KIM WILDE’s new single ‘Kandy Krush’

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock1 Comment

The Rock 'N' Roll Oatcake's avatarThe Rockin' Chair - A good song never lets you down

Following the declaration of intent of lead single ‘Pop Don’t Stop’ Kim Wilde releases the thrill ride of raucous second single ‘Kandy Krush’.

‘Pop Don’t Stop’ was playlisted on BBC Radio 2, declared “a huge pop anthem” by the Express and a “pop wrecking ball that’s about to smash its way through your brain” by Popjustice and included the prescient lyrics “The seasons come and go again and what was old is new again.”

Kim Wilde’s return to recording isn’t a comeback, but it does mark a fresh start in the iconic singer’s extraordinary career. Proud of her past, but focused on the future, Kim has never stopped singing or selling out tours – she has played more shows in the past decade than ever before, finding fans in countries she never dreamed she’d visit and turning new generations on to her songs – such huge hits as…

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FAR SKIES DEEP TIME by Big Big Train (2018)

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock7 Comments

Far Skies, Deep Time.  Even the very title evokes mystery.  Indeed, were there still loads and loads of CD stores, and if I could spend my time browsing them, I would buy this album simply for the title alone.  Even if I knew absolutely nothing about Big Big Train.  I do, however.  That is, I do know about Big Big Train.  In fact, I know a lot about Big Big Train.  I’ve written more about Big Big Train over the last nine years of life than any other single topic, except for my professional work on humanism and the humanists of the 20th century.  And, to be clear, 9 years is just a little less than 1/5 of my life.

FSDT cover-300x300
Once blessed, now glorious.  Cover art by the extraordinarily talented Jim Trainer.

Truly, my life is immensely better for knowing the music and stories of Big Big Train.

I’m coming up on a full decade of Big Big Train being a vital part of my personal and professional life.  My kids and wife all know and love the band’s music, and no other band has served as the soundtrack of my last almost-decade more than has Big Big Train.

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SIGNALS (1982): A Song Cycle by Rush

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock6 Comments
signals
Rush, SIGNALS, 1982.  A New Wave-Prog Song Cycle.

The last album produced by the then fourth-member of Rush, Terry Brown, Signals (September 9, 1982) marked yet again a major progression in the music of Rush as well as in the lyrics of Neil Peart.  The pressure to produce something similar to the previous year’s Moving Pictures naturally proved immense, as they had never encountered such success.  On the Moving Pictures tour alone, fan attendance doubled at concerts, and almost anyone in the American Midwest could hear one of three tracks from the album almost anytime on FM rock radio.  But the three main members of Rush decided that a second Moving Pictures would be too easy.  They had done that album, accomplished what they had sought to accomplish, and they wanted to take their music in new ways.  In particular, Lee had become more and more interested in keyboards and composing on them.  He never planned to become a “Keith Emerson,” but he loved the challenge the keyboards brought him. [1]  Not surprisingly, especially given Lee’s interest and the learning curve he needed to understand and overcome regarding synthesizers, the keys employed on the album had either 1) a deep, booming bass sound or 2) an airy, soaring feel.  Lee remembers:

I was getting bored writing. I felt like we were falling into a pattern of how we were writing on bass, guitar and drums. Adding the keyboards was fascinating for me and I was learning more about writing music from a different angle.[2]

Further, he claimed, the keyboards allowed Rush to expand beyond the trio without actually adding a new member of the band.[3]  With Signals and the following concerts to support it, Lifeson claimed he felt “almost re-born” with the new sound. [4]

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Review: Choral Hearse – Mire Exhumed

On By NickIn progressive rock1 Comment

ChoralHearse bandphoto72

Here comes an album that really surprised me. Choral Hearse is a Berlin-based all-female four-piece who are having their debut full-length album “Mire Exhumed” released on April 16th. The group creates what they call Progressive Doom Metal, which is then impeccably mashed with Experimental Rock and Folk elements.

The album flows seamlessly from track to track, carrying the listener through dark and disturbing soundscapes. The opener, “Chronic Departure,” acts as the perfect overture to the album, opening with a very simple, ominous melody, then carrying that melody through a consistent, driving beat with singer Liaam Iman’s haunting vocals adding the third layer. In many ways, this track takes the primal beats, presents them to the listener, and then shows the ways in which they have been altered and developed to produce this record.

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The Age of Insanity

On By alisonscolumnIn progressive rock1 Comment
Age of Insanity
Clive Mitten of the C:Live Collective

Twelfth Night was one of the most influential and respected British neo-prog bands. Though the band’s career was interrupted by various changes in the dramatis personae,  many view Fact or Fiction, released in 1982, as their finest album. This was a commentary on the double speak and mind control beginning to permeate society, arriving two years ahead of the year of reckoning as predicted in George Orwell’s 1984.

The album represented the band at their zenith which also saw them playing the Reading Festival for the second time, a tour across the UK and a live album recorded at London’s legendary Marquee Club, at which vocalist Geoff Mann was to make his final appearances with the band.

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soundstreamsunday #102: “Kiss It Off” by Little Feat

On By Craig BreadenIn americana, progressive rock, Rock and RollLeave a comment

little feat2On the other side of the 70s country rock that made the Eagles fabulously famous and rich — and drove them eventually to a dark funk that produced songs like “Those Shoes” — dwells Little Feat, emerging from the Zappa/Beefheart camp of SoCal weirdness during the same period, with funky desperate darkness fully intact from the get-go.  Theirs was an American vernacular progressive rock, full of smarts and awareness, and as led by guitarist and singer Lowell George (fired as “a favor” by Zappa, who then helped him get a Warners record contract since George was a talent, no doubt), they were the rock and roll revolution from the inside, the real throwdown at the hoedown.

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Phoenix Rising

On By Mahesh SreekandathIn Heavy metalLeave a comment

Among the best to have emerged from Down Under is this band named Deströyer 666. Feels like they only entertain one single goal – destroy even the last remaining understated qualities in metal. And that’s exactly what they accomplish. Synthesized from black and thrash elements, Phoenix Rising takes extreme metal aesthetics to unprecedented loudness.

Rough harping choruses, over-the-top guitar melodies, black metal screams and galloping old school riffs. In short, 80s/90s heavy metal signatures exaggerated to the point of no return. From “Rise of the Predator“ to “I Am the Wargod” to “The Eternal Glory of War” – lyrics pretty much mirror exactly what the music conveys. With this brazen approach, they will manage to get through to even the most obtuse of listeners. With no frills old school structures, a style absolutely devoid of pretenses and adequate in substance – Deströyer 666 becomes that essential cross-over band to darker genres. Needless to say, album is rated 666/666.

By Christian Misje (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

Gleb Kolyadin: The Virtuoso We Need

On By kruekuttIn progressive rock4 Comments

Progressive rock has always attracted virtuoso keyboard players.  Parallel with Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page’s moves toward British blues and heavy music, classically trained pianists like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman fired up Hammond organs, Mellotrons and prototype synthesizers, mashing up genres and grabbing attention with gleeful abandon.  From the maelstrom of psychedelia, jazz and modern classical, a new kind of rock emerged — and one of the unspoken standards of nascent prog was that you had to really be able to play.

That standard offered multiple paths forward for proggers: jaw-dropping shredfests by Emerson, Wakeman and disciples; seamless melds of improvisation and composition from King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator; long-form, ambitious suites by Yes and Genesis.  It’s also spawned countless wannabe virtuosos — sometimes trying their hardest, sometimes just following trends, but frequently lacking the compositional chops to give their playing maximum impact.  Even after prog’s fading from mass culture, the virtuoso standard keeps attracting musicians eager to prove themselves — especially keyboardists — to the genre, like moths to a No-Pest Strip.

The problem is this: when you have to prove yourself (especially to yourself),  it may come too easily to baffle with BS rather than to dazzle with brilliance — to play more notes, not necessarily the right ones, with space and taste going out the window.  And when the seemingly endless runs of 32nd notes stop, is there anything of substance behind the flash and the “oh, wows”?

That thorny dilemma is why Gleb Kolyadin is the young virtuoso progressive rock needs.

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In Concert — “The Clock … Tick, Tock:” Back in Time with The Musical Box

On By kruekuttIn progressive rock2 Comments

The Musical Box presents “Selling England by the Pound with Special Lamb Set Encore,” 20 Monroe Live, Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 2, 2018.

Back in 1977, the Broadway musical revue Beatlemania‘s tagline was “not The Beatles; an incredible simulation.”  Little did anyone know that, 41 years later, Montreal’s The Musical Box would carve out a career applying that maxim to Genesis’ Peter Gabriel-fronted concerts of the early Seventies.

If the retro stage set (authentic down to the drum kit and keyboards) didn’t clue in uninformed patrons, the opening “Watcher of the Skies” left no doubt how hardcore The Musical Box is recreating the early Genesis experience.  Clad in angelic white, “Tony Banks” (keyboardist Guillaume Rivard), “Phil Collins,” (drummer/vocalist Marc Laflamme), “Mike Rutherford” (bassist/guitarist Sébastien Lamothe) and “Steve Hackett” (guitarist François Gagnon) built the harsh, Mellotronic tension of the opening riff to a shattering climax — only for “Peter Gabriel” (Denis Gagné) to grab the spotlight with his black jumpsuit, cape of many colors, bat-winged headgear, shaved head, luminescent eye-shadow — oh, and his committed, slightly crazed vocal narrative of an abandoned Earth seen through extraterrestrial eyes.  Right away, the bar was set high: this would be a night of prog-rock epics, meticulously performed by an ensemble that’s toured worldwide far longer than the original band, replicating the musical and theatrical quirks of legendary tours with painstaking precision.

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