Happy Monday, metal heads. Guess what? Nikki Stringield, of Iron Maidens fame, has released a totally shredtastic single. You can buy it on iTunes today.
Also, check out the sweet guitar she’s playing in the promotional video.
Rock on, Nikki. Can’t wait to hear a whole epic album from you someday. I think we’re all ready for you to unleash some prog metal on us.
In my review yesterday of Schooltree’s brilliant new album, Heterotopia, I focused primarily on its unexpectedly incredible music, and I didn’t really get into the album’s fascinating mythical storyline, which is reminiscent of the classics (e.g., compare Suzi to Genesis’s Rael, or Enantiodromia to Rush’s Cygnus).
But to give you an idea of just how terrific this fully conceived concept album is, I wanted to offer below an overview of the plot. Here’s the summary of Act I, courtesy of the band’s press kit. (I will place Act II in a separate post.) Use this as your guide to listen to Act I, if you have not yet tuned into this magnificent prog opera.
HETEROTOPIA
A Rock Opera from Schooltree
Plot Synopsis
ACT I
(Prologue) Suzi is a modern underachiever, clinging to yesteryear’s now-defunct dreams of rock-n-roll stardom. Her life became progressively darker as she found ways to support herself outside of the fame and fortune she thought was her destiny. And easier money came with a high cost. (Rocksinger)
A disillusioned Suzi reflects on the bullshit of contemporary life. In her despondence she sees having a soul in these empty times as her biggest problem, and makes a wish – someone please take it away. (The Big Slide)
Continue reading “Act I Synopsis: Schooltree “Heterotopia” @schooltree”
It can look like a conspiracy, from the outside, to know what those of us in middle America grew up with musically in the 1970s. Ensconced deeply in our Yeses and our Styxes and our REO-es and our Kansases, we often missed out on the larger view of the world, despite the delicious depths of what did come delivered over the airwaves. Case in point: Fela Kuti. The Afro beat. I suspect even if you were a jazzbo soldiering on in the post-bop wonderland delivered in the ever-widening sidelong jams of Miles and Herbie and Pharaoh, there might be quite a gulf between such distinctly American cooking and a Nigerian self-trained sax player and polemicist who wielded the conch of Democracy for Africa. Kuti’s mission, though, was a kind of a trojan horse. It looks an awful lot like a super tight big band stomp, epic riffing over a relentless beat, and musically it is. But pulsing underneath was a heat that Kuti, with an outsized personality and voice that all-too-easily drew fire from Nigeria’s governing elite, stoked with an enthusiasm that would eventually enflame his life in tragedy.
1973’s “Gentleman” is an early classic, the title track of a record where Kuti ironically declares “I’m not a gentleman at all.” He doesn’t want anything to do with what that word means in a place where the gentlemen were in essence slaveholders. It’s an open statement of discontent, of a desire for justice. And it wouldn’t mean half so much as it does if his band didn’t burn the house down with their playing. It’s here that the idea of world music takes shape, borrowing from blues and jazz structures of the African diaspora and feeding back on them — once you hear Kuti’s work it’s hard to imagine Soft Machine’s Third, krautrock bands like Out of Focus and Embryo, contemporary bands like Seven Impale, and even the greater part of British punk and American rap without it. Kuti’s voice was loud, gruff, a rap that cried its flawed humanity atop a fury of horns and guitars and drums. It’s serious shit and a party all at once. Anger and joy and heartache. Even if that conspiracy was true and the staid worldview of 70s America denied me Kuti, I’m hearing it now. And I am still listening.
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 above.
This is a freakin’ amazing album. If you have not yet heard Schooltree’s Heterotopia, you have no idea what you’re missing.
Imagine if Kate Bush released, in 2017, a 100-minute long, double LP concept album. Imagine if it was so damn good that it ranked right up there in rock history with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Quadrophenia. Sounds like a total fantasy — too good to be true, right?
Well, that is exactly the magnitude of what is going on here with this release. Except it’s not Kate Bush. It’s an incredible musician I had never heard of, called Lainey Schooltree, who has done the miraculous. With this amazing achievement, she has forever earned her place in the history of rock. This is seriously one of the greatest albums you will ever hear.
Continue reading “Album Review: Schooltree — “Heterotopia” ★★★★★ @schooltree”
Haim performed the catchy lead single “Want You Back” (track one from Something To Tell You) last night on SNL, along with a live debut of the album’s third track, “Little of Your Love.” That song uses strings to soar effectively into its final minute, over top of which Danielle gets to have fun with a tasty guitar solo:
https://vid.me/e/tGG6?stats=1
Flashback Caruso, The Flashback Caruso Memorial Barbecue (2016)
Tracks: Pigeon Plague (4:04), I (0:48), Levitation Song (5:31), Black Magic (7:52), Going Home (4:59), II (1:25), Life Lie (4:35), III (1:13), Aqualung Boy (6:37), Darkest Hour (5:16), IIII (1:30), Raggazza Italiana (3:25), Øksa (2:22)
Every once in a while, a breath of fifty-year old air can seem remarkably fresh. And yes, I am speaking metaphorically. Norwegian band Flashback Caruso provide just such a breath in their first full album as a band. Ranging from a surf rock sound with occasional Beatles-esque vocal harmonies to a more contemporary sound, The Flashback Caruso Memorial Barbecue embraces several styles of rock to create a smooth sound.
While I am far from an expert in 1960s rock, I know enough to recognize it when it is used as an influence. One of the things I like about that era of music is how light and airy it can sometimes be. It wasn’t overburdened with production or overplaying. It sought to create catchy music that was actually good. Flashback Caruso have tapped into that formula fairly well in this album, while still managing to include the instrumental prowess we have become used to in the progressive rock genre. Additionally, that album art is about as hippie as you can get.
“As Fire Swept Clean the Earth” blends multiple and in a way polarizing influences. Old 70s Genesis is pervasive, but layered with that most infamous variant of Norwegian artistic intensity. Quite like an elegant time warp, the delicate 70s prog intro launches headlong into 360 beats per minute drums and inhumane screams. Transition from the high of symphonic prog into this turbulent abyss cannot be starker.
Lead guitar and keyboards are textbook 70s prog. Enslaved blends that melancholic overtones of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ with the ferocity of Viking metal. Subtle use of electronica is a wonderful prelude to more relentless drums. But this frenetic pace does eventually get reined in by that towering proggy lead guitar. Even the album artwork mirrors this aesthetic — calmness set atop absolute mayhem.
Unusual that the lyrics do contribute to the grim atmosphere, because it’s actually decipherable — “I close my eyes. As Fire Swept Clean the Earth. Nothing left to strangle. As the cords were torn from our hearts”.
Enslaved is arguably among the most accomplished metal bands, but even for them, the aesthetics of this track is an unmatched creative act. We can safely state; abstraction of the quirky melodic aspects of a ‘Selling England by the Pound’ and placing it within the context of 90s extreme metal has now been accomplished – with captivating surgical precision.
John Mitchell is a busy man. It was less than a year ago that another one of his projects,
Frost*, was getting ready to drop another album. And before that, John was busy with another one of his bands, Arena. To put the parenthesis on then and now … before that he was busy with the first Lonely Robot album, and now we have seen the release for the latest one, The Big Dream (Tad Wert’s excellent review can be found here). We caught up with John recently, and he generously gave his time to discuss his career, the concept behind the Lonely Robot project, and the creative process, and how to stay busy.
Progarchy: You are in Lonely Robot, Kino, Arena, Frost*, It Bites … (did I miss any?), while your Arena bandmate Clive Nolan is also associated with Pendragon, Shadowland, Caamora, Strangers on a Train, Neo, and Casino. Are you two having a contest to see who can be in the most bands?
John Mitchell: I can’t remember – it seems like I’m busy enough already! That is indeed a humorous question – and yes, you are absolutely right. If I don’t win, heads are going to roll! The honest answer though is that these things don’t run concurrently, they don’t run in parallel, they run in series. I think if we are going to run a contest, it needs to be the most things done concurrently, and I don’t really win that at all. Clive Nolan has won, so there we go!
Progarchy: This is your way of keeping busy, I assume.
John Mitchell: Yes, well it looks good on paper. I have at some point or other have been involved in that many musical projects. I hasten to not use the word ‘project’. When I started these things, I didn’t think of them as projects. ‘Project’ to me denotes something that has a finite end, like a table. A table, once it’s made, that’s the end of the project. When I went into these things, with the good grace of the Lord, to make a band, and to try to engage that band and do multiple albums with it, so I never really saw it as a project. Kino I never really thought it to be a one-off thing, but I didn’t realize quite how busy everybody was. The things I’ve been involved in, they reach a natural conclusion, and they get parked and that’s it. So I’m really not that busy, just doing a few things these days.
Continue reading “I, (Lonely) Robot: Progarchy Talks to John Mitchell”
Reviewing Slowdive’s eponymous new album, their first in 22 years, Clash’s Robin Murray made a statement bound to pique the interest of progarchists:
“It feels at times like early King Crimson, or Pink Floyd’s post-Syd/pre-Dark Side nexus. It’s the sound of a band forgetting who they were, and embracing who they could become.”
That second statement is undeniably true. Slowdive (released May 5 on the Dead Oceans label) is unmistakably the work of the same quintet that disbanded between 1995 to 2014. But it’s not a reunion record of rehashed old ideas. It would also be correct to say the band’s music has more in common with Floyd than, say, punk rock. Among their signature showpieces is a majestic, slow-burning cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair.” But Lark’s Tongue in Aspic? Other listeners can judge.
Guitarist/songwriter Neil Halstead grew up in a home where orchestral music was preferred to pop, and that influence is strongly apparent in tracks like the stirring “Catch the Breeze” (1991). While Slowdive can’t be classified as prog, their body of work has occupied spaces progarchists can appreciate: ambient, avant-garde, dream pop, and experimental, all under the broader classification of shoe-gazing. In this vein no other band sounds like Slowdive.
The cover art for Slowdive features a frame from Harry Smith’s 1957 avant-garde animated film, Heaven and Earth Magic. Composed of cut-out figures set in motion, the narrative includes a sequence involving a female patient sedated for a dental procedure. The darkened profile depicts her state of semi-consciousness, or perhaps heightened awareness. Or both.
Shoe-gazing refers not to the contemplative state of the listener (though it could) but rather the guitarists staring down at the array of effects pedals used to achieve other-worldly sounds. None are better at this than Slowdive’s Halstead and Christian Savill. On the new record that prowess is everywhere present.
But Slowdive also contains a refined attention to detail and form. The pace of the songs is faster. Nick Chaplin’s bass and Simon Scott’s drums thunder out front instead of being obscured by clouds of guitar effects, e.g. “No Longer Making Time.” And instead of a metronomic build-up common in earlier work there are tempo and time changes, e.g. “Don’t Know Why” and “Go Get It.” But as on previous records Rachel Goswell’s voice moves through the mix and around Halstead’s vocals like a spirit, e.g. “Sugar for the Pill,” the album’s emotional epicenter.
The closer, “Fallen Ashes,” may be a preview of things to come. Showcasing Scott’s abilities with laptop software, it embellishes and pushes a hypnotic piano riff to sublimity à la Jonny Greenwood.
Overall, Slowdive is familiar but with more sculpted contours and sharper pin pricks than in times past — a welcomed development.
All of this works from a context of two-decades’ old material still very much in view, still relevant, still captivating. I had the great fortune to catch Slowdive in Carrboro, NC at the next-to-last date on the North American leg of their current tour. Blending half the new album with old material, Slowdive overwhelmed the audience with canyons of sound.
I spotted a few fellow 50-somethings in the music hall. But more than a few of the audience weren’t even born when this Thames Valley gang first started making music as teenagers. Having fallen quickly out of fashion years ago with a press enamored to Britpop and cool Britannia, then beckoned back to life by an emerging cult following, Slowdive have a word for souls fearing rejection without redemption: No, this is what we do, and done well time will vindicate it.
After opening with “Slomo” from the new album the band followed with “Catch the Breeze,” with Savill, Goswell, and Halstead leaning toward the floor, wailing guitars swelling to orchestral heights.
The breeze it blows, it blows everything
And I, I want the world to pass
And I, I want the sun to shine
You can believe in everything
You can believe it all…
During the rapturous finale I glanced to my left. A couple of people were actually weeping. Heaven and earth magic, indeed.
Not sure what to think of this. Lots of Star Trek red shirts dancing before getting blasted away on some alien world? Then, demons pushing back goodness? Call me utterly confused. The band should’ve just stuck to audio.
Progarchy 