Seeing as my funds for purchasing new music have run dry,  I’ve drawn a line under a fantastic year for music and decided on my top 12.  

This didn’t really take me long to put together,  my favourite albums of 2012 are quite clear.  There are some omissions  that other may find strange (Rush, Marillion) but it’s my list and it’s for me to choose who goes on my list …. so there 🙂

Big Big Train is my stand out album which is no surprise and the others follow in a random order.

 

Big Big Train – English Electric 

Simply stunning throughout. Not as epic as The Underfall Yard but a timeless English masterpiece evoking village greens, stone walls and fields but tinged with darkness and seriousness …. a true classic

 

Steve Hackett – Genesis Revisted II 

A beautiful re-working of some classic Genesis and Hackett songs. Not quite a homage as new vocals add variance. Beautifully produced and a sonic wonder as Hacketts guitar is brought right to the front of the mix

  

Pineapple Thief – All the Wars

Classy, snappy prog-pop wonderfully produced with a raw edge of emotion throughout – superb.

 

Nine Stones Close – One Eye on the Sunrise

The second NST album and a tremendous effort with atmosphere, great guitars and an absolute killer track in ‘Frozen Moment’.  Hints of Gilmour, Page and others but has it’s own sound.

 

It Bites – Map of the Past

A glorious pop-prog masterpiece with a hefty whack of emotion thrown in – catchy as hell.

  

The Rumour Cubes – The Narrow State 

Beautifully layered string instruments build to guitar crescendos reminiscent of Mono at their best – ‘The Gove Curve’ is a track to die for.

 

Anathema – Weather Systems

Emotion, power, beauty, wonder – what else can you say ?

 

Storm Corrosion – Storm Corrosion

Quirky, low-key, strange, inventive and an album I keep returning to time after time but somehow can never play the whole thing through in one sitting…..

 

Headspace – I am Anonymous

Powerful, edgy new rock of the highest order.  Well-structured songs, great production and a very, very convincing album.  Excellent

 

Twilights Embrace – Traces  (EP) 

A stunning EP with tight, hard songs infused with Anathema moods, Opeth growls and a mood and atmosphere all it’s own. A great surprise.

 

Neal Morse – Momentum

A late entrant and gloriously rowdy and upbeat album of brilliant musicianship – cracking stuff.

 

Echolyn – Echolyn

A stunner. Reflective, clever, tricky, tuneful – a grower.

 

So there you go !

All the best to everyone for the coming festive season and I hope you continue to discover, enjoy and share the wonderful music that is being created in this very special time.

 

 

“Drinking from the firehose.”  I know whereof eheter writes.  I probably hesitate a lot more than some of my colleagues here so to drink, remembering those early years fondly and too exclusively.  Sometimes when I stoop for a sample from that ongoing gusher, I’m less than enthused.  I’d mostly rather keep writing of auld lang syne.  But sometimes it’s a new, startling kind of refreshment.

Lately it’s Spock’s Beard.  I missed them long because I was wandering rather far from any prog congregation.  What I’ve sampled over the last couple of weeks is the après Neal Morse SB, dominated (though that’s not quite the word) by Nick D’Virgilio. (Should I be ashamed to say that he’s like a new aural fixation, an object of would-be bromance for my ears?)  While hardly a “review,” what follows is prompted by first listens to Feel Euphoria (2003), Octane (2005) and Spock’s Beard (2006).  Peace!  Peace, friends who are more at home directly in front of the hose’s flow!  I’ll probably get to what you will urge upon me for comparison, but slowly I expect.

There’s a place where my listening or my mind (or whatever it should be called) sometimes goes.  It’s like an interface, or maybe an interstice, but no huge gulf to be bridged; more a tiny fissure across which some kind of synapse recklessly leaps.  It’s where a sonic upsurge, apparently threatening figuratively to deafen, meets/adjoins/enters an enigmatic lyrical field or opening.  I expect the meaning to be there, in the opening.  I expect it to present itself to me on bended knee, to wash into my cognition as if it had been at home there already for time without beginning.  But it stands aloof.  It regards me suspiciously, as if waiting to see if I am actually worthy of what it has to tell me.  The cleavage (a cut but also a holding contiguous and tight) between the song and its lyric rarely hits me this way, but when it sometimes does, I am a bit undone.

I can glimpse that fugitive sens lurking in the clearing just behind the sumptuous sound of this band.  Band?  Travelers?  Wanderers?  Of course, not all who wander are lost (Tolkein), and this band seems anything but lost.  But I must reach for this meaning that is not yet close enough for me to have under my hand for an actual touch.  The beauty of the music (by musicians acquainted with Muses) has me longing to draw closer to it.  Not to GRASP it as if it could be “held” by the likes of me, but to become a novitiate in its order.

So much more pretentiously verbose, perhaps, than “THESE GUYS ROCK!”

Hey, but they do.

Leave me now if you will, for a while, in this clearing with this beauty.  The words therein elude me for the present, and I must have another go to see what they bring.  I might say more, if the more turns out to be anything that can be put into words.

Or, perhaps you could join me in the clearing if you can, if it opens for you too.