“Vision and Ageless Light” by Eye ★★★★★

On By Time LordIn Progressive rock1 Comment

I couldn’t agree more with my fellow Progarchy editor, Brad Birzer, who has recently been singing the praises of Pink Floyd’s Meddle album and Live at Pompeii film. Back in the day, that was one of my most frequently played VHS tapes, as I watched “Echoes” over and over again. When the Floyd gets their groove on in that track, there is simply nothing better. It has set the standard for my aesthetic judgment of great prog in so many ways. No wonder Brad and I are brothers in prog!

Recently I have belatedly discovered one of the very best albums of 2016: Vision and Ageless Light by Eye. I must say that, if you like Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and other such perfectly psychedelic prog, you will love this album. Eye has truly assumed the mantle of classic Pink Floyd for the present day. No one is making better music than this when it comes to groovy tunes laced with spacey synth sounds. Only Dave Kerzner’s mastery of vintage keyboard sounds is in the same league.

Listening to Eye, I am reminded of the excitement generated upon first hearing those classic sounds on Dark Side of the Moon. We forget how innovative and thrilling those sounds are, but Live at Pompeii can serve to remind us whenever we overhear the Floyd crafting that epochal album in some of the documentary stretches of the film. They are sounds both familiar (from the subsequent album) and unfamiliar (from the nascent album, in progress but not yet finished) that tantalize us with the brilliant experimental studio genius of the Floyd. Well, just like the Floyd, Eye has the uncanny knack for such innovation.

“Book of the Dead” starts things off with a slowly building instrumental that highlights Eye’s penchant for classic keyboard sounds. It crossfades into the next track, as does every track on the album, a feature which ends up shaping this album into an integrally perfect progtastic whole.

“Kill the Slavemaster” shifts things into higher gear as the band shows off their full psychedelic capabilities when it comes to rocking out. The aural delights in this song will seal the deal, if you have any doubts. If you like it old school, this is the album for you. The instruments all have a classic sound, but the music is truly fresh and exciting. It’s like entering a time machine and experiencing what it was like to hear a classic for the first time.

“Searching” is my favorite track on the album. It’s perfectly placed in third position here. By the time it arrives, the listener has been slowly primed for this maximally groovy experience. Seriously, I have not heard a song in years that more justly deserves the epithet of “groovy” than this one. The singing and the lyrics are so cool, especially with that perfectly timed echo at the end of the phrases. The back half of the track slips into such awesome grooving and then it even surprises with some exciting Jimi Hendrix Experience-like drum fills and guitar breaks to keep things going even longer.

“Dweller of the Twilight Void” is an appropriately mysterious pause between my favorite track and the extended psychedelic rock opera about to follow. Again, Eye shows off incredible instrumental mastery here, creating the sort of Floyd-like mood that no one else is able to generate these days.

“As Sure as the Sun” is the 27-minute track that the entire album culminates in. It will take a few listens for you to wrap your mind around it but, once you do, it becomes seriously addictive and wholly enjoyable, much like that all-time favorite track of mine by the Floyd, i.e., “Echoes.”

The sprawling grand finale track contains many highlights, but perhaps my favorite point arrives at 21:44, when the band suddenly morphs into sounding exactly like classic early Rush, right up until 23:14.

In short, if you have any good taste at all, you will delight in the magnificent aural feast served up by Eye on their latest album. It’s truly the uppermost upper-echelon prog that you should not be missing out on.

Helion Prime and other cool metal bands

On By Time LordIn Progressive rock1 Comment

The MoMM is an excellent resource of hearing about new music. For example, check out his feature review of a great new band, Helion Prime. Thanks, MoMM, you had me at “science-based power metal”!

In another example, I’m looking forward to hearing more Battle Beast, since I like the songs I’ve been able to buy and download so far. Thanks, MoMM!

Finally, I am indebted to the MoMM for learning about one of the very best albums of 2016: The Jaguar Priest by Universal Mind Project, featuring the amazing vocalist Elina Laivera. I have listened to that album more than any other in the past month and a half, and it has not yet grown old. It’s a truly magnificent sci-fi masterpiece, with many transcendent musical moments.

World Party Live, 2012

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

My great friend, Winston Elliott, sent me a link to this tonight.  I had no idea it existed.  Great to see Karl still performing beautifully.  Looks better than ever.

When Pink Floyd was a Classic(al) Band

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rock1 Comment

pf-live-at-pompeiiOver the past several months, I’ve been rather taken with Pink Floyd.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved the band. . . as far back as I can remember, their music was a part of my life.  Certainly, in my little town in central Kansas, I could hear someone or some station playing Floyd at any time.  As I’ve had the chance to mention before, our local planetarium played lots of Laser Floyd.  I heard them so much and so often that I started to take them for granted.

Several months ago, I picked The Wall up after years of not listening to it.  There was a time I thought it was a masterful work of art.  I still think it’s brilliant, but it’s way too depressing for me to pick up casually.  If I’m in a good mood, I certainly don’t want to be brought down by the album.  If I’m in a bad mood, I don’t need it to bring me down any further.

There’s no doubt, however, that its message of anti-fascism and anti-conformity influenced my own thinking on the world profoundly.

Continue reading “When Pink Floyd was a Classic(al) Band” →

Tim Bowness Lost in the Ghost Light

On By James R TurnerIn art rock, post-rock, Prog, Progarchy, Progressive rock, progressive rock music, psychedelic rock5 Comments

Years ago, when I was 16 I found an organization that helped with my curiosity about progressive rock, it was called the Classic Rock Society, they were based in Rotherham (a short bus ride away from the small village I lived in at the time) and they met on a Wednesday night in a pub. Beer and prog, all within a short distance from my front door, what was not to like?

One night at the pub talking about prog music in 1995 a friend lent me an album by a band I’d never heard of called No-Man, the album was Flowermouth, and it’s mix of shifting sounds and emotive vocals was my first introduction to the works of Mr Steven Wilson and Mr Tim Bowness, and I was hooked.

Luckily I got to see Porcupine Tree not so longer afterwards, but despite following No-Man and Tim Bowness solo work, it took me slightly longer (nearly 20 years in fact) to see Tim live, with Henry Fool at Eppyfest in 2014, followed quickly by seeing him at the Louisiana in Bristol in 2015.

Continue reading “Tim Bowness Lost in the Ghost Light” →

Big Big Train’s Mysterious Image

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

With no explanation, BBT has posted this image.  Most likely, it’s either the cover or the internal artwork for the band’s forthcoming GRIMSPOUND.

16602059_1307911812607819_1444498908137076244_o

 

soundstreamsunday: “Ballerina” by Van Morrison

On By Craig BreadenIn jazz, jazz folk, jazz rock, Progressive rock, Rock and Roll4 Comments

van-morrison-sqThe art gallery of rock and roll is a rich and welcoming place, with room upon room spinning off into many-directioned distances.  There is no entrance fee or warnings to stand back, please, from the piece.  And, like at all great museums, any pretense to surface comportment is, if meaningful at all, only a nod of respect to the spark of human creativity.  A sign that we don’t stand in willful ignorance.  Before the work, within the work, we are all children.  It is in rock’s nature to empower its listeners to create, and within this space there is no genre, no boogie no punk no progressive no pop no indie no folk, just an honoring of the empty canvas and the unrestrained fire banked down in humanity.  It’s what I love about rock, and it’s what made Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks happen.

Drummer Connie Kay and guitarist Jay Berliner both famously recounted that Morrison told his musicians — and these weren’t just any musicians, but some of the finest jazz players New York could provide in the late 1960s, led by the inimitable bassist Richard Davis — to “play what you want” and then left them alone to back and guide him on a set of eight songs whose precedents were slim and bore little relation to the rock-pop classics he recorded with his band Them (“Gloria,” “Here Comes the Night”) or on his first solo album (“Brown Eyed Girl”).  Astral Weeks (1968) is an echo of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), where an extraordinarily talented group of jazz musicians received a similar lack of instruction, and Love’s Forever Changes (1967), where the pop songwriter deliberately challenged the very notion and direction of his craft.  Morrison’s artistic success on Astral Weeks was, and remains, startling.  The album’s embrace of acoustic jazz as a way forward had a profound impact on the burgeoning “singer songwriter” movement, and for better or worse has become instant point of comparison with subsequent work by musicians such as Joni Mitchell or Tim Buckley or Nick Drake.

“Ballerina” captures the essence of an album that is about nothing as much as ecstatic love, the joyous and at times Joyce-ean observations of a 23-year-old ancient who had spent the previous year turning his voice into a bebop trumpet.  While Morrison got and kept his fame on the back of “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Moondance” and the slew of equally wonderful R&B radio-ready hits that would come his way, it’s here that his artistic street cred was established, as he honored the canvas and invited Davis, Kay, and Berliner to follow their hearts along with him.

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.

Big Wreck’s “Grace Street” is bold, beautiful, and bedazzling

On By carleolsonIn grunge rock, Progressive rock2 Comments

In my mini-review of Ian Thornley’s outstanding Secrets I described the Big Wreck bw_gracestreetsinger/guitarist/writer’s solo effort as “acoustic, reflective, mellow, mournful, defiant, sad, and yet shot through with a sense of cautious hope.” The new Big Wreck album Grace Street has its reflective and mellow moments—”Useless” is a mesmerizing, melodic gem and “Motionless” is a soaring mid-tempo number—but the key, overlapping descriptives surely are “defiant” and “hope”. If I were to channel my 17-year-old self (30 years ago!), I would simply say, “This albums kicks ***!” Since reuniting in late 2011, the Canadian rockers have produced three must have albums: Albatross (2012), which includes one of my favorite rock songs, period;  Ghosts (2014), nominated for “Rock Album of the Year” at the 2015 Juno Awards; and now Grace Street. As many others have said, this band deserves far more attention for consistently producing albums filled with aural delights.

The opening song, “It Comes As No Surprise”, is apparently inspired in part by Thornley’s divorce and is equal parts bombast and vulnerability, with wall-of-sound guitars bringing to mind the Von Hertzen Brothers (fans of that group’s 2015 “New Day Rising” should embrace Grace Street readily), while the vocal harmonies remind me of something from Moon Safari or even the Beach Boys. While Big Wreck is not straight prog, it certainly embraces some prog elements—similar, I think, to how Queen used complex vocal harmonies, unusual chords, and elaborate guitar passages:

The second cut, “One Good Piece of Me”, is about as AOR-sounding as the band gets (the opening riff is pure Asia, circa 1983), the sort of song that would have chewed up the radio back in the Eighties, with its power chords, anthemic vocals, and driving bass. “Tomorrow Down” has more of a grunge sound, with Thornley sounding very much like Chris Cornell, especially in how he moves from seductive to snarling at a moment’s notice. “You Don’t Even Know” is loping ear candy, a blues-inflected, hand-clapping (yes, actual hand claps!) number that would—wait for it—make Los Lonely Boys proud, with the sort of tasty guitar solo that Thornley excels at.

The middle section of the generously timed album (just shy of 70 minutes) is simply brilliant. “Useless”, as hinted at above, is a sonic and musical marvel, described by Thornley as one of his favorites. “A Speedy Recovery”, the longest track (7:38), is the very definition of an earworm, with incredibly catchy drum/bass parts, swelling guitars, hypnotizing chorus, soaring vocals, and another glorious guitar solo:

“Motionless” displays Thornley’s astounding range atop a bed of layered sonic sweetness, while “Digging In” has a more raw, classic rock sound with several overt Led Zep shout outs. “The Receiving End” could have easily fit on Chris Cornell’s most recent solo album, replete with mandolin, some slide guitar, and some falsetto. “Floodgates” is equal parts grunge and funk—Extreme, anyone?—with bassist Dave Mcmillan laying down some fabulous bass lines.

The final three cuts have plenty to offer fans of prog: “The Arborist” is built on some deceptively snaky guitar parts, with plenty of minor-keyed darkness around the edges; “Skybunk Marché” is a 7-minute long instrumental with all sorts of guitar gifts; and “All My Fears On You” is a surging, Pink Floyd-ish closer with a classic Thornley solo bringing the album to conclusion.

The Prog Report, in its glowing review, states: “At times channeling Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and other 70’s acts combined with their own unique style, ‘Grace Street’ is an exhilarating and refreshing rock album, one that is already one of the year’s best.” That’s as good of summary as you’ll find of what is an early entry into CEO’s Top 10 Rock Albums of 2017.

Butch Trucks, 1947-2017

On By Connor MullinIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge this drumming legend, an unfortunate victim of suicide. I am not aware of the demons Mr. Trucks may have been battling, but I hope his family will find peace in this difficult time.