Category: Progressive rock

2017, another great year for prog passionistas!

On By alisonscolumnIn Progressive rock5 Comments
Jargon 2
From Athens with love – Jargon of Verbal Delirium

 

2017 – what a year it has been for prog. Against the backdrop of some highly perplexing and disturbing events across the world’s stage, but, to quote the title of Paul Stump’s excellent assessment of prog, The Music’s All That Matters.

On a personal note, it has been a particularly challenging year, having early on developed a stress-related condition due to pressures presented by a previous employer, which led to an emergency operation and a month’s recuperation.  This was coupled with seeing a parent being subsumed in the clutches of dementia. However, equilibrium was restored in the latter part, thanks to the kindness, belief and support of many people both inside and outside the prog bubble.

Though prevailing conditions resulted in me missing several high profile happenings, including HRH Prog in March, 2017 has continued to astound and astonish with the quality of the music being produced, and also the wonderful community of people. This is the tribe that cherishes and follows prog in individual capacities from the fans and supporters, to the writers, the promoters, the merchandise sellers, the record label owners and of course, the artistes themselves, most of whom make scant financial returns on their considerable investments of time and energy. As was originally stated, the music is all that matters.

Without further ado, here are the highlights, and some of the lowlights, which made 2017 another great year for us prog passionistas.

Top Albums:

1) The Slow Rust of Forgotten Machinery – The Tangent. As one of prog’s most outspoken savants, Andy Tillison brings profound political and social commentary into the narrative of this musically outstanding album. This is a clarion call to wake up and see how our perceptions of the world are being manipulated. Some stellar musicianship peaks on Dr Livingstone (I Presume), co-written by his brilliant fellow Tangential collaborator Luke Machin. Thoughtful, profound with hints of jazz and dance-trance, it also features some extraordinary hard hitting artwork by DC Comics cartoonist, Mark Buckingham.

Continue reading “2017, another great year for prog passionistas!” →

soundstreamsunday #90: “A Spoonful Blues” by Charley Patton

On By Craig BreadenIn blues, folk music, Progressive rockLeave a comment

patton_crumb2While John Fahey was working on the set of songs that included “Sunny Side of the Ocean,” for The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), he was completing his master’s thesis in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, the first biography and analysis of the work of blues guitarist/singer Charley Patton.  It was published in paperback form in 1970 and is now considered a classic of blues literature.  (Like most early Fahey endeavors, original printings go for exorbitant sums.  However, indulge yourself here for free.)  Fahey’s obsession with Patton is clear but also realistic, and contains in it the reach and grasp of a true scholar.  One gets the impression he probably could have rattled this off in his sleep, despite the occasional dry stiffness no doubt desired by his thesis committee.  Fahey’s point: blues and folk scholarship was missing out big on players like Patton, who for years had been written off as being past the cut-off point of interest of circa 1928, i.e., more influenced by records than oral tradition and thus not worth bothering over.  The racism banked deep in this position aside, Fahey argues successfully that the atmosphere of non-direction in the recording studio for blues artists of Patton’s era (1929-1934) in particular — a result of A&R men having no idea what black communities wanted in the “race records” they were promoting to those same communities — gave players like Patton freedom to perform more naturally than they might otherwise, and produced work that provided a window into African American existence in the Mississippi Delta in the first half of the 20th century.

Fahey’s efforts notwithstanding, Patton remains a dazzling mystery, dead and mostly forgotten for over thirty years before Fahey’s scholarship and the debts acknowledged by artists like Bob Dylan.  Far wilder in lifestyle and presentation than that other King of the Delta Blues, Robert Johnson (himself no stranger to the on-the-edge, rough life of an itinerant Delta musician) Patton’s repertoire was also more diverse, and his showmanship as much a part of his legend as his musicianship to the people who knew him and had seen him perform (to the extent that Son House expressed surprise to Fahey on hearing a Patton record Fahey played back for him, not recalling his friend’s potent guitar prowess but instead Patton’s “clowning”).  While Patton’s legacy never attained the rock’n’roll sanctification accorded Johnson’s work — there’s no equivalent for Patton to Cream’s cover of Johnson’s “Crossroads” or the Stones’ “Stop Breaking Down” — his work constitutes in its rawness an essential rock document, the direct antecedent to the entire career of Howlin’ Wolf (who Patton mentored), and thus by association Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits.  So if Robert Johnson is closely associated with classic blues rock as exemplified by Cream and the jam bands that followed, Patton can to some degree be claimed by artists who inhabit rock’s lunatic fringe.  This isn’t, of course, an all-or-nothing proposition, but just one possible, shifting observation.  Patton was a punk.

Continue reading “soundstreamsunday #90: “A Spoonful Blues” by Charley Patton” →

BBT Christmas–True and Beautiful

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rock1 Comment

Only a week old and already a favorite in the Birzer house.  The kids are running around singing “Mer-rr-y Christmas” in full-blown David Longdon style.  What a beautiful gift to the world, capturing everything that matters about the season.

Merry Christmas by Big Big Train.

Nominate Alison Reijman and Susie Bogdanowicz–PROG

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

Jerry Ewing’s PROG magazine has put a call out for nominations for this year’s READERS’ POLL.  Here’s the handy-dandy link: PROG READERS’ POLL 2017.

Make sure you follow the directions for the email: “To vote, copy the categories below and e-mail us with the subject line ‘Readers’ Poll 2017’ to prog@futurenet.com.”

I have proudly sent in my nominations, but I would like to encourage you to consider two specific folks for nomination.

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Unsung Heroes.  Alison and Martin Reijman.

First, please consider nominating our own (well, she’s her own!) Alison Reijman as the “Unsung Hero.”  I have known Alison–only through the internet and correspondence; sadly, never in person–for years now, and I can state that I know of no other person not directly employed by a record label, a PR firm, or a magazine dealing with PROG who has promoted the genre more than Alison has.  She not only loves the music and the musicians, but she, herself, is a lovely, lovely person.  She exemplifies, at least to my mind, all that is best in our strange but delightful little corner of the cultural world.  She’s brilliant, free-spirited, spontaneous, tenacious, and exceedingly generous and kind.

Continue reading “Nominate Alison Reijman and Susie Bogdanowicz–PROG” →

The Mystical Theology of Bob Dylan @DawnofMercy

On By Time LordIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

Dawn Eden has a theologically astute review of the Bob Dylan box set Trouble No More over at Angelus. Here’s a taste:

It is a long way from the almost pugilistic attitude of the opening track of “Slow Train Coming,” in which he announces in his best Bobby Zimmerman sneer, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody,” to the heart-wrenching introspection of the final track of “Shot of Love,” “Every Grain of Sand”: “There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere / Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair … I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man / Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.”

“Trouble No More,” in showcasing versions of those songs and dozens more from Dylan’s gospel period, affords a wealth of insights into what took place between those two moments. It is a moving chronicle of the believer’s journey toward the virtue of true Christian hope, in the sense that Aquinas means when he defines hope as desiring an unimpeded union with God in the manner of “a future good, difficult but possible to obtain.”

And so it was that, for a few years at the cusp of the 1980s, Woodstock Nation’s greatest revolutionary rebelled against rebellion itself, against the old enemy whom Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals” admired as “the very first radical.” Although he afterward returned to secular music, he never disavowed it. In fact, in 2015, when receiving the MusiCares Person of the Year Award, he even indicated a desire to record another gospel album.

The only footnote to her analysis that I would add would be to argue that the subsequent track “Ring Them Bells” from Oh Mercy (1989) is one of Dylan’s best songs ever, right up there with the aforementioned “Every Grain of Sand,” because it epitomizes what Dylan learned in his Gospel period, and yet also signals a shift beyond his Vineyard theological training, both with its explicit mention of “St. Peter” and also its intensely mystical mode of vision.

Where do we go from here?… The best album of 2017

On By ericbfgIn Progressive rock1 Comment

What another cracking year for music in the Prog world.

Am I still able to say that –‘ Prog’? Some people are too cool to want to associate themselves with it.
And yet there have been some fine releases in 2017 that are proudly ‘Prog’, with a capital ‘P’.
Not least the excellent ‘From Silence to Somewhere’ from Wobbler and the Tangent’s ‘The Slow Rust of Forgotten Machinery’.  I know that there will be many lists out there soon enough-  ‘My favourite top 10 of the year’ and ‘here’s a picture of all my vinyl’,  posts are imminent across the web and social media.

To that end I have really narrowed the best of the year to one release.. and it really is one of the most outstanding albums in a rich and varied career to date.

It’s no secret that last year there was much gnashing of teeth (mine were gnashed)  and lamentation at the announcement that Beardfish were disbanding, in fact there is a little torch still lit in a hope that someday they will reform.

However on the strength of ‘On her Journey to the Sun’ – Rikard Sjöblom has stepped out of the shadow of his former band and produced a triumphant body of work that highlights his impressive skills and craftsmanship, both in composition and performance.

Rikard-Sjoblom

It would be remiss of me to not refer to the outlet that Sjöblom worked under for this release. Using the Gungfly project, his mission statement for the style of music was laid out. Previous Gungly albums have been eclectic, self-reflecting and unafraid of what genre they are associated with. In a break from some of this though, Sjöblom has made an album that captures the spirit of prog with a fresh, vitality that even the diehards that renounce prog and all its perceived crustiness, would struggle to deny.

RikardSJOBLOM
Amazing cover…A striking release all round..

Don’t just take my word for it, critically the mainstream press in the UK – namely the Guardian, recognised the album as one of their best for 2017 and placed it alongside the likes of Richard Dawson, Drake and Paramore. What they thought of it is the reason it stands out. On her Journey to the sun may be prog but it has a pop sensibility about it. See Steven Wilson also this year for attempting this. But rather than follow Wilson’s plan to emulate his heroes of Talk Talk and Gabriel, Sjöblom keeps them more subtle in the delivery. The fantastic  Polymixia combines the level of epic complexity you would expect from Sjoblom, and mixes it skilfully with a funk groove-clavi section that comes straight out of classic Stevie Wonder

 

What is joyful about the album is the superb voice of Sjöblom. His delicate ethereal falsetto combines with passionate soulfulness and sometimes a grittiness that packs a punch. Adding to this is the weirdly bonkers, sometimes trippy vibe that inhabits this album as it does a lot of his work, especially the Beardfish prime albums. It’s this level of sophistication that sets this above his peers and keeps the album spinning on and on…

2017: The Year of Big Big Train

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rock4 Comments

Hello Progarchists!  I’m back. . . though a little later than I had meant to be.

For those two of you (ha) who you have been waiting eagerly to know my favorite album of 2017, I give you not one album.  Oh no, not one. . . but two albums and two EPs: Grimspound; Second Brightest Star; London Song; and the Merry Christmas EP.

All by one band, of course.  And not just any band, but an extraordinary band.  The best prog band in the world (tied with Glass Hammer, at least to my ears and soul), the band that reveals every.single.thing.that.is.good.in.prog, Big Big Train.

Grimspound 2017
Best album of 2017, 1.1, Grimspound.  Art by Sarah Ewing.

Greg, David, Dave, Nick, Rachel, Rikard, Andy, Danny, and, that 9th BBTer, Rob—congratulations.  Whatever other hells happened in the world in 2017, 2017 will always be, to me, the “Year of Big Big Train.”  You overwhelmed us not with quantity, but with quality.  And, dare I say it: with love.

Continue reading “2017: The Year of Big Big Train” →

YABOL (Part 1)

On By Dr NickIn Progressive rock3 Comments

Yet Another ‘Best Of’ List, I’m afraid.

I can almost hear that sigh, almost sense you thinking ‘not another one’ – but this has been a painful process, and a minute or two of your attention would be much appreciated.

I really struggle with these, you see. I must do, given that it seems to have been four years since I last posted one here!

It’s not that I haven’t tried since then. I really have. But I just keep… running out of steam. There are too many tough questions to answer. How many releases do I list? 5? 10? 20? Then there’s the tricky business of deciding who’s in and who’s out, complicated by that quaintly British thing (or maybe it’s just me?) of feeling like I’d offend someone by omitting them. Not to mention the sheer agony of indecision when trying to rank my selection…

Deep breaths, Nick. Deep breaths…

And baby steps. Maybe that’s the best way to get this done.

Let’s start with some ground rules: First, no EPs, only full albums. That gets rid of Thumpermonkey’s hugely impressive Electricity. Second, no live albums – which neatly avoids any decision-making regarding The Fierce & The Dead’s Field Recordings, for example. Third, no reissues – which eliminates Songs From The Wood, Misplaced Childhood & OK Computer from further consideration (just three of a host of classics that reappeared this year).

Well that’s helped, but not enough.

It’s time to get ruthless, through the application of what shall henceforth be known in these hallowed halls as The Birzer Principle: namely, the examination of music player stats.

With hard data to guide me, I am finally getting somewhere. Though only by discarding some excellent releases: Malina by Leprous;  Fate Outsmarts Desire from Kaprekar’s Constant; Tilt’s Hinterland; Magnified by Beatrix Players; and Koyo’s eponymous debut. All wonderful in their own ways, and all gone, with only an ‘honourable mention’ to show for it.

At least that leaves me with something manageable. So here they all are, in no particular order. Sixteen of the best from 2017:

yabol

Just looking at this montage, I’m already struck by the relative lack of ‘straight prog’ and harder, heavier stuff. Interesting…

As for the rankings: you’ll have to wait for Part 2 for those!

SNOW by Spock’s Beard: Two Stories

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment
Snow LIVE
From Radiant Records.

As I am sure is true for all of us, albums I love and cherish and listen to, repeatedly, carry with them fond personal memories.  For better or worse, almost every single Neal Morse album and Spock’s Beard album comes with a story, and usually more than one.  As I’ve mentioned on progarchy before, I’ll never forget the release of the first Spock’s Beard album, THE LIGHT.  Being a prog fan since as far back as I can remember, I had no idea about the arrival of neo-Prog in England, and I had to content myself in the early 1990s with jam bands such as Phish and jam pop bands such as the Dave Matthews Band to satisfy my not so easily satisfied prog desires.  I had purchased so many CDs and had had so many discussions with the manager of Tracks in Bloomington, Indiana, that she remained on the lookout for me.  Anything that even remotely smacked of prog, she let me know.  She rather gleefully handed me a copy of THE LIGHT when it first came out.  To say I was thrilled would be an understatement.  I was just plain elated, inserting that cd in the tray, putting on my Sennheizers, and falling into prog bliss, attempting to follow all the nuances of the album and to figure out all of the lyrics.  I mean really, who is the catfish man?

And, why did this guy with such a great voice have to cuss so much?

Continue reading “SNOW by Spock’s Beard: Two Stories” →

soundstreamsunday #89: “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean” by John Fahey

On By Craig BreadenIn avant-garde, folk rock, jazz folk, Progressive rockLeave a comment

faheyBeginning in 1959, John Fahey’s “Blind Joe Death” excursions for solo acoustic guitar were the first to radically reconsider traditional blues and old-time music, extending by personalizing what Harry Smith did with the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952): rather than mythologizing what at that time was a largely unknown recorded legacy, as Smith did, Fahey made it breathe life, by quoting in his riffs on the traditional all manner of contemporary music.  There is not a folk or jazz or avant-garde or prog rock guitarist who doesn’t owe Fahey a debt for this, for not only breaking boundaries — with which he was hyper-literate — but making such things seem irrelevant in the music he made.

“On the Sunny Side of the Ocean” is from 1965’s Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.  It is a masterpiece of droning open-tuned right-hand wonder, building steam and dimension until it opens up with an unexpected pull off that turns the entire ship eastward on its perfumed journey.  It is here, in this simple but everything phrase, that Fahey’s influence is apparent, as it would echo down the years through Popol Vuh and Opeth, just as Charley Patton and Mississippi John Hurt echoed through Fahey.

Transfiguration, certainly.

soundstreamsunday presents one song or live set by an artist each week, and in theory wants to be an infinite linear mix tape where the songs relate and progress as a whole. For the complete playlist, go here: soundstreamsunday archive and playlist, or check related articles by clicking on”soundstreamsunday” in the tags section.