progressive rock
Joe Muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If anyone tells you that Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) wasn’t a masterpiece then they’re an idiot. In fact, it was, more or less, the only successful use of an orchestra with a rock band ever. Now, 40 years on, a pensionable Purple have hit the road again with a full symphony orchestra. But they’re not playing the Concerto. They’re playing their hits. Critically, they’re performing them without founding keyboardist, Jon Lord, and guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore. So, at 8.30pm when support band Cheap Trick had failed to ignite the room, even with a five-necked guitar, a 12 Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tubular Bells, the first half of which is being currently revived as a live piece in the UK, sold between 15 and 17 million units worldwide. Quite apart from the work’s innocence being co-opted and made spooky in William Friedkin's The Exorcist, there was something about Mike Oldfield’s first stab at quasi-symphonic rock which seduced the music-consuming public.Borrowing the repeated motifs of Minimalism – most specifically Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air – and similarly cyclical tropes that made Ravel’s Bolero and Grieg’s Peer Gynt so audience-grabbing, Tubular Bells wallowed in cliché Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mention of Southend-on-Sea calls to mind tawdry seafront attractions and Dr Feelgood, and certainly wouldn't prime you to expect The Horrors. Prepare to be flabbergasted, however, because with their third album, this quietly purposeful quintet have taken a giant leap forward into their own phantasmagorical hyperspace.Their last effort, 2009's Primary Colours, dropped enough hints about the band's burgeoning abilities to nab a Mercury Prize nomination, but think of that one as Andy Murray to this year's Djokovic. To create Skying, they dispensed with outside production help (Portishead's Geoff Read more ...
Joe Muggs
They started as a band of hyper-accomplished musicians aiming to play fiddly electronica in a guitar-band format and thereby creating a rather witty new kind of progressive rock. Now, minus key member Tyondai Braxton but plus a few leftfield star guests, Battles are playing a neat line in chugging heavy metal calypso techno dub punk pop. No, the notion of genre in the 21st century doesn't get any easier, does it? But preposterous definitions aside, a lot of this record boogies along with a surprising amount of fun given its makers' conspicuous virtuosity and the hodge-podge of influences Read more ...
david.cheal
Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century? Where did they come from? Never, except for tribute bands, have I witnessed a group performing in one era whose music owes so much to another. These hairy Australian rockers are steeped in the lore of late-Sixties psychedelia and early-Seventies hard rock, their singer Andrew Stockdale shrieks like Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Gillan and the rest of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Post-rock shares more with prog rock than six letters. Both are rock music that doesn’t want to rock, be rock and are beyond quotidian rock. Of course, these labels are never self-defined. But post-rock is what Austin Texas’s Explosions in the Sky are lumped in with. Unlike prog rock, it’s not about flash technique. A guitars-and-drums four-piece, their instrumental music is about texture, rather than melody or verse-chorus-break structures. Sixth album Take Care Take Care Take Care doesn’t take them to new places though. It restates who and what they are.The last Explosions in the Sky album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you just knew him from the pop and world-music part of his career you might struggle to believe that Peter Gabriel was once considered to be synonymous with everything that was white and stiff in music. His Genesis work, all public-school poetry and am-dram costumes, not only practically invented prog rock, but also spawned its most infamous practitioner, Marillion. By “Sledgehammer” and “Steam”, however, Gabriel had fully switched sides of his brain. That was, however, until last year when he revisited prog by replacing his touring band with an orchestra. Not everyone was impressed.The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Sónar festival occupies a very special place in the New Music calendar – and is this year expanding outwards temporally and geographically, with new franchises in Tokyo and A Coruña, Galicia. Now into its 17th year, the parent festival in Barcelona serves as a vital meeting point for those of all stripes who refuse to acknowledge the polarisation of avant-garde and populism, or of club culture and the mainstream music industry. With 10 or more main stages and untold off-piste club events around the city, it would be impossible to condense even a single day and night of Sónar Barcelona Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Glaswegian James Dillon (b 1950) is one Britain's most critically acclaimed living composers. Early detours as a drunken and drug-taking wastrel gave way to what he calls "musical terrorism". By which he means his blistering career as one of the most intoxicating and uncompromising of the New Complexity school of composers. His music has won awards (an unprecedented three from the Royal Philharmonic Society) but few British establishment friends or commissions, which has forced him into almost permanent exile. Now, for his 60th birthday, he makes a rare return to Glasgow for one of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. It was only at last year’s Children in Need concert, broadcast on prime time which featured the great and the good of British pop that it finally sunk in just how huge Muse have become – they were there appearing with Sir Paul McCartney, Take That, Leona Lewis and Paolo Nutini. Weren’t Muse the alternative Radiohead-lite band from Devon who sing politically loaded and enjoyably paranoid lyrics against the system and all it stands for? In fact, Muse, while managing to retain something of their outsider status, were evidently bigger - at least, for Read more ...
david.cheal
Some years ago I saw Muse playing at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Towards the end of the show, at a climactic moment (I think it might have been during their proggy epic, “New Born”), singer and guitarist Matt Bellamy reached into a bag attached to his microphone stand, pulled out a handful of shiny golden confetti and flung it into the air. It fluttered downwards most attractively. It was a terrific show, with some truly powerful music, but as far as visuals were concerned, the confetti moment was about as good as it got.Compare and contrast that little affair with last night, the first Read more ...