature on 2004’s “Silent nation”, on which there would be, again, additional players.

The artwork, any Asia fan will be able to tell you, is by Roger Dean, who had created the art for the covers of the previous albums since the debut, but who would not be involved in the somewhat lacklustre and very un-Asia cover for “Silent nation”. Perhaps realising how deeply he was tied in to the band, or perhaps because Payne had been replaced by original singer John Wetton by then, Dean would return to create the artwork for all further albums from “Omega” onwards.

A drum roll takes us into a sprightly keyboard line as “Awake” opens the album, Payne singing about his hopes for humanity if only we can put aside our prejudices and hatred. The song is apparently based on a poem but I don’t know it so can’t comment. It’s very upbeat though, with restrained guitar and some fine vocal harmonies, a chorus that consists of only one word but Payne puts a universe of emotion into those two syllables. Some nice piano work from Downes, who handles all keyboard duties. There are tons of guest guitarists but no way is he allowing anyone to steal his thunder! And who can blame him? The man’s a keyboard genius and Asia would certainly not be the same without him. This, among other songs on the album, really showcases though how strong a singer John Payne is, and how, over a short period from 1992 to 2004, he really made Asia his, no mean feat when you consider he was trying to almost erase the memory of the original vocalist. And more or less succeeded. Even now, he tours with his own band, Asia featuring John Payne, and they do great business.

A superb turn from David Grant’s Gospel Choir, taking the song into the realms of the spiritual and leading into “Wherever you are”, on which Payne and Downes are assisted by 10cc alumni Graham Gouldman and Andrew Gold. It’s a nice mid-paced song, though it’s a little pedestrian after the explosive opener. It has a nice tinkly keyboard line and some pizzicato strings synthwork with a decent rhythm, a fine solo from Payne and some crashing guitar from him near the end. Asia seldom if ever cover another artiste’s song but this is what they do next, with a version of 10cc’s “Ready to go home”, a striding, emotional desire to see one’s homeland, perhaps, starting out on a low, whistly keyboard line with an impassioned vocal from Payne and some great backing vocals too.

It kicks up in intensity shortly, but remains a slow song, almost a prayer in a way as Payne sings ”Lord shine a light for me/ I’m waiting to be born.” Powerful, stirring organ from Downes paints a sepulchral backdrop as Payne sings in almost, but not quite, a gospel style, and the choir from the opener return for a fine performance. A fine guitar solo too from Guthrie Govan, who would go on to become a permanent member of the short-lived band which would only record one more album before being pushed aside in favour of the original lineup in 2008.

The tempo rises then a little for “The last time”, with a bouncy synth melody leading us in and a busy bassline from Payne, while Steve Howe handles the guitars. As I say, I don’t know whether this is because he recorded original sections of this song, as in, it’s an older Asia song, but I doubt he would return only to perform on one track. Anteater can probably tell us. There’s a very typical Asia vocal harmony on this, recalling the best from “Alpha” and “Aqua”, and you can certainly hear the influence of the original guitarist and founder on the track. A very stirring bridge as Payne sings ”All these fields/ That once were green/ Have turned to smoke and steel/ The sun will fall, and the last moon rise/ Don't turn this tide away.”

A dramatic synth line then with bubbling keyboards in the background and a rising guitar as “Forgive me” nods back in the direction of previous album “Arena”, with a jaunty line in the melody which belies the lyrical theme, which seems to be another of Asia’s many eco-related ones but may also have something to do with TV evangelists as the line ”I am direct salvation/ Just send in your donation/ I can promise that you'll be saved” would seem to indicate. Great beat in the song and again a fine, fine performance from Payne. One of my favourites on the album is up next, as “Kings of the day” opens strongly with a rhythm that’s hard not to nod your head or tap your feet to. Some nice sparse fretwork from Govan again, and Payne sings like a man possessed as Downes lays down the soundscape against which his bandmate bares his soul.

If any track on “Aura” can be described as funky, Govan’s guitar here makes this the closest they come, but the strong keyboard presence from Geoff Downes keeps things decidedly progressive rock oriented. It’s not really even AOR, which is a label that befits some other Asia albums: this is pure prog rock. Super little guitar solo halfway through, again quite funky and jazzy, while the final two minutes or so of the song are taken by an extended instrumental that displays both Payne and Downes at their best. There are a few words thrown in, but basically it’s enough of an instrumental to me to qualify for the label.

“On the coldest day in Hell” opens on gentle acoustic guitar and breathing synth with a reflective idea in the lyric as Payne asks ”Do you remember years ago? /All our hopes would ebb and flow/ We thought we'd find a promised land /Our footprints in the sand.” It’s probably the closest to a ballad on the album, which, given Asia’s propensity for two or three on an album, is surprising. Payne’s voice is soulful as a fallen angel here and Michael Sturgis does really well on the percussion here, holding it back and making it very tasteful. Great synthwork from Downes complements a lovely acoustic guitar solo from Govan and a sublime vocal from Payne to end the song as it starts to fade out, but then ends on a dramatic keyboard passage.

This takes us into the longest song on the album by far, almost nine minutes of “Free”, which is certainly also the rockiest, kicking the tempo right up and bringing back memories of tracks like “The heat goes on” and “Rock and roll dreams”. Downes goes crazy on the keys here, squealing and twiddling all over the place, with Steve Howe back on guitar, joined by Pat Thrall and Ian Crichton, and with Payne himself that makes four axemen: you can really hear it in the guitar attack! Despite being the longest and hardest rocking track, “Free” is far from my favourite on the album, in fact it comes in close to the one I like least. But there’s no denying the energy and passion in it. I’m not quite sure why it needs to be as long as it is though: I think a five or six-minute version would have worked just as well.

There are of course several guitar solos in the song, including one on what sounds like Spanish guitar, but Payne throws down a really nice bassline in about the fourth minute too as the thing builds back up to a crescendo and heads into the sixth. I’m glad however to report that, although as I say, “Free” is not my most liked track here, “Aura” does not suffer from the “midpoint syndrome” that so many albums do. It’s consistently good all the way through, and despite the oddly pop nature of the next track, “You’re the stranger” is still a very good and very much Asia track, with whining synth and interesting percussion from Luis Jardim. Great vocal harmonies too; the song is mid-paced and somewhat restrained after the finger-blurring fretwork and speed of “Free”, but in ways it’s just what’s needed, as the chance to catch your breath after that monster is definitely welcome.

Elliot Randall this time joins Guthrie Govan on the guitar, and rips off a fine solo as the song powers along, more ecology themes in it as Payne asks ”Where the eagle used to fly/ They carve their concrete in the sky /Tearing at our mother's skin /Taking all her blood within /Remember how it used to be?” A powerful guitar then punches in as “The longest night” almost winds up the album with a strong, stirring vocal and ominous keyboard, the tempo slowing down but this is no ballad. Based on the Wilfred Owen poem, the song decries the futility of war, as Asia have done down their career with songs like “Too late” and “Countdown to extinction”, as well as “The day before the war” and others. It’s a powerful indictment, Payne giving it all he has on his final outing on the album. The closer is a typical Asia instrumental, and also the title track. It’s a fast upbeat piece with as you would expect plenty of input from Downes on the piano and keys, and flourishes from Payne on the guitar. More great percussion from Sturgis and a sort of choral vocal with the synth complements a really nice organ sound. One last solo from Payne and we’re out of here.

TRACKLISTING

1. Awake
2. Wherever you are
3. Ready to go home
4. The last time
5. Forgive me
6. Kings of the day
7. On the coldest day in Hell
8. Free
9. You’re the stranger
10. The longest night
11. Aura

Note: there are three bonus tracks on my CD, but as per my usual MO I won’t be talking about them. In addition to detracting from the purity of the album itself I find it takes long enough to write these reviews and I always have one eye on how many more tracks are left, so including bonus tracks just makes more work for me. For the record, of the three, the best is probably “Under the gun”, though the other two aren’t bad. As is often the case with additional material though, the quality of none of the three is quite up to the overall level of the album itself, another reason why a) they’re bonus tracks and b) I don’t review them.

Despite what I said in the introduction earlier, for a while I used to approach a new Asia album with the smallest amount of trepidation. Every one had been great, I would think, up to this. Surely this one will be the one that breaks that pattern? And when you’re paying full price for a CD as I used to, that’s something of a gamble to take. But I always felt in my heart confident that Asia would deliver, and they always did. I suppose it’s ironic that the first time they failed to was with a digital download, so that although “XXX” fell far below the standard I had come to expect from this band, it only cost me a dollar or so to find that out. Still, it was a huge disappointment, sort of like the first --- and so far, only --- time Marillion let me down, or when I suffered through “Abacab” by Genesis. You just don’t want your favourite bands to turn out bad albums, even if you get them for free. It’s part pride I guess and part a feeling of being cheated, even if it’s not out of money. There’s also the fear that this is the tip of the iceberg, the point at which the artiste’s material will begin to nosedive in quality and that the next album or albums you get from them you can expect all to be as poor as this one, or worse.

I haven’t, as I say, listened to “Gravitas”, the latest offering from the new/old/new Asia yet, but my expectations have been battered down after the last one, so I’m not really expecting all that much. I may be overstating the case, but I feel that after this album the shine began to rub off a band which had existed for nearly twenty years at that point, and though they achieved something which is rare enough in music, a second rebirth with the album “Phoenix” and the reassembling of the original 1982 lineup sixteen years after they released their debut on the world --- an album which still contains their only hit singles ---the only way from here was down.

“Silent nation” did not overly impress me, “Phoenix” was admittedly excellent and “Omega” a decent followup though nothing terribly special, while quite possibly the death knell for Asia was sounded two years ago with the album that marked, ironically, their thirtieth anniversary. John Wetton, far from revitalising Asia (which didn’t need revitalising anyway and was doing quite well under John Payne, thank you very much) seems almost intent on destroying his legacy, taking apart a decade of great music and leaving us with only the older albums to enjoy. That said, “Gravitas” could be their best album yet, though I think I see a pig flying … oh no wait, I’ve reviewed “Animals” already, haven’t I?

If the latest album is to be Asia’s last gasp, and if it’s anything like “XXX”, maybe it’s better they give it up as a bad job now, before we’re subjected to a string of substandard albums. Personally, I’d rather they made “Gravitas” their finale and left us with superb albums like this one to remember, and try to block out the awful memory of “XXX”.

Do all Asia covers look the same? Because the one from Ki's journal looked very similar, just green.

Yes they were never the most imaginative of bands.

The basic design remains the same, yes, but there are differences. If you Google them you'll see Alpha is different to Aqua (the latter is a marine-themed thing) but both are basically blue. Then Arena and Aura are both kind of orange, while Aria is again blue so they do mostly look the same. The difference would be Silent Nation, which is nothing like any previous or later cover, and to some degree Phoenix and Omega.

But yeah, a quick glance would not really tell you, unless you were a fan, which album you were looking at.

Aura is a great record, possibly Asia's best as far as sheer progginess goes. 'Under The Gun' really should have made the main tracklist though, because its one of the catchiest songs they've ever done by a longshot under any lineup. :love:

Although as everyone knows my favourite musical genre is progressive rock, I've tried hard not to make this journal concentrate on only that. Despite the fact that my very first album reviewed here was a prog rock one, and despite the preponderance here of that genre I've done my best to include metal, rock, blues, classical, even soul and now pop in my journal to try to keep something here for everyone, not just progheads.

But if I'm to reach my target (and I may not do) of listening to and reviewing all the albums in Progarchives' Top 100 Prog Rock Albums for 2013 by the end of the year, I'm going to have to up my game. That means that I really need to aim to have reviews of at least two of the albums every week, and while that may not be possible or achievable I'd like to work towards that goal.

Of course, no matter how good PA think the albums are, some may not resonate with me and in that case I will only touch upon them in a short, perhaps "Bitesize"-like review: many of the ones I've already listened to are pure instrumental and while I have nothing at all against instrumental music, especially prog instrumentals, it can often be hard to find things to say about such albums; sometimes a shorter review is necessary in those instances.So where the album either doesn't measure up, or I feel it doesn't need or merit a full review I'll be doing a shorter, more concise one, which of course will help me on my way towards that target I've set.

In essence, I intend to try -- that's try --- to post a review each Monday and Friday, but this is by no means certain. Some weeks I may post more, some less, or on different days but in order to try to discipline myself in that regard I'm going to try to keep to that schedule.

That said, this is Wednesday, so go figure huh? Well, the plan is to start doing this properly from next week obviously. I've already listened to about ten of the albums on the lower part of the list and will be writing reviews of them soon, whether they be full ones, or much shorter ones if they either don't measure up to the standard or I feel there's not that much I can say about them.

Today's album, however, is certainly not in the latter category...
http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
http://www.trollheart.com/98.png
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...92532013_r.jpg

Ego --- Millenium --- 2013 (Lynx Music)

Now this one I do know. I’ve been playing this for the last few weeks, and am again shocked to see it so low down on the list. Having originally mistaken it for the long-awaited fifth album from the American AOR band of the same name who impressed me so much with their album “Hourglass” in 2000, I was initially confused by the proggy keyboards, atmospheric sounds and soft guitars, and then wondered why the vocalist sounded … different … Slowly the penny dropped. This was not the American Millenium, but despite spelling their name the same (incorrect) way, with one “n” instead of two, this was a totally different band.

As it happens, I have two of their albums already downloaded but have never listened to either. On the basis of this, I’m going to have to rectify that very soon. Millenium (this Millenium) actually come from Poland --- yes, the land of Riverside and Satellite --- and have been in existence since just before the turn of the, um, millennium. Possibly where they got their name. Discounting live albums and EPs, they have released a total of eight albums in that time, of which this is the latest.

The title track gets us underway, with some nice soft guitar and lush keys, and when it gets going I feel the melody has more than a touch of “Aura”-era Asia (there’s a tongue twister for you!) about it. Powerful guitar from Piotr Płonka leads most of the tune in till at about the third minute vocalist and founder Łukasz Gall comes in, his voice strong and clear with a hint of an accent like you might expect. He’s joined a little while later by guest singer Karolina Leszko and then keyboardist Ryszard Kramarski who puts in a fine shift. This is one of three ten-minute songs on the album, the next one being nine, with only six tracks in total, but not a moment wasted on even one. Every track here is pure twenty-four carat gold. Plonka engages in some Marillion style introspective guitar as the song begins to wind down to its conclusion, then rips off a fine searing solo which treads close to the footsteps of guitar god Dave Gilmour. With a final almost tragic vocal and simple piano line the song comes to a slightly abrupt end, my only quibble with this superb opener.

“Born in '67” recalls the heady days of rock and roll as a picture is painted of a more or less idyllic world --- “”He spent hours with his friends outside/ No mobiles and no web” --- that is probably being viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of age. Lovely backing vocals from Leszko here and something that sounds like a banjo or mandolin, and some soulful trumpet work from guest musician Michał Bylica which really helps this song take off. There’s a real sense of loss and regret in this song, as of the passing of something that will never return. As Gall sings ”It’s so hard to find a friendly soul/ In the ocean of despair” you can feel his frustration for the way things have gone.

I do have a small, slight problem with this song. Gall sings about how great it was to be born "With the Beatles rocking tracks" but anyone born in that year would not be able to appreciate either the music or the times till they were at least, what, six or seven? So 1973 at the earliest. Therefore to go on about how great it was in 1967 is a little off the mark: I was born in '63 but don't remember the Kennedy assassination for instance. Maybe he means it more as a kind of imprint on the soul, if such things exist? Anyway it's a small complaint but something that makes it a little harder for me to take the lyric too earnestly.

A great keyboard motif rides along the guitar line, with a superb little sax break from yet another guest, horn player Darek Rybka as the song heads towards its conclusion and into what I suppose I would call another standout, except that this is literally an album of six standouts. I really can’t find one track I don’t like, and while I like one or two more than the others, there’s nothing here that’s not immense. With a sort of country-style acoustic guitar "Dark secrets" turns a little harder fairly quickly, mostly on the keyboard work of Kramarski, including some beautifully minimalist piano, very Nick Cave at moments. A searing solo from Plonka takes the song, then we return to the kind of country feel before it heads off again on a heavier line. Kramarski then leads with a stunning lush solo on the keys which brings us to the midpoint of the track, Karolina Leszko again lending her voice to the backing vocals before the tempo ramps completely up, and on first keys then guitar we get what I can only describe as a prog take on Southern Boogie. This is just incredible and unexpected and carries the tune almost to its end, where it finishes with a staccato rhythm which reminds me of Genesis’s “The musical box”, then fades out on an ultimately unsatisfying piano line and soft vocal.

The ballad comes in the shape of “When I fall”, and gives Leszko finally the chance to really show what she can do, as she partners Gall here in the chorus and complements him perfectly against the backdrop of Kramarski’s melancholy piano. Emotional and effective strings synth ramps the piece up and stirs the passion, then about halfway through Plonka winds up his guitar and ups the tempo of the song, though it falls back on a repeated fading vocal line very reminiscent of Floyd. Soft piano takes over again with the synth backing it with the strings sound, and we move into one of the standsouts among the standouts. “Lonely man” has a driving beat but a dreamy innocence about the guitar, recalling everything from the Alan Parsons Project to the Beatles and early ELO. A lovely violin-like synth introduces the song which then gets going on acoustic guitar and some sleek percussion from Tomasz Paśko.

It’s another long song --- ten minutes and change --- but again not a moment of it is wasted or unnecessary. The overall melody is heartbreakingly lovely, and interestingly almost every line begins with the two words that make up the title. Karolina Leszko is back again to add soft angelic backing vocals, and some pastoral flute-like synth gives the song a gentle early Genesis feeling. Rybka adds another sumptuous sax solo that just wrenches the emotion from you and completes the song, and in the seventh minute, following that solo, Laszko takes over the lead vocal, switching with Gall as the song grows in power and intensity. Some thick organ from Kramarski is joined by a sweet solo from Plonka and again my only problem with the song is that it ends, after building to a real crescendo, too abruptly. A common failing, it would appear, with this band, or at least this album.

The closer is another ten-minute track, and does not disappoint as “Goodbye my Earth” sees us out in fine style. With a big guitar opening that reminds me very much of “Immortal?”-era Arena, dark synth then backs Gall as he sings about the end of things, bookending the album as it began with a newborn trying to come to terms with his life, a real life cycle. Karolina Laszko gives a final, terrific performance on the chorus here, backed only by Plonka’s acoustic guitar, then the song gets more passionate in the last five minutes as both Gall and Laskzo join together, with Kramarski adding in some very Supertramp-like Fender Rhodes in a boogie style. The vocal is then run through a vocoder for some reason, the voice I assume to be Gall’s, while Kramarski riffs off another fine solo on the keys before Plonka goes all rock on the guitar, screeching out a solo that would please the most ardent metalhead. Maybe.

Everything finally comes down with Kramarski’s strings-like synth and hard guitar from Plonka and it all fades down until only the lonely piano line is left, slowly drifting away like the last vestiges of a soul leaving the body.

TRACKLISTING

1. Ego
2. Born in ‘67
3. Dark secrets
4. When I fall
5. Lonely man
6. Goodbye my Earth

Poland is fast becoming --- or has already become --- the centre for new, dynamic progressive rock and it looks like remaining that way. It has been perhaps an unlikely quarter to expect prog rock to come from, as there is no real history there but bands like Riverside, Satellite, Votum, Paradox and others have made it one of the freshest places for prog, virtually a breeding ground there. Like Scandinavia birthed, or rebirthed the black metal revival, prog rock is now having its second coming in Poland.

There is, as I have said, very little I can find fault with on this album. There are no bad tracks. None. If I have to pick holes it would be with Millenium’s annoying tendency to set you up for a really good ending to a song and then just stop, as they do three or four times here. But that’s a small complaint and everything up to that disappointing ending on this album has been next to perfect. Everyone knows their place and their function. Most of the band members play only the one instrument --- or in Gall’s case, sing --- and don’t burden themselves, as many of their contemporaries do, with trying to fulfill several roles at once. Concentrate on what you’re good at: it’s a maxim that certainly works for Millenium, and here they’ve crafted, in my view, close to the perfect progressive rock album.

I therefore have no hesitation in awarding this the highest rating I have yet, a serious 9.7/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/throckingchair.png
Ah, from time to time I like to sit down and think about the music I secretly listen to when nobody else is watching. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it, far from it. But some of these songs are the type of thing you really wouldn’t envisage me enjoying. Though, come to think of it, I have featured both Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond in this journal, so why not? They’re what are usually categorised as the dreaded “easy listening”, the kind of thing your mother or your dad would listen to. Well, I’m certainly old enough to be a dad now, even if I’m not one, and so this section will feature some of the more, um, mature songs that I have enjoyed, and still do, and that time does not dull or have any effect on. Timeless, y’know?

So sit down in my rocking chair --- actually, I could be done for that legally, so why don’t you sit in the other chair, just there that’s right. Nice and soothing, the way it gently moves back and forth, isn’t it? Kind of reminds me of being cradled in my mother’s arms, not that I can remember back that far of course. But I do remember sitting in the actual rocking chairs in my aunt’s house when I was younger, and the feeling of quiet relaxation that gave me, as if all my troubles were just drifting away. That’s kind of the way I feel when I hear these songs. Here, pop these oversized spongy headphones on --- no you can not use your ipod buds! To appreciate this music you need proper phones that cover not only your ears, but most of your head too. You’ll see what I mean when you put them --- ah, yes. You see? Was I lying? Whole different feeling, yes? A feeling of being tethered to the stereo, connected to the music. This is how we used to do it, back in my day.

If you can let yourself go, kick back and just let the music take you as you tip gently -- gently, I said! Do you think those things come cheap? They’re bloody antiques! --- yes, more like that. Now close your eyes and just breathe softly, and allow the music to wash over you as I introduce the first of the songs that makes me feel that way…

http://eil.com/images/main/Elaine+Pa...GLE-382676.jpg

Memory --- Elaine Paige --- “Cats” Original Soundtrack Recording --- 1981

Most people know this song, as it has been covered hundred of times if not more. It is of course from the musical “Cats”, written by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and partially based on the poems of TS Elliot. You don't need to know the whole story of “Cats” to appreciate the beauty of this song, but I must admit that for a long time I knew it came from the show but was not aware of its role in it. When I discovered what it represents, the song meant a lot more to me and had a much heavier emotional impact on me.

Although the music was written by Lloyd-Webber, the lyric was actually penned by Trevor Nunn, who was also the director of the musical. His usual songwriting partner Tim Rice did write a lyric for the song but Nunn’s was preferred. As its title suggests, the song is reflective, looking back on one’s life and wondering how it has come to where it is now. Things that seem ordinary in the day --- sights, sounds, even smells --- take on a new and magical significance and importance this night, and here is why.

Sung by the cat known as Grizabella, who has been a beautiful show cat in her youth but is now approaching the end of her life and is haggard and ugly, the song is used as a plea by her to be accepted back into the community of cats, from where she had left, to seek her fortune, many years ago. Cats being cats, once you leave they a) forget you and b) attack you if you try to come back. Grizabella’s heartfelt plea eventually melts the hearts of her most staunch opponents and she is allowed back in to her old home, just in time to die.

There have been many versions of the song but I’ve always preferred the one sung by Elaine Paige, perhaps because the first time I heard the song it was her singing. The lyric speaks of the wonders of youth and how fleeting they are. When Elaine sings ”I can smile at the old days/ I was beautiful then” you can really feel for her, coming to the end of her life and looking back on her carefree youth. There’s a note of regret --- well, more than a note --- that she left the community as she wails ”It’s so easy to leave me/ All alone with my memories/ Of my days in the sun.” She has finished her wandering now, seen the world, and all she wants is to return to the place she used to call home, there to breathe her last.

The music of course makes the song. The soft, string opening with piano that sort of moves along at almost a slow blues pace, then flute or oboe coming in near the first bridge, the music getting stronger and more dramatic as Elaine’s voice rises with it, then falling back for the second verse as the music recedes in power too. Instrumental break then as the orchestra bursts forward into life and the powerful, stirring climax as both she and the orchestra explode in passion and fervour, even a blast on the cymbals, then a slowly falling oboe line and maybe piano as it fades down and away. You can’t help but be moved.

This is the sort of song you hope nobody will ruin. You just don’t want to see it on “The X-Factor” or “American Idol” being butchered by seventeen-year-olds who have never suffered a tragedy or faced real adversity in their young lives. This is a song that needs the wisdom of age and experience to fully transmit the pathos and yearning in the song, and really get inside the head of the character, Grizabella, as she faces her last night alive, not wishing to die alone.

I’ve never seen “Cats”, but I’m reliably informed this is the best thing to come out of it. I wouldn’t disagree.


”Midnight: not a sound from the pavement.
Has the moon lost her memory? She is smiling alone.
In the lamplight, the withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan.

Memory, all alone in the moonlight:
I can dream of the old days:
I was beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what happiness was:
Let the memory live again.

Every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning.
Someone mutters and the street lamp gutters
And soon it will be morning,

Daylight: I must wait for the sunrise.
I must think of a new life and I mustn't give in.
When the dawn comes tonight will be a memory too,
And a new day will begin.

Burnt out ends of smoky days.
The stale cold smell of morning.
A streetlamp dies; another night is over:
Another day is dawning...

Touch me! It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory of my days in the sun.
If you touch me, you'll understand what happiness is
Look! A new day has begun.”

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png

Well it’s Monday so here’s what will hopefully be the first of two reviews this week. We’re now all the way up to number
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...j218QnmCUFU8AU
where we find
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...12212013_r.jpg

Echo Street --- Amplifier

I must be finally going mad, or else really getting it wrong, because I remember listening, after much encouragement and positive reviews, to “The Octopus” and hearing death growls, which immediately caused me to stop listening. And so when I kicked this up on the MP3 player and pressed play I expected to hear something I would be unlikely to enjoy. And yet, as it turned out, I was way off the mark. Whether Amplifier changed their sound for this album or whether I somehow got “The Octopus” confused with another one I don’t know, but there are no death growls on this album. Quite the contrary: it’s at times as laidback as you could imagine, which was a big and also pleasant surprise to me. This is Amplifier’s fourth album, and talking of surprises, I’m told they have no keyboard player, so that any sounds that seem like they’re synth-made are in fact made on the guitar.

“Matmos” gets us underway, and no I have no idea what it means, but it comes in very quietly and gradually, atmospheric sounds that you would be hard-pressed to believe are guitar-made leading us well into the first minute before proper guitar strums accompanied by ”Na-na-na-na-na-na” opens the song as vocalist Sel Balamir sings softly, the guitar still laconic and atmospheric, almost acoustic, keeping the musical background firm. I’m almost loathe to believe the next sound is on guitar because it sounds completely like keyboard, but that’s what I’m told. Percussion kicks in now, but the song is still very slow to mid-paced,nd a great start to an album I really thought I’d only be reviewing under duress.

It only has eight tracks, but the shortest is just under five minutes while the longest runs for over twelve, so it’s still decent value. There’s a definite sense, at least here, of the old folk and acoustic singers like Dylan, Gates, Young, Guthrie. The guitar gets harder and more powerful in the last two minutes, and both Balamir and Steve Durose handle fret duties, doing a great job between them. The song ends as it began, on single strummed guitar and takes us into “The wheel”, with buzzing, almost hypnotising rhythms, a start somewhat reminiscent of Floyd’s “Welcome to the machine” in places, and a great guitar motif running through it.

It’s a faster song, though not that much, and drummer Matt Brobin does much to lay down the identity of the track, pairing with Alexander Redhead on the bass. The guitar is sharper here, more in-your-face, though one of them keeps that spellbinding theme running --- again, I can’t believe it’s not keys but the evidence is there in the lineup --- while Balamir sings the lyric, and not a hint of growls, never mind death ones. What was I listening to when I thought it was “The Octopus”? Must check that out later. For now, this song slides into a really slick guitar solo as Brobin thrashes out the drumbeat, then it falls back a little in the fourth minute before the guitar motif returns to take it to the end and into the longest track, the twelve-minute “Extra vehicular”. This is a great track but I do notice certain themes and musical phrases recurring throughout the album. This has much of the melody of “Matmos” and is very similar to the next song, which I’ll talk about shortly.

A darker, more dramatic sort of song, it has a deep guitar intro that takes it into the second minute before the vocal comes in, and it’s slower, broodier than either of the two preceding tracks. Elements of Porcupine Tree and Floyd in it, with the guitars punching through into the song around the fifth minute or so, and they really get going in the sixth, and it’s pretty much extended guitar solo (or duet) time from there to the end of the song. It does seem a little dragged out though beyond the tenth minute, and I feel it could have faded down at that point but it stretches on for another two. When I see a song of this length, I always hope to see that the artiste has used up all the available time with music and/or singing and not just left extended noises and effects or even in some cases space just to fill the time. Here, it’s not quite that bad but the song definitely does not need to be this long. Nod to Peter Gabriel at the end with the sound effects that close “Lead a normal life”, but still.

My favourite track is up next, with as I say much of the melody both of “Matmos” and “Extra vehicular”. Nevertheless, “Where the river goes” is still far and away the standout on the album. Great jangly guitar, super hook and a great melody. When the guitars kick in properly it really lifts the song to another level, as do the vocal harmonies. It’s interesting too that there’s little or no percussion really until more than halfway through, with some intriguing guitar effects before it takes off on a major guitar solo that carries it for the next minute or so, with the chorus coming back in and the song ending on an acapella final line.

Sadly, this is, for me, one of those albums that suffers from midpoint syndrome, and the rest of the songs just completely fail to live up to the promise of the first four. “Paris in the spring” has a nice almost early Genesis sound about it, slow and gentle and somewhat similar to the opening of “Entangled” from “A trick of the tail”, then changes into a very Porcupine Tree style, darker and almost menacing in a way: you could nearly hear Steven Wilson singing this. Again, I marvel that the Hammond-like sound is made on guitar; I would never have guessed. These two guys can really do things with their guitars that you would not believe. Definitely the most downbeat of the tracks on the album, and it leads into the shortest, “Between today and yesterday”, which reminds me of the guitar work of mid-seventies Dan FOgelberg, with a vocal harmony that reinforces this and also recalls the likes of Gallagher and Lyle. Very acoustic and folky, upbeat but gentle, with a certain Country feel to it too. It sounds like there’s a female backing vocalist but none is mentioned so I guess not, unless if she is there she’s uncredited. But if not, then Steve Durose has a very high-pitched voice, which he may have.

The title track then is next and not surprisingly the guitars have plenty of reverb, feedback and, well, echo on them as they take the tune over, really turning it into as close to an instrumental as you can go, the music well to the fore as the vocal, sung in a high-pitched dreamy tone that puts me in mind of the more psychedelic work of the Beatles, sort of stays in the background. I hear flashes of Hogarth-era Marillion here too, and possibly the Beach Boys. But it’s the guitars that drive this song, and even though it runs for six minutes almost, on the same basic melody line, pulling in the opening phrase from “Matmos”, this tune does not seem overlong. The closer does however. Coming in at just over seven minutes, “Mary Rose” outstays its welcome by the fourth. It does however remind me very much of the closer on Marillion’s “Radiation”, a song called “A few words for the dead”. It’s not exactly similar but it is very close. A dark, sort of slide guitar opening with a low vocal before it picks up and becomes a hard rocker that tries to be something it isn’t. I have to say it just kind of bored me. Not a good closer.

TRACKLISTING

1. Matmos
2. The wheel
3. Extra vehicular
4. Where the river goes
5. Paris in the spring
6. Between today and yesterday
7. Echo Street
8. Mary Rose

To use an old footballing cliche, this is very definitely an album of two halves. The first four tracks are consistently excellent and the last four, well, aren’t. Apart from maybe “Between today and yesterday” I don’t really hear anything here that I would be interested in hearing again, whereas the first half of the album I could listen to all day. I’m not sure whether that’s a case of Amplifier running out of ideas after the first four songs, or if they just don’t appeal to me but I felt a definite shift in quality once “Where the river goes” finished. It was almost, but not quite, like I was listening to another album.

For once, the first time since I began reviewing these albums, I can see why “Echo Street” occupies the lower echelons of the list, though on the strength of the first four tracks I would have placed it a little higher. It was never going to make it to the top though, or anywhere close, and so the best I can award it really --- and this is obviously based on the first four tracks, and also the fact that I had expected to have been a lot more disappointed with it than I turned out to be --- is a reasonable 6/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
This list, it would appear, is going to take me all over the world before I’m halfway finished. We’ve already met a band from Greece, later we’ll be heading over to Spain and then Germany (or is it the other way around? I forget…) but right now we’re heading into the heart of progressive rock country, the current hotbed of all this is prog. Of course, I can only be talking about … Ukraine?
http://www.logotypes101.com/logos/52...annover_96.png
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...30122012_r.jpg
Aleatorica --- Karfagen

Yes indeed, the territory that’s currently all over the news as Mister Putin tries to turn back the political clock to the 1950s and does a decent impression of Stalin, grabbing the Crimea and “liberating” it, welcoming its citizens back into the arms of Mother Russia, whether they want to be there or not, while casting greedy eyes over the rest of the ex-Soviet dependency. But here at the Playlist we don’t concern ourselves too much with the machinations of dictators, I mean politicians and the movement of armies. It’s musical movements we’re interested in, and here there are plenty, whether they’re flying up and down fretboards or gliding over keyboards.

Karfagen are essentially a two-man operation, and the band is the brainchild of one Antony Kalugin, who formed the band while still at school and then asked his friend Sergei Kovalev to join him. Remarkably, Antony has, in the period 2003-2005, worked on or composed over forty separate albums, some solo, some as projects, but his first work under the Karfagen name was released in 2006. Since then the band has released five more albums, almost one a year, making “Aleatorica” their sixth overall.

Although a two-man band in essence, there are a lot more than two people contributing to this album, with oboe, bassoon, cello, sax, viola and electric violin players all adding to the mix, as well as flutes, clarinets and just about anything else you can think of. All in all, it looks like fifteen players in all, including the two founders. Impressive. Antony sings and plays guitar, keyboards and some percussion, while Sergei looks after accordions, bayan, does some more keyboards and even adds some vocals. The latter however are sparsely spread throughout the album, and for much of it it reads like an instrumental project, so much so that it’s something of a surprise --- was to me anyway --- when either of them start singing.

The title track --- subtitled “Shuffler’s riddle” --- opens the album with a decent five-minuter, almost Russian (sorry guys) style piano before the percussion kicks in and Sergei’s accordion adds its own flavour, then the guitars get going and flute and clarinet slip in too. The tempo is mid-paced with a certain amount of drama, not a bad opener, with a kind of descending melody on the accordion. I must admit, not my favourite instrument but when used well it can be really effective. The tempo picks up then on lilting clarinet and then gets more proggy with the keys, returning to the Russian themes and then going a bit Jethro Tull before the horns take the tune in a very jazzy direction with a lot of discordant stuff going on in the background. Kind of ruins it a little for me. The guitars take it again in the last minute but I would personally sound a note of caution here, that I think there’s too much going on, that the lads are trying to crowbar too many instruments and styles together, and I’m not sure it works that well.

“Mad gods of destiny” starts off with a sort of Irish reel, the accordion and flute trading licks, then it ramps up as the percussion cuts in along with the guitar. This is the first of the few vocal tracks and Antony’s accent is so thick initially that I thought he was singing in his native language, but he’s not, as quickly becomes apparent. It’s a good rocker, the tempo a good bit higher than the opener with some nice vocal harmonies too. Sort of reminds me of Ten or Arena in places. What this song does prove is that in addition to being a talented multi-instrumentalist, Antony is a really good singer with real power and passion. The song goes into a very Alan Parsonsesque instrumental around the sixth minute with some nice tenor sax from Artyom Vasilchenko and more great flute work from Sergey Klevensky.

There’s a short workout on the keys then for “Shadoof”, which lasts barely two minutes but is very cinema scorelike, really enjoyed this even though it was very short. It leads into another instrumental called “D’Ale”, which has a rather obvious and predictable celtic feel. I must admit, I get a little tired of artistes painting Ireland as being a place dedicated to drinking. I mean (hic) it’s not we’re (hic) all drunks now (his) is it? What? We are? Mere … meer, c'mere an’ say that ye bast …. Sorry, it just annoys me. Nevertheless there’s some good irish fun to be had in this song and it is good: I just wish they’d called it something else. My moan for the day. A short one up next for the oddly-titled and hopefully never-to-be-experienced “Gnome in a bathroom” (don’t they usually hang out in gardens with little fishing rods?) which is one of my favourites on the album, with a really nice mix of acoustic guitar and accordion, some deep bassoon adding a throaty quality to it. Again, it’s not long enough sadly.

“Solar cycles” is longer, almost six minutes, in which flute, clarinet and oboe dance around each other, brought together then by Sergei’s accordion before the tune evolves into something close to a medieval style with a bit of waltz thrown in. Some fine sax breaks with piano interspersed throughout the melody leads us into “Transaleatorica”, another short instrumental mostly carried by Klevensky’s flute work as we head into the longest track, nine and a half minutes of “Mystic castles”. It’s accordion that leads this for the first minute or so before flute joins in, keyboards and piano making their presence felt as the third minute turns to the fourth. It’s probably the most overtly progressive rock track on the album at this point, with a lot of nods to Yes, Camel and ELP. Some very jazzy piano then in the seventh minute. After sixteen seconds of flute which goes under the name of “Radio beam” this jazzy piano continues into “Whirlabout”, which is just basically great fun, almost a jam.

Some very Genesis keyboards in the third minute, with some almost electronica thrown in and it gets quite new-wave at times, then some truly awe-inspiring cello and violin work as the piece comes to a conclusion. Another short instrumental in “Sweetmeat”, this time a showcase for Sergei on the accordion and Vanya Rubanchyuk on the drumseat. Nice, again kind of middle ages feel to it, bit Tullish I guess though I don’t know much of their work as I don’t like it. The other standout comes for me in the form of the only other vocal track, the almost eight-minute “A day without rain”, which again has deep celtic undertones. I’m not sure why this is the case as the guys are as far removed from Ireland as they could be, but maybe they just like Irish music? Anyway, it has a deep, dark, dramatic keyboard line and a low vocal, almost spoken rather than sung for the first verse before Antony shows what he can do as the song begins to take shape.

Very much a Pink Floyd influence on this, with a great chorus involving some fine backing vocals. A great rising bassoon and keyboard harmony about halfway through, The vocal comes back in about the fifth minute, and again you’re struck by the resemblance to, or at least the style of, Roger Waters, particularly on “The Wall” and “The final cut”. Just to cement the Floyd comparison then, Antony rips off a very Gilmour solo to close the track. Whether this was meant to be a conscious tribute to Floyd or not I don’t know. It’s a great song but it is quite derivative, but not so much that you would accuse them of ripping Waters and Gilmour off. Still one of my favourites, and as I say the last vocal track on the album.

Which leaves us with two, the first a short piano piece called “Amazing Ananda” which runs for just over two minutes, some flute certainly helping out with some squishy synth too, but it’s the piano’s show as Sergei hits the keys harder and edges into some seventies Genesis areas, then the album comes to a close on “Aleatorica (Back to the alea)” which I guess bookends with the opener. Celtic flute, piano and busy synth carry the tune, which soon evolves into a sort of boogie blues number with Sergei’s accordion adding its voice, some nice guitar work too as the track heads into its final minutes. There’s something of a false ending then as marimbas kick in and then everything stops in the fourth minute for about maybe ten seconds before a wash of synth reintroduces the flute which backs it, then synth changes to piano and we fade out to leave the flute on its own, dying away in the last seconds of the song.

TRACKLISTING

1. Aleatorica (Shuffler’s riddle)
2. Mad gods of destiny
3. Shadoof
4. D’Ale
5. Gnome in a bathroom
6. Solar cycles
7. Tranaleatorica
8. Mystic castles
9. Radio beam
10. Whirlabout
11. Sweetmeat
12. A day without rain
13. Amazing Ananda
14. Aleatorica (Back to the alea)

I’m not sure whether I would class this as progressive rock really. There are elements, sure, but mostly they’re only in one or two tracks, and with the wealth of instrumentation on display here I’d consider this almost more folk or ethic music really. But it’s an album I really enjoyed and to say it’s mostly the work of just two guys, and more, that it comes from out of the dark depths of Eastern Europe just shows how much of a triumph it is. I’d certainly be disposed towards hearing more of Karfagen’s work, though again it would not be terribly high on my list of priorities. Nevertheless, as I remarked in my review of This Patch of Sky’s “Newly risen, how brightly you shine” in my “Bitesize” journal recently, for an instrumental album to keep my interest there has to be a lot of different and varied music going on. This is not entirely instrumental but as close as it gets, and it certainly fulfills that criterion. Although some tracks nod back to others nothing is as samey or as formulaic as the other album.

it is good to know that even in the farthest reaches of what used to be the USSR (and will again, if the Russian president has his way!) good music is still alive and kicking, and that talented musicians are working with perhaps not the greatest support structure and you would imagine some restrictions on what they can do and what they can broadcast. Karfagen may not be what I would strictly speaking think of as progressive rock, but it’s still damn fine music, and Ukraine can be rightfully proud that it has artistes of this calibre, who can compete with some of the best in the world.

Nice job, guys. I hesitate to award this album too low a score, but must take into account the sometime lack of prog rock in many of the tracks, as well as the probably unintentional slight to my home country (yes I’m that bitter and twisted!). At the same time I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the difficulties faced by a band trying to make it in this genre in what would be seen as one of the perhaps lesser-developed countries of Eastern Europe, and the fact that not only are they only two guys writing this but they appear to have self-released the album.

Therefore I think a reasonable rating is 6/10. I’d like to rate it higher but due to the concerns above this is the best I can do, though it probably deserves better.

(Note: I looked, but there is nothing I can find on YouTube --- not that surprisingly --- so I'm afraid I can't showcase their music)

http://www.trollheart.com/runcoverspl.png
Surely one of the best-known metal songs --- inside and outside the genre --- and indeed best-loved is Motorhead’s “Ace of spades”? Ask any man or woman in the street --- well, man anyway --- to name one Motorhead, or even one metal song, chances are they’ll name this. It’s been used for everything from car chase scenes to video games to … well, just about anything that needs a powerful, forceful and exciting theme. Someone once said it was or should be the theme to the end of the world, and I would certainly agree.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._of_Spades.jpg
I went on at some length during last year’s special Metal Month about how the track has become the proverbial albatross around the band’s neck --- not that they care --- and it’s true, but it’s also inspired surely more cover versions than any other song in the whole of metaldom, with over twenty known versions in existence, with everyone from bluegrass to punk to techno taking a stab at it. It’s one of those songs that really transcends genres: even if you hate metal you’re surely going to know it and have heard it, and maybe some secret part of you wants to headbang to it. Not bad for a song that only got to number fifteen and spent a mere two weeks in the charts!

So why is this a “Special Edition”? Well, with all those versions running around it just wouldn’t be right to do what I usually do, which is feature just one. So I’m going to be looking at some of the least expected and more outlandish covers here, and examining just how many boundaries this humble two minutes and forty-nine seconds of heavy metal thunder crosses.

First up is Batmobile, a psychobilly band from Holland


A folk/ska version? See the Barking Dogs…


There’s a Glam Metal version too, courtesy of TigertailzNot to mention Hayseed Dixie, who put a bluegrass twist on it…An unnecessarily long live version from TrickyEven our own Stiff Little Fingers take a shot at it on stageAnd of course we couldn’t forget Bathory!Want a Russian metalcore version? You got it!There’s even a techno (techno-techno-techno!) version!But apparently this is the only version Lemmy himself likes!Yeah, even robots dig this song and try to play it!This one is amateur, but I had to include it because I’ve always wanted to hear it on pianoJesus! Even Slipknot’s Corey Taylor had a stab at it! Not bad, either…Are these kids the future of heavy metal? Um, no. But they are all aged 10-15 so you gotta admit they have balls. Or will have. Stop that! Just listen!A ska version from French band SkarfaceThere’s also a Ukranian version and an acapella one, but YouTube won’t give it up to me so I can’t feature those.But of course, where would we end but with Lemmy covering his own song in an acoustic version? Rock on!

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
I said in the last review that this list is taking us all over the world, and so it is. Today we find ourselves in beautiful sunny Argentina. Now surprisingly I have heard one other prog rock band from this country, featured in fact in my journal a year or more back, the rather wonderful Apocalypse, and I was very impressed by them. They however hailed from the capital, whereas these guys come from, I’m told, Rosario, which is apparently a small suburb of Santa Fe, about 200 kilometres north of Buenos Aires.
http://www.aperfectworld.org/clipart...assions/95.gif
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...31122013_r.jpg
Láquesis --- Láquesis

I don’t know for certain, but I am pretty sure that the name of this band is either a translation in their native Spanish of, or a reference to, the three Fates in mythology who were said to guide the lives of humans. The Greeks called them the Morae, the Romans the Parcae and the Norse the Norns, but in all cases they were represented by three women, one very young, one middle-aged and one old. The youngest, Lachesis, was she who spun the thread out of which men’s lives were fashioned. Clothos, the middle one, wove the thread and Atropos, the crone, cut it when it was time for someone to die (hence the term atrophy). My theory is supported by the fact that the closing track is a suite, divided in four, called “Las Moiras” (close huh?) and does indeed contain three movements which refer to the figures above. Not to mention that they’re looking out at you from the album sleeve!

Anyway, whatever the case, this is probably obviously the first effort from Láquesis the band, who have been together since … um, I don’t know. As with most South American music, details are hard to come by. Even if the band happens to have a website (which these don’t appear to) chances are it will be in Spanish anyway, but I’m told they have been together for a number of years. It certainly shows in the close-knit performances and the sometimes almost telepathic understanding between the five-piece, and what results appears to be something of a revelation, and a find in modern prog not often happened across.

A nice hard guitar starts off “Efecto placebo” (translation anyone?) ;) and it then settles down into a nice sort of laidback guitar and synth line with some lovely relaxed percussion. Rather surprisingly, the vocal when it comes in is in English. It’s not that I haven’t heard “foreign” bands use English in their lyrics, but considering the title is in Spanish I thought … well anyway, singer Martin Puntonet has a very engaging voice, very calming and soothing and the backing vocals work very well too. The guitar work of Guillermo Caminer is special and Diego Actis on the keys gives a boppy, Supertramp-style feel to the music, then switches into full eighties Marillion mode.

There are only technically six tracks on this album, with the final one being a suite of four parts, but nothing is wasted here, not one note. A super slick little guitar solo from Caminer leads us into militaristic drumming from Martin Teglia and a powerful guitar and synth ending, taking us into “Tema X”, on atmospheric keys joined by a dramatic little guitar passage and the first appearance of the Hammond from Actis. Gives the music a great seventies feel without dragging it back to that decade (Are you listening, members of The Watch?) and keeping it fresh and contemporary. This track is instrumental and very much a workout for Actis as his fingers fly over the keys, culminating in a soft little piano piece to which Caminer adds some gorgeous guitar work. “Hamacamatic” has a great latin sound to it, as you might perhaps expect though it hasn’t been that prevalent so far that you’d notice. Another instrumental, this one is much longer, clocking in at over eight minutes and allowing Caminer his head but still very keyboard-driven. Faster than the previous with a real sense of jamming in it. Some almost AOR keyboards lead into a real workout for all band members.

A soft and yearning keyboard line takes us into “Puestas del sol”, with some expressive guitar and gentle percussion, picking up a little in the third minute with the addition of tubular bells and choral vocals. Gets a bit bluesy in the seventh minute --- it runs for just over twelve --- and I hear real echoes of twenty-first century Marillion here, especially on “Happiness is the road”. Turns into a Tony Banks solo-style piano tune near the end then ramps up for the big ending with a fine solo from Caminer.

“Lemuria” has a gentle acoustic guitar opening, and only the second vocal track. Throwing me completely though Puntonet this time sings in Spanish. Nice addition of flute and there’s a neoclassical piano interlude from Actis halfway through which then turns into a keyboard solo and leads into one on the guitar as the tune speeds up a little and gets more “hard progressive” as it were. That brings us to the closer, the four-part suite that Láquesis call “Las Moiras”. The first movement is hard guitar and jumping synth which opens “Láquesis” itself, rocking along faster than the band have up to now but slows down near the end on Gilmouresque guitar from Caminer and soft lush synth from Actis. I suppose if my analogy is correct, this is supposed to represent the start of life.

“Cloto” then comes in on solo piano that then metamorphoses into a big keyboard fanfare as the tempo jumps up, percussion now joining in and guitar fitting in around the edges, but definitely a vehicle for Diego Actis until Ariel Lozar comes in with some truly exceptional bass work. Laidback acoustic guitar from Caminer takes us into the third movement, “Atropos”, where one would assume our unknown hero faces his or her death, and the oldest of the Fates begins to cut the thread of their life. It’s an uptempo, almost panicky keyboard arpeggio for the first minute before it settles down slightly into its own groove, allowing Caminer to take the tune with a searing solo of his own, the piece returning to the slow relaxed tone of the first movement as we head towards the final part.

“Requiem” brings everything to a close with soft string-like keys, a darker, moodier theme and a kind of medieval sound with the bass sounding like a heartbeat as the keys work busily away, chugging guitar coming in from Caminer as the piece begins to reach its climax and he slams everything into overdrive with an almost metal solo, low choral vocals adding into the mix before the movement, the suite and indeed the album comes to a most satisfying close.

TRACKLISTING

1. Efecto placebo
2. Tema X
3. Hamacamatik
4. Puestas del sol
5. Lemuria
6. Las Moiras -- Suite
I: Láquesis
II: Cloto
III: Atropos
IV: Requiem

This is an interesting album for many reasons. Like last week’s reviewed Karfagen, the thing is mostly instrumental and features only two vocal tracks but unlike “Aleatorica”, there are two different languages employed on those tracks. The musicianship is superb, again perhaps surprising though it probably should not be; but progressive rock bands from South America, particularly Argentina, aren’t exactly spilling out of my record collection. These guys are good! It’s also interesting because although Láquesis pay their dues to the giants of progressive rock --- Yes, Camel, Genesis --- as well as some of the more recent additions (I hear Marillion, Pendragon, Big Big Train in there too) --- they never make the mistake of imitating them, as some other bands have. These five Argentines have their own, very distinctive sound.

The wealth of talent displayed here makes me wonder if I shouldn’t be checking further into the music of this country, if not the entire continent? But before I do that, I have another ninety-five albums on this list to process, so I guess that will have to wait for the moment. As for now, I think it’s fair to award this album, given that it’s a debut and sounds so polished, yet not a production monster, a solid 7/10.

Hey, TH, check your PM's, trick.

Done and done. Sent you a reply. Trick. ;)

http://www.trollheart.com/laff8.png
Music doesn’t always have to be serious. Sometimes it is of course, and needs to be: if you don’t take your music seriously then what’s the point? But as my “Psychic Album Reviews” journal has shown, there are occasions where you can just lie back and laugh, both at yourself and at the music, and jsut indulge in something that is ultimately silly and nonsensical, but great fun still.

In this section I’ll be looking at those novelty, comedy songs that have made us shake our heads but stll brought a smile to our lips, if only an ironic one. “The Chicken song” by Spitting Image. “Ernie”, by Benny Hill. “Jilted John”. “Brand nwe combine harvester”. And Weird Al of course. Songs that often make no sense and you wonder why they were written, but still laugh at them: you just can’t help yourself.

I won’t be going into too deep analysis of the songs --- after all, this is all fun. Mind you, I had fun once and it was awful! --- but I will be telling you what I know about the songs and what I think of them, whether you want to hear it or not. ;) Maybe some will bring back fond, embarrassing or awkward memories for you, who knows?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...n%27_Cover.jpg

Star Trekkin’ --- The Firm --- 1987
Music by John O’Connor and Grahame Lister, lyrics by John O’Connor, Grahame Lister and Rory Kehoe.

Chart Position: Number One (for two weeks)


(Warning: this review will be Nerd-heavy and contain many references to Star Trek. If you are offended by such material please do not read any further. Thank you for your co-operation.)
:laughing:

Note: this was briefly featured in my now-defunct section "Weird **** I like", back in 2011, but I only touched on it slightly. This will be a little more in-depth.

If any show has been parodied more than “Star Trek” I don’t want to know about it. I’m a big Trek fan myself (though I wouldn’t call myself a Trekker: you’ll find no Starfleet uniform in my wardrobe!) and have seen it, often rightly, slagged off more times and in more ways than I care to remember. Some of the parodies have been good, some very good, some bad. This I would put in the middle category. It’s clever, it’s funny and it pokes fun at the franchise in a way none but the most tight-arsed Trek fan could take offence at.

Utilising an original verse written by Rory Kehoe but with amendments and additions from John O’Connor and Grahame Lister, the former a session musician and composer, while the latter was a guitarist and still plays in a rock band, it is of course a parody of the classic TV series. The basic melody is a fast, uptempo, almost frenetic rhythm based around a children’s chant like the type they sing skipping (or, if you’re American, jumping) rope or playing other games. It’s sung in a high falsetto (probably using studio technology to speed up and raise the octave of the singers, as the voice sounds female but no female is credited), again like children, and briefly catalogues the mission of the USS Enterprise and its crew.

Each has their own line, with Scotty singing “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!”, a line he only spoke once but which has become identified with his “miracle-worker” reputation within the series and onboard the ship. I can’t remember what episode it was in (I’m not that much of a nerd!) but I know it was something to do with the ship’s orbit decaying so that they would fall into the atmospheric pull of the planet (I am that much of a nerd!) and Kirk demanded he do something, to which Scotty replied “I can’t change the laws of physics Sir” or something similar.

Uhura (comms officer) warns ”There’s Klingons on the starboard bow” while Mister Spock declares “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” NERD ALERT! NERD ALERT! Spock used Kirk’s given name perhaps twice or three times in the entire run of the series. His stuffy formality and his Vulcan etiquette meant he always referred to his as Captain, leading to their cover almost being blown in “The city on the edge of forever” when he used the title. Doctor McCoy says “It’s worse that that! He’s dead Jim!” This at least is accurrate: McCoy called Kirk by his first name more often than not, and the captain referred to him affectionately as “Bones”.

Of course the song would not be complete without input from the man himself, and Captain Kirk declares “We come in peace, shoot to kill!” The tempo gets faster and more frantic as the song progresses, with the chorus thrown in after each character speaks, until it reaches a climax at the end when the voices get so high they almost move out of the range of human hearing and then fade away.

The song is great but the video really makes it, with what I think is claymation (though the puppets’ heads all look like they’re made out of a potato) and the action switching between the bridge of the Enterprise, outside shots of the ship and three aliens on a small moon who are watching, they who sing the chorus. A nice touch is that Kirk is sitting in his captain’s chair holding a wooden log: Captain’s Log? Eventually poor old Scotty is overwhelmed as Kirk delcares “Warp Factor 9” and he replies despairingly “If I give it any more captain she’ll blow!” And she does. The ship explodes as the song fades out.

Utterly brilliant. The Firm came into being when O’Connor and Lister, unable to find anyone who would perform their 1982 novelty song “Arthur Daley e’s alright”, decided to do it themselves. This song encountered similar problems for them, and was turned down by every label they approached so they ended up pressing a few hundred copies independently. After a flurry of activity on radio the song quickly became a hit and indeed made it to the number one spot. Not bad going for a song no label was interested in!


”Star Trekkin’ across the universe
On the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk.
Star Trekkin’ across the universe
Boldly going forward, cos we can’t find reverse!”

(Lieutenant Uhura, report!)

Uhura: “There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow
Starboard bow Jim.”

(Analysis, Mister Spock?)
Spock: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Not as we know it Captain.”

Uhura: “There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
Starboard bow Jim.”

Star Trekkin’ across the universe
On the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk.
Star Trekkin’ across the universe
Boldly going forward, still can’t find reverse!”

(Medical update, Doctor McCoy!)

McCoy: “It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead, Jim!
It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead!”

Spock: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Not as we know it Captain.”

Uhura: “There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow,
Starboard bow Jim.”

(Starship Captain James T. Kirk!)

Kirk: “We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill!
We come in peace, shoot to kill! Shoot to kill men!

McCoy: “It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead, Jim!
It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead!”

Spock: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Not as we know it Captain.”

Uhura: “There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow
Scrape ‘em off, Jim!”

Star Trekkin’ across the universe
On the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk.
Star Trekkin’ across the universe
Boldly going forward, and things are getting worse!”

(Engine Room: Mister Scott!)

Scotty: “Ye cannae change the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics!
Ye cannae change the laws of physics, laws of physics Jim!”

Kirk: “We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill!
We come in peace, shoot to kill! Scotty, beam me up!

McCoy: “It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead, Jim!
It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim! Dead, Jim! Dead!”

Spock: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Not as we know it Captain.”

Uhura: “There’s Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow,
Starboard bow Jim.”

Scotty: “Ye cannae change the laws of --- ach, see you Jimmy!”

McCoy: “It’s worse than that! It’s finished, Jim!”

Kirk: “Bridge to Engine Room, Warp Factor Nine!

Scotty: “Ach! If I give it any more she’ll blow, Captain!”

Star Trekkin’ across the universe
On the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk.
Star Trekkin’ across the universe
Boldly going forward, cos we can’t find reverse!”

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
http://94thinfdiv.com/94th_g_b.gif
I'm a little late with this one. Had it written (truth to tell, I have several written) but I completely forgot I hadn't uploaded it. So here it is, about fifteen minutes over my personal deadline.
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...41592013_r.jpg
From the days of Deucalion, Chapter 1 --- Leap Day

This album put me in two minds. On some levels it’s pretty damn great, on others it’s quite a disappointment. Sometimes I found myself excited and sometimes bored. Some tracks I wished were longer and then some of them I could not wait to see the back of. Such is the dichotomy presented by Dutch outfit Leap Day who, like many or indeed most of the bands here so far, I had never heard of prior to this. Indeed, I didn’t even know such a thing as Leap Day existed --- Leap Year, yes, but Leap Day? Well apparently it’s the name given to that very day which turns every fourth year into a Leap Year, February 29. Who knew?

This is the third album from the band, and once again, like the previous few album it’s a short one in terms of tracks, eight in total. None of them are epics --- the longest is twelve minutes, with the shortest, the opener, a mere two --- and they vary as I say between pretty good and pretty meh. There’s a nice acoustic opening and it’s slow and laidback for “Ancient times”, the guitar not anywhere near Hackett level, but not bad. It goes straight from that into one of the two longer tracks, “Signs on the 13th” which is just over nine minutes long and opens on droning, bassoon-like keys and a crash of drums building to a mini-fanfare, slow and graceful like the overture to a symphony or the opening to an opera. Things start to get a little harder dramatically, the keyboard sounding like violins in that urgent tone strings have a way of creating, and getting slowly (very slowly) louder with odd little sound effects flying around in the background. For the keyboard soundscapes we can look to both Gerrit van Engelenburg and Derk Evert Waalkens, the percussion mostly handled by Koen Roozen. It’s a good “overture”, but it goes on so long (four minutes) that you’re fooled into thinking this is another instrumental, before the vocal comes in on almost the fifth minute, low and soft and almost unmarked, as Jos Harteveld makes his entrance.

I must give him credit here, as he really does not try to take over the song as most singers do when they arrive but despite his intentions, if such they are, it’s his voice that you’re drawn to, not because it’s loud and brash but because it’s so much the opposite. Like they say, sometimes a whisper can be louder than a scream. Or something. This is one of the songs that impresses me, almost a theme for the album. which I think may be a concept but I can’t confirm. Similar topics seem to run through the songs though and it does seem like they’re telling some sort of story. A very nice Pendragon-style guitar solo from Eddie Mulder as the song moves towards its final minute, then we’re into “Changing directions”, something more of a rock song with a nice guitar intro then some sweet Hammond before it kicks up and bops along really well on the back of the two keysmen’s flying fingers.

If this wasn’t so long it would probably make a good single, as it has that commercial, radio-friendly appeal that much of Marillion’s material from about 1992 to about 2005 had, but the song runs for short of eight minutes so it’s not a candidate, if any of the tracks indeed are. Good vocal harmonies provided by both the keyboard players as well as Mulder. Definitely one of the heavier songs on the album, though in fairness that’s not saying that much. Very pleasant though. The longest track is up next, with “Insects” running for just over eleven minutes. Another nice acoustic guitar intro with the thunder that closed the previous track carrying through here. Jos has been compared (badly) to Gabriel, and I can sort of hear it here, but I think it’s an unfair accusation. He has his own voice and is probably just influenced, like many prog vocalists, by the master.

It’s a nice gentle opening to the song, with some soft piano and what sounds like violins but is I guess synthesiser, the melody almost reminiscent of something you might hear from the Carpenters or a group of that ilk. The slow guitar break in the fourth minute is this time very Hackett inspired, however the fifth minute gave me a real problem when I was listening to this on my MP3 player walking along, as it’s mostly the sound of insects flying and seemingly engaging in some sort of war, and I, unaware the sound was on the music, kept flinching and going to swat imaginary bugs that I believed were attacking me!

The music gets a little intense and mad here as I guess the war plays itself out, then in the eighth minute or so it calms back down on the back of whistly keys and upbeat guitar, dropping back to acoustic in the ninth before Jos comes back in with the vocal and taking the song to its conclusion. This could have something to do with the likes of a plague of locusts, like in the Bible, though I’m by no means sure, but the final line ”Was it a punishment or environmental?” would seem to indicate there may be some truth in that. “Hurricane” opens with an acapella line from Jos then some powerful keys and a screeching guitar that reminds me of “Run to the hills” --- I’m not crazy about the vocal here and this is one of the weaker songs certainly: it’s just a little empty of ideas I feel. It is in fact one of a triumvirate of lower standard songs that follow each other. “Ambrosia” has the potential to be a really great track, but seems to lose its way fairly soon. A gentle acoustic guitar line and soft vocal quickly punches up through the registers and the song changes totally, becoming something of a mix of an Arena track and a refugee from an early Genesis album, while the less said about “Haemus” the better. I just find it totally standard, by-the-numbers rock, hardly even what I could comfortably call prog rock. Very generic.

Luckily though the album recovers at the end and finishes well with “Llits doots nus --- Sun stood still”, a seven-minute instrumental incorporating elements of the Alan Parsons Project with some nice guitar and bass work, this in fact being the only instrumental track on the album, and though it does little to wipe the memory of the previous three tracks from my mind, it does at least ensure that the album closes, if not quite on a high, then at least with grace and polish.

TRACKLISTING

1. Ancient times
2. Signs on the 13th
3. Changing directions
4. Insects
5. Hurricane
6. Ambrosia
7. Haemus
8. Llits doots nus --- Sun stood still

Yeah, again I can see why this album is so low down the list, though in fairness there are albums I have already reviewed that should be well above this. It’s a solid album but I would question its even being included on the list, when so many good progressive rock albums I heard last year were not. It’s one of those albums where the good tracks struggle to balance out the bad, but in the case of “From the days of Deucalion, Chapter 1” it’s an impossible task. If this was a debut album I might have been more forgiving, but these guys have had four years to perfect their formula, and to be honest they still seem unsure as to what direction they want to go in.

Would I listen to another album by Leap Day? Let me put it this way: while listening to six or seven of these albums on rotation on a playlist I began to learn to dread when their name came up. Put it another way: if Leap Day released only one album every leap year it would probably be one too many. Or a third view: if this is chapter one, I’m not in any hurry to hear chapter two!

I won’t trash the album, as there are good songs on it, but they can’t save what is basically a relatively substandard album that probably only made it onto the list by the expedient of sleeping with the listmaker, so guys you will have to be happy with my, I think more than generous, 5/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/mush3.png
Ah you can’t beat the classics can you? Which of us hasn’t danced, swayed, kissed or indeed fu --- mbled in the dark to this superb love song? The song that really made 10cc and got them a major recording contract, it has gone down in history as one of the most technically expert and innovative pieces of music of the seventies. In a time when polyphonic synthesisers were not yet de rigeur, 10cc took the idea of “sampling” one note, sung by each band member in unison, and creating a chord progression that they could then play back on the keyboard. The first proper sample? I don’t know, but it certainly made musical history back then!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ront_cover.jpg
“I’m not in love”
10cc
1975
From the album “The original soundtrack”

Apart from the inventive musical composition of the track though, the lyric itself is very atypical of love songs of the period. Rather than sighing about being in love, strutting or boasting, or indeed, whining over unrequited love, the singer tries to deny that he is in love. He uses every excuse --- ”I keep your picture upon the wall/ It hides a nasty stain that’s lying there” --- and declares ”It’s just a silly phase I’m going through.” It’s clear he doesn’t believe it though. Quite why he’s denying it is uncertain and never explained in the lyric, but there’s a certain amount of arrogance in the lines ”Don’t get me wrong/ Don’t think you’ve got it made” and ”If I call you don’t make a fuss/ Don’t tell your friends about the two of us.” It’s also quite a turnaround, as it’s usually the woman who is trying to tell the guy she’s not interested, that he’s reading too much into their relationship. But here, it’s the man who’s saying “This is not love, I’m not in love. You’ve taken it up wrong” even though he knows he’s lying, to her and to himself.

The second number one hit single for the band, it was in fact dumped by them originally as they had not been happy with the original composition, but seeing others sing the song around the studio gave them the impetus to go back and re-record it, and thus a legend was born. The song even did well in the USA, something of a coup for a British band at the time, just barely missing out on the number one slot there too. It has gone on to become one of the classic love songs, instantly recognisable from its big choral orchestral opening and still a favourite both on the radio and TV, and on those seemingly ubiquitous “Love song” albums.

The song itself opens on a single drumbeat which is joined by a slow, almost breathy choral vocal and then a lush piano line, the choral vocals building to a powerful climax before they fade out momentarily as the actual vocal begins. All through the song though they maintain a presence that is impossible to ignore, sounding like both a bank of synthesisers and a large backing vocal group. Halfway through they fade a little to allow bass and piano to take the instrumental midsection, with a woman's voice whispering “Be quiet. Big boys don't cry”, this line repeated to fade as the choral vocal comes back strongly, ushering in the return of the vocal for the second verse.

The middle eighth then is about the only part of the song that does not have the wall of sound in attendance, with just guitar and piano accompanying the slow percussion. As the third verse ends and the piece fades into the end chorus the choral vocals swell and grow more intense and powerful, eventually falling back to fade out and leave just the piano before it too fades out.


”I'm not in love, so don't forget it:
It's just a silly phase I'm going through.
And just because I call you up
Don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made.
I'm not in love, no no, it's because..

I like to see you but then again
That doesn't mean you mean that much to me.
So if I call you don't make a fuss;
Don't tell your friends about the two of us.
I'm not in love, no no, it's because..

I keep your picture upon the wall:
It hides a nasty stain that's lying there.
So don't you ask me to give it back ---
I know you know it doesn't mean that much to me.
I'm not in love, no no, it's because..

Ooh you'll wait a long time for me.
Ooh you'll wait a long time.
Ooh you'll wait a long time for me.
Ooh you'll wait a long time.

I'm not in love, so don't forget it:
It's just a silly phase I'm going through.
And just because I call you up
Don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made
I'm not in love…
I'm not in love..."

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
http://monregime.unblog.fr/files/201...saintdenis.jpg
There’s a whole almost subgenre to be found in Rock Progressivo Italiano apparently, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here, my other introductions to the subgenre being the likes of Alphataurus and Hostsonaten. But RPI is such a rich and varied vein of progressive rock that it does in fact make Italy the only country deserving of claiming its own special niche in the prog rock genre. This is another debut (few of them on the list) and is an entirely instrumental affair.
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...33052013_r.jpg
Ulisse: l’alfiere nero --- Progenesi

I’ve plenty of time for instrumental albums, even if they are a little harder to review than ones with vocals. But there is an inherent problem here.

This is a concept album. Now I know the likes of Rick Wakeman, even Vangelis have created instrumental concept albums, but I have always found it hard to follow a story when there are no words. This, apparently, is based on the journeys of ancient Roman hero Ulysses. better known perhaps by his Greek name, Odysseus, from which comes the title of Greek playwright and poet Homer’s “The Odyssey”. I love Greek myth --- all myth really --- and I feel like I’m going to be unintentionally cheated on this album, because first of all I won’t be able to follow any concepts just by the music and secondly, even if it were a vocal album it would be in Italian most likely, so there’s no way I could follow it.

But such it is, and if we try to leave aside the concept (hah!) of the concept album, and just concentrate on the music Progenesi play, then perhaps we can approach this album from a different angle and appreciate it on its own merits, rather than compare it to something like Hostsonaten’s “The rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which does use vocals, and English ones too. With a name like Progenesi you’re probably expecting a lot of the style of Genesis in their music, and you would not be disappointed. Or you would, if instead of expecting you were dreading. But I have a feeling the word in Italian means something like firstborn or something like that, so the similarities to Collins, Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford may not be actually inferred from the name of the band. But it doesn’t stop them sounding at times like an Italian Genesis. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on your view on the progressive rock giants.

Again we’ve only got six tracks, and “La gioia della pace” starts us off with a riproaring ride on the keyboards, very Marillion on “Market square heroes” I find, boppy and uptempo with some nice guitar. It’s no surprise that the album is so keyboard-driven when you learn that the man behind the keys, Guilio Stromendo, is also the composer of this whole thing. Great work on the Hammond joins the busy synths as Omar Ceriotti drives the beat along behind the drumkit. It all slows down near the end to give way to soft piano and the first taste of sweet violin, provided by guest musician Eloisa Manera, and with the sounds of tinkling piano and some pizzicato strings we’re off to “La strategia” (I think even I can translate that one) where honky-tonk piano gives way to brassy synth in a sort of dramatic, upfront sort of melody with some staccato drumming from Ceriotti.

It slows down about halfway with a marching drumbeat and sparkly keys in quite a Yes vein, and rather interestingly at the end they rip off the ending from the full-length version of Prince’s “Purple rain”, but Manera does it so tastefully it doesn’t seem like it’s being copied. A beautiful slow piano and cello from Issei Watanabe, another guest, takes “Il blue della notte”, which is either blue night or blue north. My Italian is crap, basically nonexistent. A nice jazzy keyboard rhythm then unfolds, with for pretty much the first time really that I can hear the guitar of Patrik Matrone making itself heard, and very good it is too. Stromendo though soon reasserts his somewhat iron grip over the composition and it’s Hammonds, pianos and synths all the way. We then get a boogie blues tune in the third minute, with another eight still to go.

Again Matrone comes in and adds his flourishes to the music, and they’re welcome. I love keys but this album is perhaps a little too concentrated on one instrument, and no matter how well it’s played that eventually gets a little jaded, which is why it’s nice when the violin or cello break through, or as here, the odd guitar solo or passage. The longest track on the album, there’s no denying the quality here, and to think this is a debut effort is pretty stunning: these guys sound like they’ve been at this for years. Always the measure of a good epic or even long track, it’s heading towards the end and it sure doesn’t seem like it’s been eleven minutes.

Technically that is the longest track, but the next two almost go together and if you add them then their combined length is five minutes over the previous one. “Il rosso della notte” (which I think may mean “the north wind”? Don’t know where that came from, but somewhere in my mind it’s saying the word rosso is wind in Italian?) is split into two parts, with part one being a fast, almost frenetic ride along Hammond and keyboard rails, slabs of church organ thrown in there too and a thumping drumbeat accompanying it all. Great to hear Matrone cut loose with a real rocker of a solo too, but Stromendo isn’t prepared to let him have the limelight for long and is soon back in front. To be fair to him he’s a wonderful keyboard player; I just wish he wasn’t so almost dictatorial about the band, or at least this is how he seems. Maybe they’re happy playing the little bits he gives them. Hmm, yeah. You ever know a musician, especially a guitarist, who was content to stay in the shadows?

I am hoping we get some more of that beautiful cello and that exquisite violin though before the album ends, as as we head into part two and it all slows down with an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere I think perhaps we may meet up with them again here. It’s dark piano to set us off though and then climbing, dramatic synth backing it before Matrone gets to reel off a lovely acoustic guitar piece and yes, there they are, the sumptuous violin of Eloisa Manera and the stately cello of Issei Watanabe. Just beautiful. An extended keyboard solo by Stromendo leads into a nice duet with Matrone and Manera’s violin is there adding its colour too. Then the bass of Daio Giubileo finally gets a moment to shine before the man behind the keyboard is off again, kicking up the tempo and pulling everyone along with him in yet another superb solo, and everything slows right down and fades away, with the first (and probably only) spoken words (in Italian of course) as the song draws to a close.

A powerful finish then as “Un grand eroe” (I assume “a great hero”) bounces along on exuberant keys and some unfettered guitar from Matrone, sort of a reprise of the basic melody of the opener, with the violin and cello also making their voices heard. This is also a long song, just over ten minutes, and goes through some changes, slowing down after the third, then picking up on rippling piano and Hammond in the fifth, some of the piano semi-jazzy. And again we’re six minutes into the ten before I even know it. I think I could listen to these guys all day. In for the big finish then and really this album could hardly be any better, unless it had more guitar or strings in it. But what’s this? Even the drummer gets to rack off a solo right at the end. Maybe this guy Stromendo is not such a tyrant after all!

Whether he is or not, Guilio Stromendo has here put together one hell of a band and a debut that sets the benchmark for RPI for the future. I predict great things for Progenesi. Superb, absolutely superb.

TRACKLISTING

1. La gioia della pace
2. la strategia
3. Il blue della notte
4. Il rosso della notte, part 1
5. Il rosso della notte, part 2
6. Un grand eroe

In a way, I’m kind of sorry I discovered that this is a concept album, because when I just listened to it before researching anything about it I could really enjoy it for what it was. I still can, of course, but now I’m left trying to tie the great music into the story of the Greek hero, and while it’s not impossible it is a little difficult and leaves me perhaps not concentrating so much on the music and more on the plot of the album. But even if you ignore that --- and you probably should, unless you’re a musician and can see where Stromendo is coming from here --- you will find it hard to deny that this album is pure musical gold all the way through.

Really. It’s rare to find an album, much less a debut, much much less an instrumental one, that has literally no bad tracks. There’s nearly always one that mars what could otherwise be a perfect record. But here, everything is a gem. There’s not one track I can find fault with and I am quite in awe not only of the proficency of these guys --- I know some of them came from other bands, so it’s not like they’re a bunch of sixteen-year-old kids coming together for the first time, but it’s still mighty impressive --- but of the composing skills of Giuilo Stromendo. I may not know what his vision is, or what passages are meant to represent what, but with his bandmates here he has created an album to rival the best in current prog, and even give the old masters a run for their money.

I therefore push the rating on this to a new record of 9.3, and it deserves every single percentage point.

Trollheart reviews albums in the style of …. Nickelbackrules
http://cdn.buzznet.com/assets/users1...8564502785.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...billy_joel.jpg
The Bridge --- Billy Joel --- 1986 (Columbia)

Everybody knows, and there is no logical argument against this, that Billy Joel would be nothing without Nickelback. If it hadn’t been for the well-documented* patronage of Chad, Billy would still be playing a cheap piano in a run-down bar, trying to make enough from tips to make his rent. Mister Joel has a lot to thank Chad for, but he seems to have forgotten this, as I find no reference in the liner notes to what is unquestionably and inarguably the biggest musical influence in Joel’s life, or indeed, any musician’s life. This strikes me as ungrateful and also somewhat disingenuous: Joel is here taking all the accolades, claiming to have talent he really does not possess. Chad, of course, taught him everything he knows. Some people have no gratitude!
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
The album opens with “Running on ice”. Not only did Chad suggest that title, but he worked with Billy on that frantic, frenetic rhythm that puts you so much in mind of somebody running. Chad used the experience he had shared with Gilmour and Waters when showing them how to lay down the track for “On the run” on the classic Pink Floyd Album, “Dark side of the Chad” --- sorry moon; they wouldn’t use the title he suggested and I have still to this day no clue why ---and this is what makes this song work so well. There’s a real sense of panic and paranoia about it. But where Chad has always excelled of course is in the ballad, and “This is the time” recalls a period in his life when he was looking back on all he had accomplished down the years, the stars he had made --- many of whom refuse even today to acknowledge his part in their rise to fame, probably because they don’t want to have to pay him anything ---- and how far he had come. Joel is said to have been “knocked out” by the breadth of Chad’s experience on this song and felt that if he allowed him a credit it would be, quite rightly, mistaken as a Nickelback song, and he would be accused of ripping them off, something he did not want to contemplate at this stage of his career, having only ten albums to his name.

Chad of course is used to being ripped off and underappreciated. He knows that other artistes are just insanely jealous of his talent, his effortless affinity with music, both playing and writing, and his total command of the English language. They hate the way he can get right into a listener’s soul, hear what they’re hearing and make contact with them in the most intimate of ways, ways no other artiste in history has ever managed. This cannot be argued, so please Nickelback-haters, do not even waste your breath trying, as you are on a hiding to nothing. Chad literally wrote the book on music. Which is why it makes him so angry that two of this album’s singles went top ten, with no credit given at all to him. “A matter of trust” is perhaps the most annoying of these, given its title and Joel’s assurance that he would pay homage to Chad in the lyric. I don’t see it anywhere. He lied.
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
“Modern woman” is worse. Who could deny, with a straight face, that it was Chad who taught modern ladies how to dress, how to move, how to sing and how to act? Chad is as much a woman of the world as he is a man, and yet here again Joel is singing about a modern woman without once mentioning Chad. I despair, I really do.

When Joel teamed up with the legendary Ray Charles for “Baby Grand”, there was an emotional reunion between Chad and Charles, the latter almost crying as he hugged the Nickelback frontman and declared “This guy taught me everything I know! I owe it all to him!” See, Billy? That’s how to pay your dues, and to fess up and admit the music you’re playing and the lyrics you’re singing have been given to you by a higher power. Chad is eternal, and always will be. Charles reportedly enjoyed working with Joel but irked the “piano man” by spending too much time with Chad. From the “Strolling Bone”, July 23 1989: ”It was like, you know, I wasn’t there. You know that feeling when two friends are catching up and you just feel out of the loop? That was me with the two of them.”
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
Joel has a lot to thank Chad for. Again it’s well known** that when he wrote “Piano man” he was using the opening lyric ”It’s nine o’clock on a Friday, the regular crowd shuffle in. There’s an old man sitting next to me drinking his tonic and gin” and Chad, after giving the lyric the once-over, suggested changing it to Saturday night and replacing the word “drinking” with “making love to”. Joel was apparently bowled over by Chad’s grasp of the situation and the way he could make such a rudimentary and ordinary action as having a drink special and romantic. This, of course, has always been one of Chad’s many strong points, as we all know, and nobody can argue with that.

The album did well for Billy Joel, hitting the number seven spot in America, and Chad, though uncredited on it, was delighted to be reunited with the man whose solo career he had singlehandedly masterminded, Steve Winwood, when he played the Hammond on the closing track. Reports are that Chad, Winwood and Charles went drinking the night after the album was mixed down. Joel was not invited.***
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
In 2004 Billy Joel did however come clean, to the world’s relief, as everyone knew anyway the massive part Chad had played in the recording, mixing, production, writing and playing of the album --- Joel did not even play piano on it, but left that to the much more talented Chad. With the terrible burden of claiming credit for “The Bridge” beginning to affect his health, and his musical output --- have you heard “Storm front” and “River of dreams”? --- he was advised by friends and colleagues including Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen --- two more alumni from the Chad School of Music --- to make a clean breast of it. He arranged an interview with Joe Polanski of Q Magazine, an excerpt of which is reproduced below, with their permission. And Chad’s of course.
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
”It’s been weighing on my conscience for decades now. The guy is an icon, a star among stars, and has helped so many musicians who are now famous but who would be nowhere without his help, that I feel terrible having denied his input, not only into that album (“The Bridge”) but all my others prior to that. He helped me to stardom and success, there’s no question. I wrote “Just the way you are”, but only the title: he did the rest. And “Piano man” was mostly his composition. Plus he played piano on it; in a fit of childish jealousy I overdubbed his parts till they were gone completely, and claimed the performance as my own. He suggested I change the title of “She’s always a whore” and that change helped me get a huge hit, not to mention his tireless attempts to get me released from my contract with Family Productions.”
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
“Yes, he taught me how to play the piano. He found me at some dive in Queen’s playing for tips and took me under his wing, obviously seeing something in me that others did not. And he taught me how to write songs. “The Stranger”? All his work, apart from a few notes from me. “Glass Houses”? There’s no contribution in that from me, and yet these were my two most successful albums. Yeah, I owe the guy everything, as does just about any other musician I know, and more I don’t. The rising stars of today owe it all to Chad, as do the ones who haven’t yet been born. He’s a musical colossus, and I just hope someday he can forgive me for stealing his thunder.”
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
So there you have it. The so-called Piano Man finally comes clean, and admits what every person with a brain already knew, that his long career and all his hit singles are all down to the influence and guidance of one man. Just as Springsteen’s “Born to run” was a Chad-inspired triumph, and “Nevermind” benefitted from his advice and input so much that it is now acknowledged as one of the most important records in music history, “The Bridge” by Billy Joel is completely a product of Chad’s superior brain, musical talent and writing skill.

Thank you, Chad.
http://www.trollheart.com/chad.jpg
(Next time: Chad’s influence on "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”)

Trollheart's notes:

* Not documented at all
** in my own mind only
*** There is no documented proof of this.

http://www.trollheart.com/trollchild2.png
Let me tell you about television when I was growing up. No, not the programmes, but the actual sets themselves. Yeah, we called them “television sets” back then. Those of you who have grown up knowing a television has a flat screen, is very thin and can be controlled remotely do not know how good you have it. I lived through an era where even the concept of remote control was once unknown, and if you wanted to change the channel (or “station”, as we had it back then), you had to --- gasp! --- get up out of your chair! What, I hear you say? Was this the Stone Age you lived in, Trollheart?

It’s true though. It was some time into my teens maybe before we got our first telly with remote control, and it wasn’t the compact flat little thing you think of today as being your remote. Oh no. This was big. Probably about as big as one of those 200-packs of cigarettes you get when you go away on holiday, and about as thick. It was heavy and --- wait for it --- was tethered to the television by a cable, something like they used to use for operating camera shutters remotely. You probably don’t remember that either, do you, in these days of electronic digital timers. Indeed, even digital cameras were not always here and people had to use manual cameras and get the film “developed”. But that’s a story for another time.

I can’t find an exact picture, but it was something along these lines:
http://www.electronichouse.com/image...oteControl.jpg

Of course, our old remotes did little more than change the channel and control the volume, possibly the brightness too. After all, our tellys were serious beasts. You wouldn’t lift one on your own. They were fat, wide things with no real handgrips and the only way you could take a hold of one was to tip the screen towards you and grab the back of it and then stagger along with it hoping you didn’t trip over anything! The screen was curved. There was no flatscreen back in my youth. Everyone was used to seeing the very edges of the picture bend out very very slightly, and the screens were thick! The television was also set in a cabinet of sorts. Whereas today your telly is basically a big monitor/screen with some controls and a stand, back in the seventies and eighties they were made of wood, fashioned like a cabinet into which the screen sat, with the controls either under the screen or to one side, and often more on the back.
http://shellnye.edublogs.org/files/2...01-1rtgi1g.jpg

You’ll note that the screen appears green. Well it was. Don’t ask me why. Probably something to do with the kind of glass they used in them. And it was glass too: if you pinged your fingernail or rapped your knuckles on the screen you would hear the hollow, slightly ringing sound glass makes. The speaker (mono only of course) was down there at the right, with the controls, such as they were, above it. Mostly these consisted of a volume knob, channel buttons and brightness control. Most channel buttons were pushed in to select the channel but could also be turned. Why? I’ll tell you in a moment.

http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thin...l&tid=39781990
That’s what they looked like around the back. None of your USB jacks or stereo audio inputs, and HDMI was an acronym that would not be invented for decades. As you can see, there are ventilation slots in the back, and they were necessary because these machines got HOT! If you touched the back of one while it was running, well you wouldn’t burn your hand but you would certainly feel it. You can see this one had knobs on the back too. They were for tuning.

Unlike today’s tellys, which come either pre-tuned or which, with a touch of a button can find all the channels and tune them in to pin-sharp clarity, older tellys were not generally tuned in. If you rented --- or, if you were quite well-off, bought --- one, you would usually have to look forward to more than an hour of trying to tune in the television. If your tuning selectors were on the front of the unit you were lucky, if not then you would either have to have someone else turn them at the back while you watched the screen, or stretch your arm around the back of the set while craning your neck to see if the reception was coming in. Channels didn’t just appear: you tuned and tuned till you heard a ghostly, whistly noise and then slowly the image would appear. Once you had the station, and knew which one it was, you did whatever it was you had to do to commit it to memory: some TVs worked on the basis of you popping out the selector knob (ooerr!) turning it and then once you had tuned it push it back in, and the selection was saved. Others worked different ways. To be honest, I don’t remember the fine details: it was a long time ago, and each set worked differently in this regard.

Once you had one channel tuned in you moved on to the next, selecting the next knob down after making either a mental note of the name of the station you had just tuned in or marking it with a sticker on the button so you knew where to go when you wanted to get that channel again. Inevitably, as all the channels were broadcast on the same wavelength, you would come across the channel you had already tuned as you went, and cries of delight would quickly turn to disappointment as the family realised we had already got this channel.

And on it would go, till all channels were tuned in. Then we would sit proudly back and confidently press button 1 for BBC 1, button 2 for RTE and so on, and be very happy with ourselves. Of course, if someone accidentally tuned the station out afterwards --- I’ll explain why that might happen in a moment --- then you had to go through the whole process again, at least for that station. And if someone mislabelled the buttons, or the stickers fell off, well just hope you had a good memory otherwise you were due to spend more time clicking around, trying to find the programme you wanted, usually thirty seconds before it was due to be broadcast (for the one and only time).

And then there was what we used to call “ghosting”. In these days of digital television and High Definition channels, everyone expects and gets perfect pictures every time. But not back in my day. We used to have to rely on a company now called UPC and previously Cablelink, but I can’t recall what it was originally called, to provide us with television channels other than the local one. This was generally referred to as “The piped”, as it was piped into our homes. “Piped --- often shortened to pipe --- TV” was the thing to have. Ireland had at the time only one channel, RTE, the national channel and if you wanted more you had to have a television aerial on your roof.
http://www.aerialandsatellite.net/images/aerial1.jpg
These were tall, unwieldly things which stood usually on a metal stand or tube and had to be on the roof in order to get any sort of reception. They rarely failed, but if a storm took yours down, or if birds messed with it, your tv could be knocked out. Those wishing for a simpler solution, and willing to receive only the national channel, could use a pair of “rabbit’s ears”, a small indoor aerial that plugged into the back of the telly and then stood on top of the set. The drawbacks of these were many. First, they were anything but stiff as time went on, and the times I remember trying to force one arm to stand up while the other collapsed and fell over, the picture for a moment sharp (or as sharp as you could get with rabbit’s ears!) on the screen before it dissolved in a sea of static to a chorus of disappointed groans. Secondly, although most TVs were flat on top they weren’t very wide --- wider than today’s almost-not-there models certainly, but the base of a pair of rabbit’s ears was quite wide itself, so often you would stick it on the back of the TV, as in the second image above. Problem with that was that the back of the TV was curved and sloped downwards, so inevitably after a while the rabbit’s ears would begin its slow journey down the TV, slip off the end and bang would go your reception! Not only that, but with a pair of rabbit’s ears you could ONLY get your channel in if the ears were positioned a certain way AND LEFT THERE. The slightest deviation of even one of the “ears” and your programme was gone. So when the unit fell off the tv naturally the arms flopped all over the place and you were looking at some time trying to get the channel back in. All the while, of course, your never-to-be-repeated programme was continuing without you!
http://flowtv.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/ill12.png
“Just get it on the plus one channel!” I hear you youngsters yell knowledgeably and perhaps a little derisively. Would it surprise you to know that there have not always been plus-one channels, that they are in fact a relatively recent invention? So indeed are repeats of the same show either that day or later in the week. When I was growing up if you missed the show you missed the show. There was no catch-up channel, no repeat and they didn’t even do those “previously on…” segments. You really were lost, unless you could find someone who had seen the show and fill you in.

But back to ghosting. What was it? Well, before digital television became the norm, we all received analogue signals. Since they all transmitted on the same wavelength it occurred rather regularly that the signal for one would become stronger than for the other, and it would bleed in to the weaker channel. I don’t know the technical specifics; we just knew it as “bad reception”, probably a figure of speech that would be totally alien to some of you, unless you were thinking in terms of a badly-planned wedding. But it happened all the time, so much so that when you got home and wanted to watch your favourite programme you prayed silently to the television gods that not only would the reception be good, but that it would stay good for the duration of your show, as ghosting could occur at any time and at any point during transmission.

The net effect was that you were looking at, say, Captain Kirk walking along an alien desert,, while in the background a faded, grainy image of a newscaster could be seen. Or “Match of the Day” was suddenly invaded by ice skaters or cartoon figures. The sound would also be affected, so you would hear the programme you were watching (or trying to watch!) and then a buzz, a hiss of static, and “Luton Town, nil. Shrewsbury Rovers two, Dagenham, one.” and so on. Very annoying but very common, and there was literally nothing you could do about it. Not that we didn’t try. Screaming, shouting, cursing, and when none of that worked, blaming our mother and finally trying to “tune in” a channel that was already perfectly tuned, often losing the signal in the process so that the channel that had been ghosting through suddenly came through strongly, as Mister Spock turned to Captain Kirk with a concerned look on his face and a glance at the sky, and say “Sir I think THAT WAS A FANTASTIC GOAL! OH CITY REALLY HAVE IT ALL TO DO NOW!” Cue much cursing, banging of the top of the telly (this always worked) :rolleyes: and frustrated noises, threats to “put me foot through that effin’ thing!” and a general air of grumpiness descending.

We had no twenty-four hour television either. Usually around midnight or 1am the Irish national anthem would play and we would know there was no more to be seen that night. Test cards replaced the final programme like this one
http://thumb7.shutterstock.com/displ...d-61115026.jpg
and pop, classical or sometimes supermarket music would take over. Also, the channel would not be on-air during the day, so until maybe early afternoon if you tuned in this is what you would more than likely see, again accompanied by music
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi.../Test_card.png
Finally the music would fade out and the announcer (a real one, not just a voiceover) would appear and welcome us to the channel, telling us what was on that day and then the first cartoon or whatever of the day would begin. If you were off sick from school you could not rely on the telly to keep you entertained, that’s for sure. Unless you enjoyed shopping music.

There were of course no video recorders. We didn’t get our first one till I was about fifteen, and then it was a big event. The idea that you could tape a show and then watch it later? Pause it? Rewind it? Man, state of the art! What a time to be living in! And by now we had progressed on to infra-red remote controls, which were much smaller (generally; some were still bloody huge) and needed no connection to the TV in order to work. The Space Age had arrived!

So now we could record all the shows we enjoyed and keep them, for watching whenever we wanted! Cool! I remember renting two video recorders, specifically so that I could wire them up together with SCART leads. I would record my shows on one, then wind the tape back, put a blank one in the second VCR, and go through the show again, recording it but this time stopping the recording at the beginning of each advertisement break and starting it again when the break was over. In this way I made shelves full of tapes of my favourite shows --- Buffy, Angel, Star Trek, Babylon 5 etc --- with no breaks at all, and yes, I made special covers for them. I was a super nerd!

You may or may not be interested to know that I only made the move to a flatscreen TV a years or so ago. Up till then I had been fine with my big chunky CRT (Cathode Ray Tube, basically a wide fat TV) set until one day it just died on me, and I was forced to make the switch up to HD and flatscreen. While I would not wish for those days back again --- the idea of ghosting is now gone forever, and good riddance: it ruined more than one programme for me --- I still think fondly of those old cabinet televisions and wonder if they’ll ever make a comeback, even in a “retro” style, with maybe a flatscreen inside the cabinet? Probably not though: they were, I have to admit, bulky, heavy, often ugly, loud and they got hot easily. And yet, they broke but seldom. In these days when we buy a new TV and expect to be replacing it within five or ten years, our old sets back in the 70s and 80s were very reliable and were usually only replaced due to upgrade rather than necessity. And screen size was not the social status symbol it is now. Some people had small TVs, some had portable ones (fourteen-inch screen or less) and some had big, ostentatious twenty-eight or even thirty0two inch ones. But nobody who had a small telly was that bothered if their neighbour had a bigger one, or if they were, didn’t show it that I saw.

So next time you plug in your brand new HDTV and watch the channels pop up in front of your eyes, or next time you view your favourite HD channel and marvel at the clarity --- or bitch that it isn’t quite pin-sharp enough for you --- spare a thought for what these televisions had to go through to get to where they are today. They’re not the pinnacle of technological evolution, far from it. But they began from very humble origins, and they owe their dominance of our viewing habits to their elderly grandfathers, who at one time would not even have recognised the term remote control.

Happy viewing, you lucky people!

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
http://sonnetprojectnyc.com/wp-conte...3/06/92-RW.jpg

http://www.progarchives.com/progress...19692013_r.jpg
Der gefallen stern --- Flaming Bess

I have something of a problem with this album. It’s not that I don’t like it: I do, very much. The music, that is. But there appears to be some sort of narration running through the album --- could be a story, could be a poem, could be anything --- and it’s all in German so I have no idea what’s being said. That’s bad enough, but without meaning to cause offence and with apologies to any German readers, or anyone who understands or enjoys the language, I’m sorry but as I said in a thread recently on the subject I just find the German language one of the harshest and most ugly in the world. I mean, I can’t speak Spanish or Italian or French (or indeed any language other than English and a very little Irish) but I could either guess the basic idea by picking up on certain words I know or can guess at the meaning for --- much of the usage of words in the “romantic languages” sounds pretty similar --- or at worst just listen to it and enjoy it.

German, not so much. It’s just so hard on the ears. Even to be honest if I understood it I think I would still consider it a terribly gutteral language, full of hard consonants and phrases that sound like they’ve been spat from a machine gun. I recognise this is my problem and that many people will have no difficulty with or dislike of the German language, but when you have to listen to literally minutes of someone spouting something in German, with no idea what he or she is saying, it gets tiresome. I have asked for a translation and Kartoffelbrei has said he will oblige, but he’s busy and I’m not holding my breath. He did mention that the narration seems to be part of an ongoing storyline, huge in breadth and covering several albums, so the chances of me getting the gist of it seem slim at best.

From other reviews I’ve read I’ve discovered that the idea, or part of it anyway, seems to concern the journey of the lead character through Hell, guided by a shining star, voiced by a lady called Mirjam Wiesemann, on some sort of quest. This is, apparently, the second in a triilogy of albums that seems to be titled overall “The music of the spheres”. The fact that I have no clue what’s going on makes the review very frustrating, and it’s just as well the music is so bloody good, otherwise I would not have bothered, which would I think have been my loss. To directly quote the contributor known on Progarchives as PleasantShadeOfGrey in his (or her) review of this album: ”Thus unfolds a mysterious quest, that, at its best moments, is utterly beautiful, endowed with a lyricism that will unfortunately be lost to those not familiar with the German language.” And he/she is right. I would love to know what is being said, I’d love to be let in on the mystery, find out what the story is, but I know nothing of the German language and until Kart comes back to me (if at all) with a translation I remain in the dark.

Even more impressive then the fact that I have really grown to like this album. The musicianship is completely flawless, with the main band already a five-piece and an extra seven players on this album making this a real almost cinematic experience. The album is made up of either three long tracks or fifteen shorter ones. I really don’t know which. There’s a title for each of the three parts but --- surprise, surprise! --- I don’t know what they mean. So they could be movements, chapters, sections, anything. As for the titles of the “songs” themselves, I can guess at one or two but that’s about it.

Before we get to the album though, let me just tell you that Flaming Bess have been together since 1969 would you believe, and have in that time released a total of six albums, of which this is the latest. Why such a relatively small output over such a long period of time, you ask? I don’t know. All I know is that their first album didn’t come out until 1979, ten years after they formed, and after that 1980 saw the release of their second, though sixteen years would pass before their third album hit in 1996. Then another nine years for the fourth, with the fifth out in 2008 and this their sixth. Guess they must be perfectionists or something. On the basis of this album you’d have to say that it was the right idea not to just rush out an album every other year, but even so, a hell of a wait between certainly the third and the fourth.

Wind sounds usher in a lonely piano before trumpet peals sweetly across the tune, the percussion cutting in powerfully as “Erwachen” opens the album. Now this is prefaced by the title or legend “Verloren im dunkel”, so we could be listening to part one of whatever that means, I don’t know. Strong guitar takes the tune as the tempo ups a little and breathy synth lays down its own flavour in the background. Then in the third minute there’s a sharp intake of male breath and the first narration begins. Behind the voice of Markus Wierschem, the character known as The Nameless, soft atmospheric synth and echoing, doomy drums in a slow pattern create the backdrop. A female voice joins the male, this being The Star, the female spirit that guides the Nameless through Hell --- apparently --- and voiced as I said earlier by Mirjam Wiesemann.

The next track, if it is a track, is the title of the whole section, so to speak. Um. It’s called “Verloern im dunkel” and it’s a slow but measured drumbeat with spacey keys and a vaguely AOR sound on the guitar when it comes in. The guitars are handled very ably by Achim Wierschem, surely the brother of the voice of the Nameless? Nice keyboard run, then it gets more dramatic and oppressive … oh wait a moment. This is very confusing. I think (though I can’t be sure, it is very disorienting trying to sort this out when you don’t have a word in the language to work from) that the first track was as I said, but the second part of it, from where the Nameless comes in and starts talking, is actually called “Verloren im dunkel”. Now this track I’m listening to and have been describing above is I think called “Nosce te ipsum”. Maybe. Anyway, there’s a running keyboard riff going through it which is nice but the guitar pretty much holds court here. Nice squeaky, sort of brassy synth ending and it seems there will be no speech on this track. Thank god for small mercies!

It’s not that I don’t like the talking, but I just don’t know how to talk about it, as I have no idea what’s being said, or why. Anyway, next up is, I think, “Verzweifelt und Vergessen”, and here Flaming Bess hit you with yet another surprise. No narration (yet) but a vocal, which is in English! Sung by Jenny K, it’s a joy to hear something other than music that I can understand, and the song itself is an uptempo AOR style song, which seems to question why the character is not in Heaven but in Hell, as she asks ”Where are all the stars in Heaven?/ Where are the golden rays of light?” Sort of a funky dance feel to it too, with samply synth and ticking percussion. The song kind of puts me in mind of Daft Punk, especially when they employ some vocoder, then a Lizzy-style guitar break from Achim which soars into quite a solo that takes us into the last minute of the song.

The title track is next, and I did at least find out that “Der gefallene stern” means “the fallen star”, so that’s something. A very emotive guitar solo opens the song, and Jenny K makes her return for what will be her last performance on the album as the track hits into its second minute. Very Genesis feel to this as it gets going with dark, dramatic keyboards and thundering drums. Despite, again, the fact that the title is in German I’m glad to find the lyric is in English. It’s a slower, moodier piece than the last, with a really nice melody. Achim really shines on this, putting in a fine shift on the guitar. It slows right down then in the last three minutes or so, with flutelike synth and wind sounds, before picking up again on a keyboard line almost ripped out of Tony Banks’s playbook.

If I understand anything about the structure of this album --- and I don’t --- then this song ends the first part of the triplet, and part two is made up of five tracks, as was part one. If they are parts. “Anderwelt” opens with, well, “Anderwelt”, a lovely acoustic guitar playing over broody synth, then the voices are back, sadly in German this time, talking to each other with me rolling my eyes and sighing. I honestly couldn’t even make a guess as to what they’re saying: they could be reciting poetry or their shopping list. But the acoustic guitar keeps a nice atmospheric background behind them, a little light percussion complementing the dark synth as Mirjam and Markus jabber on about whatever it is they’re discussing. They seem to get very animated, excited, but it’s lost on me.

A sort of Parsonsesque instrumental then in “Lichtpfad”, with some stabbing synth and hard guitar and a gorgeous thumping bassline from Hans Wende, before Achim sets off on another superb guitar solo. More vocoder is brought in for the last two minutes, with peppy squeaky synth leading the way to the finish line. We then get a different vocalist as Mike Hartmann takes the, er, mike for “... wie Wüstenregen”, which opens with a fine guitar line and then it’s great to hear that the vocal is again in English. Hartmann’s voice is soulful and powerful, complementing the music here perfectly. Some really nice keyboard work on this from Peter Figge, then what sounds like violin leads into a very Pink Floyd-style guitar solo from Achim. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “Identropie” means identity, and it features more spoken passages from the Nameless as a very new-wave style reminiscent of maybe Duran Duran or OMD takes us into a nice instrumetnal with some Brian May overtones on some quite superb guitarwork from Achim, more vocoders and more Lizy influences on the guitar. “Erlösung ?” is obviously a question but what the question is I have no idea. It does however feature a sort of far-off vocal that’s not too distinguishable, but I think is again in German, as well as bassy piano and echoey slow percussion. This gives way to a very gorgeous piano line that’s almost classical in tone, leading into a deeply sumptuous strings section that nevertheless reminds me of the closing track on Genesis’s “Invisible touch”. Hmm.

Powerful guitar from Achim then takes up that melody, giving it real teeth as the strings keep going. We’re back to solo piano then for the last two minutes of the song, as it all quiets down, with some flutey keys joining in, Achim adding his own touches on the guitar while the distant vocal returns. And so we move into what I guess may be the third movement, “Am Fluß von Sein und Zeit”, which again opens with the title with some Mike Oldfield guitar and choral vocals giving way almost to the opening to “Shine on you crazy diamond”, then the vocal is back, behind a soft lush synth line that reminds me of Pendragon’s “For your journey”.

It all kicks up then for the rockiest track on the album, so different to what has gone before that I’ve wondered if it is really on the album or if I have inadvertently downloaded the wrong track somehow. “Die kyberniten” however makes sense when you listen to the lyric, which is sung in English, Mike Hartmann making his return. The title seems to translate as “cyborg nation” and it’s jammed full of guitar riffs, solos and keyboard arpeggios, with a driving beat and a sonorous organ too. The epic is next, the longest track on the album -- assuming you don’t take this as an album with three tracks; you know what I mean. Don’t you? --- at over twelve minutes, “Haravienna” keeps Hartmann behind the mike for the final time, as a heavy, ominous intro on synth and then howling guitar gives us the final English vocal. It again reminds me of the best work of the Alan Parsons Project, particularly on “The turn of a friendly card” or “I robot”.

You get some part of the story here in the lyric as Hartmann describes, or seems to, the journey these lost souls are making and the quest they are on. There’s also a sense of Asia in the song, though it does get a little repetitive in the third minute or so; after the fifth or so it becomes mostly an instrumental, allowing first Figge then Achim to shine as they go through a workout on their individual instruments: even Wende on the bass comes more to the fore. It’s well into the eighth before Hartmann comes back with the vocal, but to be totally fair it’s nothing more than a reprise of the chorus, the bit that had bored me before the instrumental break and it probably was not needed. Nice acoustic guitar passage from guest Julian Küster, then in the tenth minute it gets really stripped down, to just flute and piano, before kicking up for the big finale with guitar and choral vocals and ending with lone piano and wind noises which carry us into the penultimate track and turn into a rainstorm with pealing church bells as “Rückkehr” opens on flute from guest Markus Roth, who had been responsible for that fine organ in the epic just now. Another really nice acoustic guitar solo before harder electric guitar from Achim joins in, then the closer features the return of Markus Wierschem as the voice of the Nameless. Against the backdrop of synth and crying guitar, “Friedhof der Träume” seems to feature an exchange, argument or realisation between the Nameless and the Star. I think I can figure out that he’s trying to discover who he is and the final words ”Ich bin musique!”, well, they tell their own story, don’t they?

TRACKLISTING

Verloren im Dunkel:
1. Erwachen
2. Verloren im Dunkel
3. Nosce Te Ipsum
4. Verzweifelt und Vergessen
5. Der gefallene Stern

Anderwelt:
6. Anderwelt
7. Lichtpfad
8. . wie Wüstenregen
9. Identropie
10. Erlösung ?

Am Fluß von Sein und Zeit:
11. Am Fluß von Sein und Zeit
12. Die Kyberniten
13. Haravienna
14. Rückkehr
15. Friedhof der Träume

Truth to tell, I feel slightly cheated by this album. It’s my own fault and nothing I can blame the band for --- they’re singing after all in their native language --- but precisely because of that, and the fact that I can’t understand what’s being said, what it means and how it ties into the album, I feel like I haven’t really experienced the full effect of “Der gefallene stern”, and I think it would be so much better if I could follow the story.

Which is high praise, as this is one amazing album, even notwithstanding the above. The wealth of talent on display is staggering, and the album has clearly been carefully constructed over a number of years to ensure they provide the very best result to their fans. It’s just a pity that I’m not one of them. I think the music is excellent but though I made myself listen to this several times for the purposes of this review, it’s not something I would do for pleasure. Nothing to do with the music, and those sung in English are great. But the overpreponderance of dialogue in German just makes it hard to keep listening. As I said at the beginning, were this any other language I could probably just listen toit, but German is way too harsh for my ears to have to deal with for any protracted length of time.

Still, I can see why it’s on the list and if the rest of their albums are this good it explains why there are so few of them over a more than forty-year period. Flaming Bess may not release too many albums, but when they do, it looks like they’re masterpieces.

The rating sadly has to reflect the problems not being able to speak or understand German caused me. Were these just German lyrics in a song I would not be so harsh, as I could still listen to the music. But though music did accompany the spoken parts, it was very much in the background and you couldn’t really concentrate on it, so you were forced to listen to two people ramble on, with increasing passion and excitement, about something you had no clue about. So anyway, given that I enjoyed the music but not the spoken parts, I think the best I can award this album is a probably undeserved 5.5/10. Sorry guys!

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Kartoffelbrie for offering to translate this for me. Maybe someday he’ll get back to me with the full story, but even if not, the intention was there and that’s what matters. Thanks man!

Nickelback_rules shall not be forgotten.
Anyway, all those chads are creeping me out.

They're meant to. They would creep out any sane person. I just wish I could have found that picture he was using on every post. I looked but the one I used was the closest I could get, and there is only so much of Chad one man can take before you have to go have a lie down... ;)

I wish I had things to post here more often, but I'm just not a prog fan so I have trouble relating to a lot of the posts. I will say, however, that the Nickelback post was quite hilarious, so kudos for that!

Thanks man, and I do a lot more than prog here, or try to. Did someone mention Miley Cyrus?? ;)

http://www.trollheart.com/intro1e.png
There’s nothing quite like a good intro to a song. Some of course start without one really, either with a vocal very quickly after the music starts or indeed starting on a vocal, or with just a few notes on piano, guitar or even a few drumbeats before the singing starts. And I have nothing whatsoever against such songs. But I prefer to be pulled into the song by way of a really good instrumental intro. “Hotel California”. “Sweet child of mine”. “Wish you were here”. “Stairway to Heaven”. Some great songs down the decades have been characterised by their distinctive and powerful or moving intros, so much so that you can tell the song from the musical interlude that opens it.

That’s what this section will feature then: songs with really good introductions. The first I want to look at is a real classic, and once you hear the pounding piano and growling guitar you know you’re in for a treat. It’s a long intro too, over two minutes of the almost ten the song runs for.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mac7rhZP2d1qze1ld.jpg
Bat out of Hell --- Meat Loaf --- From the album of the same name, 1977

This album was my first experience of Meat Loaf’s music, and indeed I think my first introduction to hard rock. I’ve spoken before of how my mate and I used to drool over the cover art as we looked at the album in our local record store on the way home from town, but both agreed we would never listen to such music. This without of course knowing what the music inside was like. So when I eventually took the chance and bought the album --- on vinyl, this would have been about 1978 I think and I would have had my first pay packet from my part-time after-school job --- I cautiously let the needle drop onto the grooves and waited with bated breath.

A guitar power chord punched me in the face, almost knocking me over, quickly followed by what sounded like the very Devil himself on piano, his fingers running up and down the keyboard with what seemed to me supernatural speed. The drums crashed in and I was on my way. In those first few seconds I was perhaps not reborn but I certainly saw the error of my ways in slagging off music I had never heard, and a whole new vista was suddenly open to my somewhat disbelieving ears, which up until then had had to accept whatever was on the radio as I had no record player up to now. My first real album, as I think I’ve said before, was one by ELO, then Genesis followed by Supertramp, but this was the first real hard rock melting into heavy metal I had heard, though later of course I would buy “The number of the Beast” and everything would change again. But for now, this was the revelation, and it was glorious!

Like I said, it opens with the loudest, brashest guitar chord I had ever heard, repeated a few times before Roy Bittan comes in on the piano, taking the tune as Max Weinberg pounds away at the drumkit like a man possessed, perhaps grateful to be released from the often more pedestrian drumming he’s had to be content with when playing with Springsteen. The excitement builds to fever pitch as Todd Rundgren fires off an amazing solo on the guitar, everything coming together in a stunning crescendo before it heads into the main melody and then drops back to just piano before Meat Loaf comes in with the vocal.

As an intro I believe it’s hard to beat this. It’s almost more what you would expect to hear in the midsection or even closing of a song (indeed, there is another extended instrumental workout halfway through) and it really sets you up for what’s coming. The vocal, when it does come in, is hard and passionate but somehow giving the sense of taking a breath, which after all that musical histrionics you definitely feel you need!

Of course it’s an excellent song, and a long one, and did much to elevate Meat Loaf --- and Steinman --- to rock god status. But when it gets right down to it, it’s the intro that sends shivers down your spine and makes your heart well, to slightly paraphrase the final line of the song, want to break out of your body and fly away, like a bat out of Hell!

http://www.trollheart.com/blackboard2.jpg
I’ve focussed on a few songs in this section which really do take everything back to basics, but really, could there be anything more straightforward, both in terms of music and message, than John Lennon’s anthem to peace? I mean, it’s just one line mostly, and really the same melody all the way through, and yet somehow it doesn’t come across as lazy or contrived, possibly because the man believed deeply and fiercely in what he was singing about. Perhaps he just thought to himself: who cares if the song sucks? (It doesn’t by the way) I jsut want to get my message across, using the medium I have defined my life by.

Give peace a chance --- John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band ---1969
Music by John Lennon, Lyrics by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

http://www.jpgr.co.uk/apple13_a.jpg
And so we have one of the simplest, yet most elegant, beautiful and above all honest songs in quite possibly the history of music. Lennon is even peaceful with the one line in his chorus. He doesn’t try to shove peace down your throat --- if that’s not a contradiction in terms --- or go on about how we should all be nicer to one another (though of course that never hurts). He doesn’t even lay out the barest blueprint for how this peace is to be achieved --- because frankly I’m sure he was as clueless as to how that could be done as we are today --- and yet, again, this does not come across as someone preaching peace but avoiding the issue of how it is to be attained. It’s jsut the simple wish of a sincere man who wanted us all to stop hating and kicking the **** out of each other over everything from territorial boundaries to whose god is the right one.
And who among us could quarrel with his message? Well, perhaps the likes of Assad, Hussein, Bush, a few others. The ugly minority who are or were too filled with hatred and prejudice to ever see a clear path to peace. But the vast, vast majority of humanity all really want one thing, deep down, and that is a safe and peaceful world for their children to grow up in.

And back in 1969, one man said it best, not the loudest, but in a quiet murmur that was taken up by the American anti-war movement and peace organisations across the globe, so that even now, over forty years since it was written and twenty since his untimely death, “Give peace a chance” still rings out across the world as an anthem, a hope and almost a demand as the planet hovers ever closer to extinction, threatening to forever silence the voices that chorus out those nine most simple words before Lennon’s dream can ever become a reality.

Let’s just hope the people who can make it happen are listening, before it ends up being too late.

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png

Time to cross back over into Eastern Europe, and take a walk on the slightly wild side beyond what used to be the Iron Curtain, into a land which was once the powerhouse and engine room of what was the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which contained many countries and territories which are now autonomous – Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine --- and which has never really been seen seriously as a home for progressive rock. In fairness, nothing about Russia has ever been progressive: they were one of the poorest countries, even after World War II, stuck in a post-Stalin era of repression and paranoia and mistrust that led to the Cold War and the world coming close to the brink of destruction in 1963. Change came slowly to the Soviet Union, mostly thanks to the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall a new era had seemed to dawn for the people on the wrong side of that awful eyesore.

But now Russia seems to have regressed rather than progressed, as Vlad the Impaler reaches out his long arms and starts to grab back territory that had been ceded years ago as the Soviet Union split up and Communism collapsed, and more and more of what were Soviet citizens clamoured for release from the yoke of Mother Russia, aching for independence and desperate to chart their own future. Can you think of any big Russian bands? Me neither. I'm sure they're there, but let's be honest, Russia is not the first country that comes to mind when you think of any music, least of all progressive rock.
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...YaWZZjjv2FC3lg
Which is what makes this latest album in our countdown even more special.
http://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000054...op.jpg?164b459
Megadream --- Azazello

Originally beginning life (it says here) as a thrash/death metal band, Azazello have released a total to date of eight albums, of which this is the latest. As they began to leave the death metal influence behind more on each successive album, elements of progressive rock and metal began to creep into their music, along with other genres like funk, jazz, fusion and of course traditional Russian folk melodies. I haven't listened to their other albums --- I wasn't even aware of their existence until now --- but from what I can hear it seems like they may have achieved their zenith here. This album is full of all the kind of music you would expect, and a lot you would not. It alternates between heavy progressive metal and almost classical at times, with a healthy dose of jazz and straight-ahead rock too.

“Zero hour” stars us off with a slow piano and mournful violin before a nice little guitar line joins in and then a thick bass line from guest Kerry “Kompost” Chicoine starts the main melody as the drums come in hard and fast courtesy of Vladamir Demokov. Much of this album is instrumental, and the opener is the first of these, with hard guitars warring with strings-like keyboards as band founder and main composer Alexandr Kulak fences with his brother, I assume, Vladamir, before the whole thing piles into the first vocal track. With a great progressive metal feel reminiscent of bands like Kamelot and Shadow Gallery, “A losing game” showcases Alexandr's many talents, as on this album he not only plays guitars (including seven-string ... seven string??) but keyboards, flute, percussion and bass. A real all-rounder.

Vocals are handled by Yan Zhenchak, though Alexandr is credited as “voice”, so I wonder if his is the dark growly vocal going on in the background? Very metal indeed. Very death metal. I've been racking my brains trying to think who these guys sound like and now I know, though it will mean nothing to you, unless you read my review of their album way back when and had the good sense to pick it up. Though they only ever seemed to release the one album, Silent Edge impressed the hell out of me with “The eyes of the shadow”, and this is exactly the same effect this album has had on me. I'm not saying Azazello are copying the Americans, far from it, but there are similarities certainly. Of course Silent Edge are virtually unknown and will probably remain so, and it's entirely possible that the Russian lads have never heard of them. Still...

There's great power and drama in the second track, with some fine keyboard work from Vladamir and chugging guitars both from Alexandr and guest Bill Berends, and it's one of the two longest tracks on the album, just over nine minutes long. You can hear the jazz influences coming in here, sort of a little freeform at times, then the title track is another instrumental, allowing a chance for breath to be caught in a nice little laidback tune with overtones of West Coast America in it, before it gets a little more dramatic and heavy thanks to some doomy synth from Vlad, choral vocals and dark guitar leading to a nice organ line with surf effects bringing in some more lovely violin and flute, very atmospheric.

“Across the frontier” kicks it all back up again with another longish song, seven minutes plus, utilising talk box guitar and powerful drumming, a burbling, skittering keyboard line before the vocal comes in, and the harmonies here are a joy to behold. I believe Azazello used always sing in their native Russian on previous albums, but here, any vocals are in English, which is always a plus. Mind you, with music this good I wouldn't have minded had it been in Russian. “Across the frontier” really rocks, with some savage guitar from Berends and a dark synthy backdrop against which Vlad peppers some jumping keys. You can certainly hear the legacy of their death metal roots here, and these guys definitely know how to play. But they have definitively left their thrash/death days behind them now for a more technical and indeed progressive approach to their music, though I would have to catalogue this as more prog metal than prog rock.

Another short instrumental follows, the shortest track in fact at less than two minutes, but “Between two worlds” leads into one of the other longer tracks, again just over nine minutes as “Nothing but a shade” hits, and it's something of a cross between Manowar and Bathory at their Viking best. A real workout on the guitars from both Alexandr and Berends takes us into a marching bassline that almost comes within a whisker of Genesis's “The colony of Slippermen”, then the hard guitar punches the metal back into the track, and it's well over two minutes before the vocal comes in. When it does, it's a joint vocal, adding some female and some unclean vocals in too. Very effective. I can see crowds headbanging to this: my own head is nodding as I type.

This is probably the most progressive of the songs on the album, building into a multi-layered melody that just awes me. And yet it remains heavy as a neutron star fragment. A great keyboard line from Vlad rides along the main melody line, but it's the guitars that mostly drive this epic. The vocals alternate between clean and unclean, keeping a sense of darkness and doom about the piece despite its mainly upbeat tempo. The almost harpsichordal piano then that opens “Live to see tomorrow” is something of a relief, the song itself a mid-paced almost ballad with some really nice restrained guitar and a yearning vocal from Zhenchak. I hear Arena, Pendragon and even at times It Bites in this song, and it's much different to what has gone before.

That in fact seems to be one of the strengths of Azazello: they can fuse different genres and subgneres, pull in disparate influences and shape them to their own needs, so that it's very hard to pin the band down or pigeonhole them. You sort of really don't know what's going to come next. “Live to see tomorrow” is a case in point: it's almost commercial, something you could in theory imagine hearing on the radio, while much of the rest of their material, despite being excellent, would never grace the airwaves or anything other than a specialist show. Some lovely high-octave piano work from Vlad here really adds to the melody, taking us into “Carnal caravan”, where the boys kick out the stays once again and rawk the house.

It's the last long track at just over seven minutes and runs again on a hard angry guitar line, and speaking of angry the vocal is dark and ragged, with much of it taken by the unclean vocalist. Some very technical guitar is displayed here and a lot of energy, much of it dark. In contrast, a forlorn piano line and haunting violin take “On the other side” in a soft lament very much rooted in the Russian folk song style. Some exquisite guitar here too, very soulful and intense, and a quite gorgeous acoustic guitar and piano combination close what is the last instrumental on the album, leaving us with ... well.

If I have one bad thing to say about this album it is this: it ends on “Run in parallel (Leo)”, which features a great James Taylor-style laidback guitar but utilises the sound of a baby (presumably the Leo in the subtitle) giggling, and hard-hearted old fuck that I am, the sound of a baby laughing sets my teeth on edge and is like poison to me. ;) I'm just like Moe. There's some nice sort of choral singing but I think it may be on the synth, a la-la-la-la sort of thing. It's interesting certainly, and I'm sure it's one of the guys celebrating the birth of his child, but for me it's just too weird and I hate that it ends the album. It's like Stevie Wonder's “Isn't she lovely” --- great song but I just hate the baby noises. Urgh.

TRACKLISTING

1. Zero hour
2. A losing game
3. Megadream
4. Across the frontier
5. Between two worlds
6. Nothing but a shade
7. Live to see tomorrow
8. Carnal caravan
9. On the other side
10. Run in parallel (Leo)

I guess this just proves, as if more proof were needed, that I need to expand my knowledge of prog rock beyond the usual national boundaries I stick to. We've already heard some amazing music from Greece, The Ukraine and Argentina, and will soon experience the delights of Spain, Mexico and more. There is a wealth of talent, obviously, waiting out there beyond the horizon, and from these shores I've set sail to discover and uncover it. My voyage has so far been very successful, and I can only look forward to the tales I'll have to tell when I make landfall back home again.

Which is a very pretentious and Trollheartlike way of saying I need to stop restricting myself to bands from the countries I usually listen to music from, and also stop worrying too much about songs being sung in English. Azazello, to be fair, do sing in English here but as I said even if they didn't I'd still think this is a great album. It certainly deserves the term progressive, even if it is more on the metal side than the rock, and without question deserves its place here on the list.

The final track impacts a little on my rating for “Megadream”, though in fairness although it bugs me it doesn't come close to ruining the album for me, so it's not going to take too much off the final score. I therefore believe this album is very much entitled to a rating of 8.8/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
http://www.2050publications.com/wp-c.../90-limite.png
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...12102013_r.jpg
Liminal --- Exivious

So what do I know about Exivious? Like many of the bands here, I know nothing about Exivious. But I can find out! Just amuse yourselves till I get back ... I'm back! Okay, so the story behind this Dutch progressive metal band seems to be a long and confusing one. And here it is. Exivious appear to be the band that died twice and came back to life, er, three times. This birth and rebirth seems to have some tenuous connection with US band Cynic, which is odd as they are or were a brutal death metal band, although it seems they mellowed and changed their focus later in their careers. Even so, these guys are from Holland and while some of the members of Cynic appear to have Dutch or Dutch-sounding names, I can't find any evidence of there being any connection between the two.

At any rate, Exivious appear to have been together since 1997 but not have released anything until a two-track demo in 2001, and with little or no exposure for them they broke up and then again in 2006 got together with a new lineup which released, well, nothing again until 2010 when their debut album hit, but shortly afterwards they broke up again and seemingly the two founders joined Cynic (?) but left at the end of the year to try to resurrect Exivious. Again. Confused yet? I know I am!

The point about all the above is ... what is the point? Nothing really. I guess in the final analysis (hah hah Trollheart! You said anal!) No I didn't: I said analysis! Really, how old are you? :rolleyes: So AS I WAS SAYING the above doesn't really matter all that much because we're not terribly interested in charting the history of the band and more focussing on the music. I say this in the clear knowledge that I am dodging the issue of my not being able to really tell you who these guys are. So sue me.

What do you mean, subpoena for you, Mister Trollheart? :shycouch:

This, then, is the second album from Exivious, a total I guess of three years in the making after their debut, and it's entirely instrumental, as was their debut. It opens on “Entrust”, with rising low synth line and chiming guitar, a slowly pulsing bass that seems to be building to something, the guitar getting louder until on the back of rolling percussion it takes off in, yes, a very progressive rock way. It's a little unfocussed for my tastes, their fondness for jazz fusion perhaps leaking through here. It does settle down a little after the first minute though, much of the tune driven on that sumptuous fretless bass handled by Robin Zielhorst, one of the originals. Actually I may be in error about that synth line, as no keyboard player is shown in Exivious.

There's a screeching guitar solo in the fourth minute as founder Tymon Kruidenier puts his axe through its paces, and honestly if that's not synth then he is one hell of a guitarist, though I know this effect can be achieved. I would definitely have said it was on keys however. The album has a mere eight tracks and unlike you would expect, no epics. The longest of them don't even push the seven minute mark, and there are three under five. One of these is “One's glow”, just four and a half minutes, another good showcase for the guitar, with some thunderous drumming from Yuma van Eekelen; in fact, he (or she) gets to perform something of a solo here, backed by Zielhorst on that fretless.

“Alphaform” is a more slightly laidback and slower track, with a nice guitar line and some measured drumming, a kind of jazzy feel to the guitar and another hypnotic bassline, and it gets more intense as it goes along. I'd say it's my favourite so far, but to be honest I haven't exactly been blown away by this album up to this point. Mind you, instrumental albums are always something of a tough sell to me. “Deeply woven” is much more frenetic and uptempo, with machinegun guitar and some that's almost reminiscent of the great Carlos Santana at times. Pretty impressive. There's definitely some sax here, I don't care what anyone says. Otherwise this guy is just a genius on the frets. No, it's got to be sax, and it's all over the place the way I hate with free jazz, but to be fair it sounds really well.

I'm assuming that's the fretless bass opening “Triguna”, which picks up on some frantic and urgent guitar and some almost Waitsesque bass. It bounces along nicely then the guitar takes the tune with a very clean and crisp passage. Some very nice fretless on the sweet and gentle “Movement”, very relaxing, though like it seems most of Exivious's work it can't stay that way for long and kicks up with hard guitar and strong drumming. It does quieten down again though as it heads into its final section. “Open”, meanwhile, is again a little too rooted in jazz to excite me, though it does have its moments. The album then comes to a close on “Immanent” (their spelling, not mine: back, fellow grammar Nazis, back! I am still one of you!) which is another heavy number but to be honest at this point I've lost interest. It's okay but nothing special and nothing particularly different.

TRACKLISTING

1. Entrust
2. One's glow
3. Alphaform
4. Deeply woven
5. Triguna
6. Movement
7. Open
8. Immanent

The thing about instrumental albums, as I've said a few times before, is that they're tough to review and they really have to hold my interest. Progressive rock, as much as I love it, is a real culprit when it comes to instrumental albums, as they can often be nothing more than an excuse for showing off and displays of technical brilliance which, while undeniably well played, become boring after a while. There's another album coming up later with yer man from Dream theater in it, and as I find them one of the principle proponents of “technical wankery”, I expected the same from his band. I was not disappointed. Or I was, depending on which way you look at it. Suffice to say I began to dread when one of their tracks would come up on my playlist.

Exivious fall it would seem into the same category. There's no questioning the fact that they're all great musicians, but an album of technically perfect music can be terribly boring, as I found out with the last album from Journey's Neal Schon. There needs to be some spark about it, something to hold the attention, and on this release these Dutch proggers have failed to exhibit that. To be honest, I was bored from about the third track in and it didn't ever pick up after that. I find myself wondering why they're even on this list, and can only really award them a fairly paltry 4/10.

Be afraid! Be VERY afraid....
http://www.trollheart.com/nickweek2.png

It's coming. And there's not a thing you can do to stop it....

Coming Soon to this Journal.
You have been warned.

:beer:

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
What part does Spock’s Beard play in the evolution of one of the most exciting new talents to come out of American progressive rock? None really. But Neal Morse certainly had a hand in the rise to notice of this Philadelphia band. Morse wanted interesting and of course talented bands to support him on his latest tour and so took the perhaps unique step of allowing bands to submit YouTubes of their music to him for consideration. After viewing this particular band Morse was sufficiently impressed to fly down to meet them, and in short order they were playing to massive crowds, warming the audience up for the ex-Spock’s Beard frontman.

Which is pretty amazing when you consider that The Twenty Committee have only been together since 2012, and this is their debut album. Not only that, but it was apparently written and recorded over just two weeks. You certainly would not think that, given the musical excellence here, which lands the album, according to ProgArchives, squarely at number
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._SR_89.svg.png
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...10762013_r.jpg
A lifeblood psalm --- The Twenty Committee

Now before you ask, no I don’t know what the band name means and also no, there are not twenty of them in the band! This is a five-piece, and the music is based mostly around compositions written by frontman and keyboard player Geoffrey Langley. There aren’t any huge prog epics --- though there is a ten minute song --- but the fifth and final track is a suite of five movements, which together make up about twenty-two minutes. The band are also one of the few I have seen, even in the progressive rock sphere, to utilise that most celtic of instruments, a harp, in their music.

“Introduction” opens proceedings with taped conversation snippets that cross over on top of each other, getting a little confused before piano breaks through and then the vocal comes in with attendant guitar. It’s a short track to start and ends by returning to those multiple voices, then “How wonderful” is the first proper track. The vocal of Geoffrey Langley sort of reminds me of those seventies soft-rock singers like David Cassidy and Christopher Cross, with a rich, full tone and a lot of emotion. Nice vocal harmonies which put me in mind of the early work of the Eagles, and the song mostly rides along on again a piano line, helped by guitars, of which there are two, one played by Steve Kostas, the other by Justin Carlton, while Langley handles the keyboards and organ work himself.

Good solid percussion from Joe Henderson and the song itself is a sort of mid-paced effort with some nice strong guitar at times. Great bubbling keyboard solo in the fourth minute, then a guitar riff very reminiscent of Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the years”. Things kick up a little more for “Her voice”, with a sort of funk/jazz style, and of the single tracks here this is the longest at a few seconds over ten minutes. Some really nice guitar work here, parts of which sound like they have heavy reverb or some sort of distortion on them. It gets a bit freeform and edging over the precipice of space rock even into experimental at times around about the midsection, and in truth the period from the fourth minute or so into the sixth is pure instrumental but really to me seems to be almost pure indulgence.

This makes the song certainly two to three minutes longer than it needs to be, which is a pity as in general it’s a good track and reminds me of Jadis at their best, but there’s a little too much self-congratulatory “look-at-me!”-isms on it for me to take it all that seriously. An opportunity missed I feel. And just as Kostas and Carlton had to have their moment on the guitar, so too Langley must show how great he is on the keyboards as the song winds to its close. Too much in the way of egos taking over from the music. A real pity. “Airtight” is a slower, acoustic number on which the band seem to settle down and put their egos away in (rather large, one would assume) boxes and just get down to it. I hear the harp of Richmond Carlton --- whom I assume is the brother of the guitarist --- who usually handles bass but here puts in a nice turn on the infrequently used instrument.

It’s a lovely little ballad and to be honest the best I’ve heard from The Twenty Committee so far. Langley’s vocal is almost lullabylike here, though that’s not to say that the song would send you to sleep. Far from it: it bounces up a little on funky guitar in the third minute and also seems to owe much of its melody structure to the Alan Parsons Project in places. A nice almost twenties-style piano takes the final minute before the rest of the band come in for the finale. I could have seen this be a decent single, even if it is slightly too long for radio at just over five minutes.

That takes us to the suite, which runs under the umbrella title of “The knowledge enterprise” and starts off with the “Overture”, a bouncy, uptempo piano-and-guitar piece quite reminiscent of mid-seventies Genesis. Some truly spectacular harp from Carlton gives the music its own unique identity though, and then the guitar goes almost metal as keyboards join the mix. Part two is “Conceivers and deceivers” and rocks along nicely with a great hook and a piano that reminds me of Hothouse Flowers at their best. The Jadis influence is still strong though and I can hear the guitar work of Gary Chandler and the keys of Pete Salmon in there. Langley’s vocal comes in and again it’s crystal clear and powerful. Halfway through it slows down, so much so that you would expect this is a new movement but not so. On gentle piano the tempo reduces but only for a short while before it kicks back up again. A very Genesis riff near the end, then we’re into part three.

“Tonight” segues directly from the previous and slips in quietly on acoustic guitar and a soft vocal with some exquisite piano and what sounds like violin but is I think synthesised. There’s a certain Country style about this, some really nice vocal harmonies adding to that feel. It gets a bit heavier then as it heads towards its close, taking us into part four, “With these eyes”. This is a much harder, rockier piece, jumping along and causing the feet to tap. There’s a lot of staccato guitar and machinegun percussion offsetting the quieter moments, and it’s a pretty good song, or section, or movement, whatever you like. Good guitar solo there near the end before the suite closes with the final part, appropriately titled “Finale”.

TRACKLISTING

1. Introduction
2. How wonderful
3. Her voice
4. Airtight
5. The knowledge enterprise
(i) Overture
(ii) Conceivers and deceivers
(iii) Tonight
(iv) With these eyes
(v) Finale

The first time I heard this album I quite liked it. The second time I liked it more. The third I began to wonder what I had heard in it the first time. As I reviewed it now I realise that perhaps it’s not as great as I had thought it was originally. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s a good album. But is it good enough? I actually at this point still don’t know. There are good, even great moments but to balance that there are some equally meh moments and I’m not sure whether the album manages to transcend itself and become more than the sum of its parts, or whether it relies on the better tracks to hold it together.

I guess Neal Morse saw enough potential in this almost embryonic band to afford them their big break, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. It would certainly not be the first time. However I really find it hard, now that I’ve listened to it through for the review in one sitting and not as part of a playlist, to get that excited about it. I find myself wondering if their next release will be more cohesive, and really think the best I can do on this one is give it a rating of 5/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/progarchheader.png
Here's a prog-based riddle for you: when is a Mexican band not a Mexican band? When they split, reform and head to the USA changing their name. Yeah, it's not a great riddle really is it? But such are indeed the circumstances of the next band in our countdown, who for apparently legal reasons had to change their name from the perfectly understandable and quite proggish Radio Silence to ... well, you'll see in a moment. But whatever name they go by these days, you'll find them at number
http://www.gbbicycle.org/wp-content/...2013/04/88.jpg
http://www.progarchives.com/progress...02482013_r.JPG

Winter soulstice --- Sonus Umbra

I guess it probably translates as “dark sound” or “shadow sound” or something, and with a title on the album like that you'd probably expect this album to be dark, introspective, melancholy, depressing. Their four previous outings (the first under their original name of Radio Silence) don't exactly make cheery reading either --- “Laughter in the dark”, “Snapshots from Limbo”, “Spiritual vertigo”, “Digging for zeros" --- so is this the sort of music you listen to when you're looking to cut your wrists? Let's find out. But first, just to be on the safe side, put that razor down, huh? ;)

We're on the “Last train to Kimball” as the album gets rolling, appropriately or perhaps predictably enough with train sounds and announcements, then a single acoustic guitar slips in. It becomes electric then, and the vocal is clear and soft yet insistent as with a certain Roger Waters quality Roey Ben-Yoseph takes us into “Insomniac blue”, with lines like ”Television watching me again” which strike you as rather clever. The band is an eight-piece, boasting among their number two acoustic guitarists, one of whom also plays the drums, a flautist and a cellist. The song gets a little more intense as piano and keys join in and the percussion of Andy Tillotson drives it along. A nice solo effort on the piano from Brian Harris as the song moves into its final minute and he's joined by Luis Nasser with some slick bass.

“Palestinian black” opens with some reflective guitar and bass before Harris's organ moans in, giving the tune something of an early seventies vibe. Rich Poston then rips off a really cool solo --- Sonus Umbra make sure to differentiate their guitarists, with both Tillotson and Tim McCaskey handling only the acoustic ones --- then a super little synth run is added to by the peppy flute of Steve Royce, and I think it's pretty clear this is an instrumental; a long one at that, running for almost seven minutes. It's actually slipped into the next track without me realising it, and this one is the epic on the album. With a running time of ten minutes, “Wounded animal” starts off slowly on piano and vocal with the story of a boy who finds himself abandoned by everyone. I think. There's a reference to “bastard son”, so I guess he's cast out. Or something.

On frantic organ and riffing guitar it takes off then, with an extended Hammond passage as the story continues. You know, it's a decent epic but every time I listen to it I kind of lose interest, and this is no exception. I don't mean to be bad to these guys because they are a good band but I just find that an unnecessarily long song. “Let it rain” is better; lots of shimmering flute, a nice guitar line and a lower vocal line, sort of a ballad that develops a nice waltzy rhythm later. Very Floydesque guitar taking “Silence kills” then it picks up with harder guitar and thumping percussion, some wailing keys joining in and it's another long track, just short of nine minutes, with nearly three of those taken up by the instrumental intro. When it gets going vocally there's what sounds like acoustic and Spanish guitar and then some really soaraway electric. Some very impressive piano comes in then around the seventh minute, but I am finding it hard to care. There's something missing about this album and I don't know what it is, but it's definitely not holding my interest. Plus despite there being a cellist I have yet to hear any cello.

Royce on the flute is certainly doing a good job though, and some excellent Hammond from Harris rides alongside more piano as the song moves into its final moments. Sad to say, “It's only fear” just kind of comes and goes, though I do note a pretty sweet guitar solo near the end. It's just getting a little hard to concentrate and, you know, care. “Bar at the end of the world”, despite its encouraging title, turns out to be a short instrumental and takes us into “Haunted”, a slower, sort of mid-paced effort driven on nice guitar lines. It's another nine-minuter though, and given that I'm having problems lasting through this album that's not a good sign. It does however contain the title of the album, if you care. I don't.

Man, I really feel like I'm not doing these guys justice; maybe this is just a bad album and the rest of theirs are great. But it just is not grabbing me in any way shape or form. Not that it's bad per se, just not interesting me. Bland perhaps, or is that too cruel? Maybe it's just me; but I can't see why this came higher in this list than, say, “Ego” or “From the small hours of weakness”, or even “Ulisse: l'alfiere nero”. It seems vastly inferior to any of those albums. Oh, at the end of this track they mention “wounded animal” again, so maybe it's some sort of concept album? Meh, I just find it hard to care. Nice acapella ending, though it goes on for far too long. Still, at least it ends.

Holy Christ on a pogo stick! Another nine-minute track! It just is not my day, is it? Okay let's try to see what we can find nice to say about this. Decent gentle acoustic guitar opening and finally, finally there is the cello, just as I was about to write “still don't hear any cello!” with a fine performance from David Keller, and he's joined by Steve Royce, the two of them really complementing each other as the acoustic guitar continues its song. The vocal comes in after the second minute, as the flute drops out and “Rebuke the sea” gets going, the cello staying to accompany the guitar and it seems quite a nice song. It's a slow --- so far --- ballad style, very laidback; probably the first song of theirs that has made me sit up and take notice.

Tempo ups halfway as the guitar gets faster and harder and rippling piano joins in, but then it slows back again for the conclusion and then the cello takes it to the end with attendant rain and surf sounds. Yeah, I really liked this. Pity the album is almost over. Or maybe it's not. A pity, that is. We close on “Adrift” --- possibly tying into the sea theme of the previous track, possibly not, but the sea sounds are still there in the background --- with again nice acoustic guitar in a slow to mid-paced vein. It turns out to be a really relaxed instrumental to end the album, which gives it at least a strong finish, even if most of what has gone before has passed me by without making any real impression. Pity this wasn't earlier in the tracklisting; maybe I would have paid more attention.

TRACKLISTING

1. Last train to Kimball
2. Insomniac blue
3. Palestinian black
4. Wounded animal
5. Let it rain
6. Silence kills
7. It's only fear
8. Bar at the end of the world
9. Haunted
10. Rebuke the sea
11. Adrift

Yeah, I don't know what it is with these guys but I'm just not feeling it. The closing tracks were good but I just couldn't get into anything really prior to that. They're all great musicians, though I think the cello should have been used a lot more; might have added some sort of different flavour to the album. In the end I just wasn't that impressed and can only really muster, based mostly on the last two tracks, a relevant rating of 5/10.

http://www.trollheart.com/powerto1.png
There's great power in music, and with great power should come great responsibility. Music can move us, inform us, galvanise us, excite us, repel us and in some probably too isolated cases, be a real catalyst for change. This is what protest songs, mostly popular in the sixties and early seventies, are all about: men and women speaking out against what they see as injustices, inequalities or prejudices and trying to change the world's mind through the medium of song. Some of these have of course been massive hits, and some have quietly sunk into the mists of time without making all that much of a mark.

But their intent remains, and although these days we don't really hear too much in the way of protest songs, I'm willing to bet they're still out there, with the world in the shape it is and human frustration and anger growing as tolerance and patience begin to run out, both with our leaders and with the general direction the human race is headed in.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-Sun-City.jpg

Sun City --- Artists United Against Apartheid --- 1985
Music and Lyrics by Steven Van Zandt

Thankfully the spectre of apartheid has now long vanished, as South Africans try to learn to live in peace, black with white, and with varying degrees of success. As in any such situation where a long-oppressed people are suddenly faced with freedom, old scores get settled and they who were once brothers turn upon each other. Humanity, it would seem, always has to have its divisions and someone must always be the scapegoat for someone else's hatred. But it's getting better, and it's certainly better than it was under the regime of Botha and later De Klerk, when black people were treated not even as second-class citizens, not even really as citizens at all, but more like a lower form of life. Want to see how the Jews were treated in Nazi Germany? You only had to visit Johannesburg or Cape Town or Soweto. A very sad and painful part of human history which we hope is gone forever.

But back in the eighties apartheid was flourishing and with no sign of its end, musicians stepped forward to do what they could. Well, some did. The whole central theme of the song “Sun City” is aimed with a disgusted and accusing finger at the artistes who closed their eyes to the plight of black people in South Africa and played the infamous Sun City. This was a resort in a supposedly free state --- one which was not recognised outside of the country --- to which black people had been forcibly resettled, where artistes more concerned about their profits than justice played in direct contravention of a cultural boycott laid down by the United Nations, in an effort to draw attention to the heinous practice of apartheid and force the South African govenment to rescind their white supremacist policy. Described as “A fantasy island in the middle of Hell”, Sun City was seen as South Africa's defiant two-fingers to the UN and to all those opposed to its policies.

“Miami” Steve Van Zandt, a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, wanted to highlight the injustices being perpetrated against blacks in South Africa and so together with journalist Danny Schrechter he set about writing and producing the song “Sun City”. To ensure there was maximum exposure --- Van Zandt himself would be largely unknown by other than Springsteen fans --- they invited other musicians and celebrities to join the recording in a sort of reprise of the USA For Africa project “We are the world”, itself a spinoff from Band Aid's “Do they know it's Christmas?” and secured the services not only of Springsteen and saxaphonist Clarence Clemmons, but also Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Jackson Browne, U2, Ringo Starr, Afrika Bambaata, Hall and Oates, Ronnie Wood and a whole host more.

The song was not a huge hit and indeed many today may not even recognise, remember or even know of it, but personally for me it was the first real experience of the horrors going on in that country, and a wake-up call to my ethics and principles. Truth to tell, the first real impact any sort of apartheid had on me was Peter Gabriel's “Biko”, in 1980, though at that point it was just a song and it wouldn't be until 1987, when I would watch the tragic story of that man as seen through the eyes of journalist Donald Woods in the movie “Cry freedom” that I would really start to get it. Things were not right with the world, and just because these injustices, imprisonments, rapes, tortures and mass killings were happening thousands of miles away did not absolve me of my responsibility to care about them.

“Sun City” may not have had the huge impact it could, perhaps should have, but then there were vested interests working against it. Much money no doubt changed hands on both sides in order for bands and artistes to play that shameful resort, and they surely had friends in high places, among them radio stations and television. I'm not suggesting some big conspiracy theory whereby the sales of the single were blocked or resisted, but at the same time, if something is going to damage your profits and your standing, well, these are the sort of men and women who would not be expected to stand idly by and let that happen.

Nevertheless, the song raised over a million dollars to be used in the building of schools and hospitals for disadvantaged black children, and if it wasn't quite the wellspring of outrage and opposition to apartheid that it could have been, it certainly planted seeds that, only five short years later, came to fruition and led to the dismantling of the system with the release of its staunchest opponent, who went on to become the country's first ever black president. Perhaps the song is something of an anachronism in today's world which is free of the curse of apartheid, but in some ways, though it surely would have happened anyway, this is where that terrible system began to teeter on its pedestal, a little less sure of itself, until finally, inevitably, it fell to the ground in a cloud of dust and a shout of “Mayibuye i Africa! (Let Africa return)”

HTTP://WWW.TROLLHEART.COM/NMTM.jpghttp://www.trollheart.com/clapperboard3.jpg
It’s a rare movie that survives its sequel, or to put it another way, some movies should be one-offs. especially successful ones. I mean, can you imagine Casablanca II? More Unusual Suspects? The Matrix 2? Oh, wait …. A decent movie has quite often been ruined by one, two or more sequels, or in the case of one, a trilogy of prequels (cough!). But Hollywood is Hollywood and worships the Yankee Dollar, as Matt Johnson once wrote, and if there’s money in a sequel then hell, let’s make one.

“Speed” was a great movie. The idea was new, the acting was pretty superb and the action was more or less nonstop. Set onboard a bus which will explode if its speed drops below a certain rate, it was a big hit. It was not meant to have a sequel, but money talks and so Fox, in their wisdom and seeing dollar signs in their eyes, emulated Captain Jean-Luc Picard and said “Make it so.”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...se_control.jpg
And they did. Though Keanu Reaves had at least the good sense and taste to refuse to reprise his role from the original move, co-star Sandra Bullock wanted the cash so agreed to star. The movie was a mess. Set this time aboard a cruise ship (yeah, you heard that right!) it was doomed from the beginning. The whole idea of “Speed” was based around the fact that the bus had to go fast. Cruise ships don’t go fast. That’s why they’re called cruise ships and why in a previous era they were known as pleasure or leisure liners. They attract the kind of people who want to take it easy, get there slowly, go the scenic route and have a lot of fun getting there.

But enough about the movie. It’s already earned enough “reverse awards” to justify the claim that it is one of the worst sequels in cinema history. It does however have one saving grace. Can you guess what it is? You can’t? Seriously? Look at the title. Yeah that’s right: it has a bitchin’ soundtrack, which is what we will be concentrating on here.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...soundtrack.jpg
“Speed 2: Cruise Control” Original Soundtrack --- Various Artists --- 1997 (Virgin)

With contributions from Shaggy, Jimmy Cliff, Maxi Priest, UB40 and others, it’s got a lot of heavyweights on it, God knows why. Maybe they assumed the sequel would be as successful as its predecessor and hoped for maximum exposure. Maybe they saw the movie and rightly sussed that it would bomb (pun intended) and so would need at least a decent soundtrack to save whatever shred of dignity the writer, producer, director and cast could.

We kick off with UB40 and “Tell me is it true”. Now I’ve never been a fan of these guys, but given the Caribbean link with cruise ships I suppose it’s inevitable that much of this soundtrack would be based around reggae music and artistes. For what it is, it’s okay; uptempo and quite a bit of fun, though I have always had a problem with a white guy singing reggae. Probably just me, but it’s like a white guy rapping: just doesn’t chime with me. Marshall who? ;) Shaggy is up next with “My dream”, but am I going mad or does he sound like Macy Grey there at the opening? Ah yeah, there’s the “Mister Bombtastic” voice I remember! Again it’s a decent enough song, though again as you all know reggae’s not my thing. But if it’s yours then this is going to (sorry sorry!) float your boat. :shycouch:

Tamia I do not know, but apparently she’s Canadian and here she puts in a fine performance on “Make tonight beautiful”, the first ballad on the album. Very sensuous voice I must say and the soft percussion is really nice. Not too much digital piano; I hate it when ballads are swamped by digital piano. And this one is not. Swamped by digital piano, that is. Some sentimental acoustic guitar which of course will never be credited, as on these soundtrack albums only the singer gets named, unless it’s an instrumental and a musician is playing it. Effective backing vocals too, one of the better tracks on the album.

Mark Morrison brings us “Crazy” and to my untrained ear sounds like Larry out of Cameo in a mid-paced disco/dance number heavy with bass and ticking percussion. Apparently this is the twelve-inch mix, but given that it only runs for three minutes and forty-two seconds you have to wonder what length the regular mix was? I definitely find the melody very like “Word up”, but again, what do I know about this genre? Tetsuya Komuro, who goes under the name of TK, is a Japanese composer who was very influential on the pop scene (it says here) and wrote soundtracks for anime and films. However, “Speed TK remix” is exactly the kind of music I hate: uptempo, upbeat trance/rave dance. Urgh. But if you like it then this will be right up your alley. Still, as it goes on I kind of find myself getting into it despite myself. Catchy certainly.

I have absolutely no idea what “A namorada” means, but it’s the title of the next track by Brazilian musician Carlinhos Brown, and as you would expect it’s not in English. With it being the national language of Brazil I can only assume it’s Portugeuse, though it could be Spanish or Mexican, as I wouldn’t know how to differentiate one from the other. Lots of peppy horns and they don’t annoy me; it’s very cheerful and celebratory. Given the eventual fate of the movie, perhaps a premature celebration? :rofl: Reggae star Maxi Priest does a passable rendition of Blondie’s “The tide is high”, which is written in a reggae rhythm anyway, so he hasn’t exactly got to work too hard to interpret it, and it’s followed by another cover, this time of Carole King’s “I feel the earth move”, rendered by Leah Andreone, whomever she may be.

It’s in fairness a pretty uninspiring version, and Common Sense’s “Never give up” is fairly pedestrian too, then the great Jimmy Cliff kicks it up with “You can get it if you really want”, some fine hornwork and a nice upbeat message in the song. Nice soft organ and kettle drums and it’s bright and breezy, a nice change after two pretty substandard songs. Despite the few cover versions that litter this soundtrack, “Some people” is not the Belouis Some hit, but Shaggy’s mate Rayvon delivering another nice midtempo Marleyesque song which is actually a love song. I must admit I like this a lot. The album then closes on one more cover, the Police’s classic “Every breath you take”, interpreted by seventies soul icon Betty Wright, and does she do a smouldering version of it. Great way to close what’s a pretty damn fine soundtrack.

TRACKLISTING

1. Tell me is it true (UB40)
2. My dream (Shaggy)
3. make tonight beautiful (Tamia)
4. Crazy (Mark Morrison)
5. Speed TK remix (TK)
6. A namorada (Carlinhos Brown)
7. The tide is high (Maxi Priest)
8. I feel the earth move (Leah Andreone)
9. Never give up (Common Sense)
10. You can get it if you really want (Jimmy Cliff)
11. Some people (Rayvon)
12. Every breath you take (Betty Wright)

As I say, reggae is not my thing but even I found something to enjoy here, so if this is your music then don’t let the fact that the movie was so piss-poor put you off checking out the soundtrack to “Speed 2: Cruise Control”: it’s the only decent thing about the whole film.

Which is, after all, sort of the point of this section. :shycouch:

So why not just get the soundtrack (it’s available to stream on both Spotify and Grooveshark, no need to shell out), turn up the volume, pour yourself a Pina Colada and try to forget this movie was ever made? I bet the actors wish they could!

^I remember that one^

Some real early use of green screen in that video too.