Thieves’ Kitchen — The Clockwork Universe

On By Time LordIn ProgarchyLeave a comment

Roger Trenwith has a great review of a great album; here’s a taste:

Amy Darby has one of those unaffected voices that trace a lineage of female contemporary jazz and folk singers back to Barbara Gaskin, Jacqui McShee, et al, and in places, even Joni Mitchell is brought to mind. The overall feel is of a decidedly folk-tinged Canterbury air, but fronted by the lush occasionally jazz, occasionally prog rock-styled guitar of Phil Mercy, who is certainly influenced by Steve Howe … and influences do not come much better than that. When Johan Brand is adding his best pounding Rickenbacker bass sound to the mix, then the “Yes go to Canterbury” bus is well and truly on the road, particularly so with the intro to Prodigy. Suffice to say none of this is plagiaristic or intentional, and the end result is Thieves’ Kitchen and no-one else.

…

An album to get lost in, the intricacy is combined with great delicacy on the baroque piano ballad Astrolabe and its instrumental companion, the beautiful closer Orrery, tracks that punctuate the longer vocal songs. Surrounding those two tunes we have all manner of complex instrumentation always delivered without bombast, complementing the theme of the album perfectly, which narrates stories of naturally imperfect human contact and interaction with precise science and technology.

The focal point of the album is the twenty minute The Scientist’s Wife, a tale of a spouse’s estrangement to her husband’s questing obsession, and a “long ’un” that fully justifies its length. The music drives along with purpose searching for the end goal in much the same way as the protagonist’s husband is striving for his own answer. It takes over five minutes before the “wife” makes herself heard, calming the building musical insistency to sing her lament for days past when she was the light of her husband’s eye, only to be slowly martyred on the altar of the grand experiment. Some lovely flute work from Anna Holmgren only serves to underline the melancholy…“When I sing, I sing alone; I’m fading to grey”. The experiment recommences, the band let loose amongst the unfathomable cogs and pivots. Some great guitar work from Phil bursts through the intricate turning mechanisms, before we return to melancholy, ending with “Charming strangeness, a beautiful mind” from Amy and followed by Anna’s sad flute. Quite lovely.

Flying Colors – “Second Flight: Live at the Z7”

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock musicLeave a comment

Raw, precise, and inspiring, “Second Flight: Live at the Z7” is yet another taste of the virtuosity that Morse, Morse, Portnoy, LaRue, and McPherson provide for Flying Colors.

http://theprogmind.com/2015/11/05/flying-colors-second-flight-live-at-the-z7/

Unified Past – “Shifting the Equilibrium”

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock musicLeave a comment

Read my thoughts on the new album from Unified Past.

http://theprogmind.com/2015/11/05/unified-past-shifting-the-equilibrium/

RUSH Premiere “Tom Sawyer” Video From “R40 Live” Film

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock music1 Comment

Canadian rock legends RUSH will release their “R40 Live” concert film later this month. A performance clip of the song “Tom Sawyer”, taken from “R40 Live”, can be seen below. All roads have led to this. Forty-one years in the making, RUSH‘s “R40 Live” tour took a very real journey back through time. Beginning with the grand design: a state-of-the-art stage set that pivots,…

http://www.prog-sphere.com/news/rush-premiere-tom-sawyer-video-r40-live-film/

New STEVEN WILSON Album “4 ½” to be Released in January

On By bradbirzerIn progressive rock musicLeave a comment

22nd January will see the release of a new Steven Wilson album “4 ½”, so titled because it forms an interim release between Steven’s recently released fourth album Hand. Cannot. Erase. and the next studio album. 4 ½ comprises 6 tracks with a total running time of 37 minutes. 4 of the songs originated during…

http://www.prog-sphere.com/news/new-steven-wilson-album-4-%C2%BD-released-january/

LSD and the best cover ever of “Bohemian Rhapsody”

On By Time LordIn Progarchy1 Comment

LSD = Lake Street Dive.

This is totally hilarious and completely awesome. One of the greatest covers I have ever seen and heard! Hat tip to Carl for alerting us to this.

A few comments from Carl:

I discovered Lake Street Dive via the work of lead singer Rachael Price, who is a fabulously gifted jazz singer. While still in a teen, in 2003, Price received an honorable mention at the Montreux Jazz Festival’s International Jazz Vocal Competition and the following year she was a semi-finalist and the youngest competitor in the history of the Thelonious Monk Institute Vocal Competition. Despite her impeccable jazz chops, she never received the sort of adulation heaped upon female jazz singers such as Diane Krall. In 2004 she began performing in Lake Street Dive, consisting of classmates from New England Conservatory of Music in Boston: Mike “McDuck” Olson (trumpet, guitar), Bridget Kearney (upright bass), and Mike Calabrese (drums). The band was the brain child of Olson and was originally envisioned to be a “free country band” (!). All four members have a deep background in both classical and jazz music, and all four have made known their love for 1960s R&B, soul, rock, and related music. And, in fact, the band first started to gain traction when a self-shot video of their performance of Michael Jackson’s “I Want You Back” went viral.

So, hardly a prog band! But anyone who prefers their pop to be quirky, smart, occasionally edgy, often fun, and always played with impeccable chops and taste, Lake Street Dive is the band for you. And they do have fun taste in cover songs, ranging from ABBA to Fleetwood Mac to Hall & Oates (their version of “Rich Girl” is smokin’, as they say) and Paul McCartney.

Their cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is part of a series of Halloween vidoes they’ve produced in recent years. On one hand, it is quite campy (perfectly fitting for a Freddie Mercury classic) and quite fun, but also impressively sang and played, with some rather brilliant instrumentation. At the heart of it all, as always, are the harmonies and the lead vocals of Price. (Anyone interested in 3:30 of vocal bliss should watch her sing “What Am I Doing Here”).

Backstory to The Tangent’s PYRAMIDS AND STARS (2005)

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment
2005. Very rare.
2005.  The Tangent’s first live album.

Ian Oakley posted this fascinating backstory on Facebook and very kindly gave me permission to repost here.  Thank you, Ian!

 Ok I may be totally biased as I tour managed the week and financed the CD – but this really is a remarkable live album – There was just something magic that night, it just seemed that for one reason or another that night everything came together at once and the band were firing on all cylinders. Then we had the enormous good fortune to have a venue sound engineer who was sympathetic to the music; because what you are hearing on that CD is basically a direct feed from the desk into a portable 4 track machine – which only really worked once on the whole tour – this night. No overdubs – just a raw live band doing only the 5th date of their entire career! Atmosphere wise there is only one other live ‘Prog’ album that I think captures a time and a place so well – Twelfth Night’s ‘Live and let Live’. So I totally agree with you Bradley, this is a real 3rd wave classic and I would go as so far to say it contains a far better performance of the material from ‘The World That We Drive Through’ than the studio album itself. . . .  I would add that this was also recorded just a week after some members of the band had actually physically met for the very first time – let alone played together! (I remember having to introduce Andy to Jonas at a TFK gig after TMTDA was recorded: “Hi Jonas” – “Hi you are?” – “Ahh I’m Andy we just recorded an album together”…

The Tangent’s PYRAMIDS AND STARS, 10 Years On

On By bradbirzerIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

There are few bands that perform as well live as they do in the studio.  And, of course, there are some for which the opposite is true.

One band that only gets that much more interesting live is Andy Tillison’s ever-evolving The Tangent.  This year, amazingly enough, is the tenth anniversary of the first live The Tangent release, PYRAMIDS AND STARS.  Looking at the line up for that tour, one has to wonder if one is caught in some kind of heavenly time-loop or fantasy prog game.  Andy Tillison, Roine Stolt, Jonas Reingold, Sam Baines, and Zoltan Csorsz.  The lineup could be for a Flower Kings album or, perhaps, a Steven Wilson album.

2005. Very rare.
2005. Very rare.

The ever, endlessly talented Ed Unitsky painted the cover, and, of course, it’s gorgeous.

Only six songs make up this 77-minute feast: The World That We Drive Through; The Canterbury Sequence; The Winning Game; The Music That Died Alone; In Darkest Dreams; and the only song under six minutes in length, a cover version of (ELP) Lucky Man.

The songs—all of which come from the first two The Tangent albums—sound as gorgeous as Unitsky’s cover art would suggest.  This is The Tangent, but it’s The Tangent fully alive.  What happened in the studio is merely prologue.  That the embryo, this the fine young man come of age.

Andy and Roine are especially playful and open to the spirit of the muses.  Their love of this music is palatable.

Sadly, this live album is extremely hard to find, and I made it a point several years ago to dig deeply across and through the internet to find a copy.  It was well worth the hunt, for I treasure this album like no other.  It’s a precious thing to behold.

CRAK-ing open the THRAK BOX

On By carleolsonIn Progressive rockLeave a comment

John Kelman writes regular reviews at my favorite jazz site, AllAboutJazz.com–and he appears to have probably forgotten more about King Crimson than most of us know about the legendary (and still very active) prog band. Here is the opening of his detailed and excellent review of King Crimson’s THRAK BOX: Live and Studio Recordings 1994-1997:

King Crimson: King Crimson: THRAK BOX - Live and Studio Recordings 1994-1997

After three years spent extensively focusing on its 1972-’74 lineup—documented over a massive 66 CDs, DVDs and Blu Rays (plus some additional downloads) on Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (40th Anniversary Series Box) (Panegyric, 2012); The Road to Red(Panegyric, 2013); and Starless (Panegyric, 2014)—King Crimson turns the clock ahead 20 years to an almost completely different lineup, a radically different sound and a far more unwieldy six-piece incarnation dubbed “the double trio” on THRAK BOX: King Crimson Live and Studio Recordings 1994- 1997. Like its predecessors, the box is part of the group’s ongoing 40th Anniversary Series, which began in 2009 with the release of new stereo and surround sound mixes of the progressive rock progenitor’s earth-shattering 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, its highly influential 1975 studio swan song for the ’72-’74 group, Red and the divisive album that series remixer (until now) Steven Wilson dubbed “the album that stereo couldn’t contain,” 1970’s now more recognized classic, Lizard. As usual, alongside the box sets come CD/DVD-a sets with the new mixes, original mixes, and a smaller collection of bonus material.

Unlike the three boxes from the past three years, however, THRAK BOX was constructed with a different purpose in mind. Those previous boxes—while each containing the studio (or more accurately, in the case of Road to Red, studio/live conglomeration) or live album that was its core raison d’être—focused more heavily on live recordings: largely audio only and ranging from low to high fidelity, and sourced from audience bootleg cassettes, soundboard recordings and full, professional multi-track tapes.

Recording technology had come a long way, in terms of portability, ease and cost in the two decades separating the ’72-’74 lineup from the double trio that expanded the ’80s Crimson lineup of guitarist Robert Fripp, guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew, bassist/Stick player Tony Levin and electro-acoustic drummer/percussionist Bill Bruford with two younger newcomers: Stick/Warr guitarist Trey Gunn and another electro-acoustic drummer/percussionist, Pat Mastelotto. Both newcomers came to the group through associations with Fripp: his Guitar Craft classes and/or the King Crimson co-founder’s collaboration with singer/songwriter David Sylvian on 1993’s The First Day and/or its live follow-up, ’94’s Damage. Every note the group made was recorded…and in high fidelity. Releasing a box like the Larks’ Tongues box—which included every known note played by the band (more to the point: every known note recorded by the group, which was far from all-inclusive)—would not just be an absurdly oversized box that would dwarf those that came before, it would have served no real purpose.

The double trio represented a more decided return to being an improvisational band after King Crimson’s largely form-focused ’80s incarnation, of which only one of its three studio recordings has, thus far, received the 40th Anniversary treatment: 1981’s groundbreaking Discipline, which introduced an entirely different Crimson, featuring the group’s sole remaining founding member (Fripp) and the only holdover from the ’72-’74 group, (Bruford). But the double trio was still heavily predicated on structure—whether it was blistering instrumentals or some of the most radio-friendly songs Crimson had released to date—and so a box containing a large number of live recordings would simply have been overkill.

And so, instead, THRAK BOX is a set of 12 CDs, two DVDs (one audio, one video) and two Blu Rays (also one audio, one video) that tells as complete a story of the 1994-1997 King Crimson as any pathological Crimhead would need, ranging from the early early studio recordings that resulted in, as Fripp called it, the 1994 calling card VROOOM EP, which also suggested that this new incarnation was going to be, quite possibly, the densest, most angular and most flat-out aggressive Crimson yet, to (in addition to the 2002 remaster of the double trio’s only full-length studio recording) new stereo and surround sound mixes of 1995’s THRAK—this time done by current Crimson guitarist/vocalist/flautistJakko M. Jakszyk, with input and approval from/by Fripp.

Read the entire review!