progressive rock
Jasper Rees
New releases by Mike Oldfield don’t exactly grow on trees, but nor can they be deemed rarities. For the first three decades he brought out roughly half a dozen a decade. But Return to Ommadawn is only his second since 2008. As the title announces, it tours the landscape of his third album Ommadawn, which he recorded in his own studio at Hergest Ridge in 1975 and played pretty much everything that didn’t require breath (wind instruments and vocals).It’s roughly the same story here except that Oldfield blows on his own penny whistles, which feature prominently in the mock-Celtic musical Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A single guitar note rang out over smouldering synth-chords. It was bent up a tone and then wavered in the air before gracefully falling. And so began the final residency of the Rattle That Lock tour. No hype. No support act. Just David Gilmour and his all-star band looking back on his long and prestigious career. At least that's how the programme described it. For everyone else this was Pink Floyd resurrected.Not the Nineties "stadium version", mind. This was more like early Floyd - a time when the band members were still totally immersed in the possibilities of making Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett. He died on 7 July 2006 at age 60, and a look at this hard-to-find yet significant release is a tribute to his memory.The band is the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the run-up to the release of his second album Grapefruit, Kiran Leonard has revealed the musical touchstones which map out his world. Boredoms, Kate Bush, the jazzy French Canterbury-rock types Etron Fou Leloublan, Fela Kuti, Swans, Scriabin and Sleaford Mods all colour his prog-tinged vision of music. And he looks elsewhere for ideas. The album's “Ondör Gongor” takes its title from a Mongolian giant while “Half-Ruined Already” is inspired by a Werner Herzog film.Leonard has also declared that his liking for Bush is based on a surmise that her music is not spontaneous: she has, he says, a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.Starting off with tones and drones, Castellanos doesn’t so much create a mood as conjure up musical weather. There’s a gadget Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Had he not become one of the pivotal members of Pink Floyd, it's not difficult to imagine that David Gilmour might have become an academic like his father Douglas (who was a lecturer in zoology and genetics at Cambridge), or maybe a high-flying lawyer with leftish inclinations. Despite having been at the vanguard of rock music in its greatest and most extravagant years, Gilmour was never a likely candidate for a dissolute life of rock'n'roll hedonism.During this expansive TV profile, he pondered over this himself. Inspired back in the Fifties by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Elvis' Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There's something reassuringly resistant to modernity about Jeff Lynne. In much the same way that his cast iron Brummie accent and demeanour have remained unchanged despite decades in Los Angeles, so his music remains in a late 20th century interzone – its real concerns being the songwriting of the Sixties and the huge, glossy production values of the Seventies and Eighties.And so it is here. The songs and vocal delivery are full of shameless nods to his sometime fellow Travelling Wilburys Bob Dylan (“Ain't it a Drag”) and Roy Orbison (“I'm Leaving You”), as well as to Paul McCartney (almost Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As part of BBC4’s continued course of musical regression therapy, we revisited a time of wide-eyed innocence, when ideas were big and pupils even bigger. The Sixties had swung and now they were set to start spinning as people looked to the past for inspiration, and to the future with aspiration.It’s often said, mainly by ageing hippies I suspect, that if you can remember the Sixties then you weren’t really there. Ageing hippies are, of course, notorious bullshitters as the parade of contributors here proved, having both very clear memories – and opinions – about what went on in the build Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As well as releasing electronic music on Ron Morelli’s feted L.I.E.S. label, and the sporadically brilliant Ghost Box, as well a particularly impressive outing on Static Caravan (as Primitive Neural Pathways), Steve Moore is the bass- and synth-playing half of Zombi. On Shape Shift, a heavier, darker and more rock-sounding record than fans of 2009’s Escape Velocity might be expecting, he is doing his utmost to show the acceptable face of horror-suited post-rock. Meanwhile, his accomplice, AE Paterra, provides the path from which they must not stray by beating several shades of something out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From its title-track opening cut to the final moments of its closer “Sova”, Allas Sak is recognisably a Dungen album. The musical dynamic between the Swedish quartet’s members and their collective sound is so distinctive that they effectively constitute a one-band genre. Allas Sak does not have as many dives into a jazz-informed inner space as its predecessor 2010’s Skit I Allt, and is also not as pastoral.The new album is, instead, more minimally arranged and balances melody with interrelated instrumental passages with a greater fluidity than previously. As ever, the lyrics are in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s nearly 40 years since bassist Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden and much has changed since then. Singer Bruce Dickinson has learned to fence, fly and kick cancer in the cock, and the band have continued to release albums – albums which, though rarely hitting the high points of their Eighties heyday, have often been pretty decent and admirably ambitious in scope.Speaking of ambition, Book of Souls, their latest, is comprised of 11 tracks and clocks in at an impressive 92 minutes. Now that’s a long album, but consider that, within those 11 tracks, there are three that go over 10 minutes and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Normally, if an album as good as The Man Who Sold the World had itself sold the sum total of sod all on release, it would have been lost, then found, before becoming a fêted rarity, exchanging hands for hundreds while bootleggers had a field day. The fact that it was a David Bowie album meant that, despite the initial indifferent shrug from the buying public, it’s shifted more than a million and a half copies. It remains, however, overlooked and underrated by many.Having never toured the album at the time, last year saw Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey and producer Tony Visconti put Read more ...