Delain is back! Released today is a new disc of their epic brand of symphonic metal.

Hunter’s Moon includes four new studio tracks, plus a selection of live recordings, as well as a Blu-Ray disc of the live tracks.

Delain is working on their next studio album, due in 2019, but the four new tracks here on Hunter’s Moon give an idea of their musical direction.

The band’s guitarists each compose a new track here: “This Silence Is Mine” (Timo Somers) and “Art Kills” (Merel Bechtold).

The live tracks (tracks 5 to 14) follow the Danse Macabre Tour in Utrecht’s Tivoli Vredenburg, and most of the live tracks (tracks 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 and 14) feature Nightwish’s Marco Hietala.

1. Masters Of Destiny
2. Hunter’s Moon
3. This Silence Is Mine
4. Art Kills
5. Hands Of Gold (Live) — studio version was on Moonbathers
6. Danse Macabre (Live) — studio version was on Moonbathers
7. Scarlet (Live) — studio version was on The Human Contradiction
8. Your Body Is A Battleground (Live) — studio version was on The Human Contradiction
9. Nothing Left (Live) — studio version was on April Rain
10. Control The Storm (Live) — studio version was on April Rain
11. Scandal (Live) — studio version was on Moonbathers
12. Not Enough (Live) — studio version was on We Are the Others
13. Sing To Me (Live) — studio version was on The Human Contradiction
14. The Gathering (Live) — studio version was on Lucidity

DJ Brass Camel is a prog-loving collective of amazing musicians. They performed the concert of the year in 2018, as I wrote in my review earlier on Progarchy. Enjoy their entire debut album, embedded above. Prog on!

Here’s some essential reading for the soprano in your life:

“A soprano’s-eye view of choral music”

It begins like this:

I feel like I’m entering a war zone writing about this topic: being a soprano in a choir. There are so many preconceived notions about sopranos. Let’s get those stereotypes out of the way now.

We sopranos don’t have ears. We just sing the melody. We don’t have brains. We’re divas. We always sing sharp. We always sing flat. We have vibrato the size of a donkey. The minute we read harmony the world falls apart. The list goes on and on and on.

It’s OK. In their careers, a lot of musicians have met that one soprano who simply ruined it for them. We’ve all met her. She’s ruined it for all of us. Sure, maybe she was oblivious and self-centered.

But maybe she was having a hard day because she was a little tired of leading her superhero life. Yes, sopranos are superheroes: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a half-woman, half-boy! Wow!

If you have not yet seen them all, take a look. But a few samples are given below.

January is always an interesting month. I find myself still listening to some of the best albums of the previous year, as well as exploring albums from other people’s Top Ten lists for the previous year that I somehow missed.

And then there are the new releases of the year. Sometimes January can blow you away, as artists release something new in January that is so good, you just know it will be on your Top Ten for that new year.

So far in 2019 we have had an incredible January. Two giants of prog have each given us masterpieces. Steve Hackett has released his magnificent At the Edge of Light and The Neal Morse Band has given us The Great Adventure, both of which Progarchy has reviewed at length, because both are top notch releases that no lover of great music should miss.

Also of note is that Dave Kerzner has launched Acceleration Theory — Part 1 with his In Continuum exercise in collaboration. It’s pretty good but, because it recycles some material destined for the second Sound of Contact album that never happened, it has some unevenness and lack of cohesion. Yet it does also have some really great moments, and I am particularly fond of the crazy “Bjork from space” episodes as delivered by the protagonist’s love interest on the “AlienA” track, as well as the album’s more conventional prog awesomeness on “Hands of Time.”

Kerzner’s solo albums are all superb, so let’s hope he brings Part 2 more into focus. Still, he may have saddled this project with too silly of a story line to make it possible to achieve a higher musical elevation. Then again, prog has a tradition of transfiguring the silly idea into a classic epic. Try explaining the best concept albums to someone without the music. They sound like jokes, right?

Meanwhile, on the new Dream Theater album, the only track I can like is “S2N,” because while the musicians undeniably have technical skill, my main first impression is the album overall lacks interesting or emotionally engaging songs.

Other new albums that I have been listening to in 2019 have been Weezer’s superfun Teal Album and Damian Wilson and Adam Wakeman’s intimate Stripped, both of which supply plenty of emotional impact, since both exhibit what great songwriting is (be they originals or cover songs).

There are four albums from 2018 that I still cannot stop listening to in 2019, and so I commend them all to you, in case you missed them:
Subsignal, La Muerta
Wytch Hazel, II: Sojourn
Greta van Fleet, Anthem of the Peaceful Army
Phaeton, Phaeton

Don’t forget, Soen’s Lotus is released tomorrow (on February 1), and I can guarantee its excellence. I have already written a preview review of it for you on Progarchy. It’s their best release ever, and if you love prog metal you cannot miss it, since it offers songs with serious emotional depth as well as unusual musical skill.

Get ready for a new release this year from prog metal masters District 97.

Here’s a foretaste! (Just click Track #9 below: “Ghost Girl”)

This sounds great, and it seems to be a bold, logical step forward from Forever Still’s previous releases.

It’s the video for the first single — “Rew1nd” — taken from FOREVER STILL’s new album, Breathe In Colours, out March 29, 2019 via Nuclear Blast.

In advance of their March 1 release of The Black Album comes this surprise Weezer release:

Weezer (The Teal Album)

01 Africa (Toto)
02 Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears)
03 Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) (The Eurythmics)
04 Take On Me (a-ha)
05 Happy Together (The Turtles)
06 Paranoid (Black Sabbath)
07 Mr. Blue Sky (Electric Light Orchestra)
08 No Scrubs (TLC)
09 Billie Jean (Michael Jackson)
10 Stand By Me (Ben E. King)

Awesome! Weezer is clearly on a roll…

Here’s Lenny Kravitz for y’all. Ready to “Raise Vibration” on MLK Day?

Hold your hands up
Hold your head up
To the painted sky
Breathe in spirit
You can feel it
Let your ego die
Be a vessel
Never settle
For the status quo
Love will lead us
And complete us
This is what I know

We’ve got to raise vibration
Wake up and raise vibration
We’ve got to raise vibration
Wake up and raise vibration

Just like Jesus
As he teach us
Do it like the Lord
Just how Martin
Got it startin’
And without a sword
Just as Gandhi
Went to war
And never used a gun
We can join together
And through love we’ll get it done

Check out the drums at the end…

Here’s a little Wolfmother to celebrate tonight’s Super Blood Wolf Moon…