10. Flying Colors – At first I thought this was more “pop” than “prog”, but I kept coming back to it throughout the year. It’s prog, and it’s very good!
9. Neal Morse – Momentum. Neal stays true to his beliefs, while delivering the best album of his solo career. Full of energy and great melodies, he, Randy George, and Mike Portnoy create a masterpiece with this one.
8. Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy – WaterSky. A beautiful set of ambient pieces that were recorded while on retreat at a lodge in rural Texas. The sympathetic interplay between Johnson’s keyboards and Keaggy’s guitar is simply wonderful. My students request this music while working on math problems! Continue reading “Yet Another Best of 2012”→
Besides Big Big Train, one of my favorite discoveries of the past year has been Joe Corrales Jr.’s project, Yppah. Their latest album is Eighty One, released on the Ninja Tune label.
Corrales is similar to Matt Stevens (another Progarchy favorite) in that he likes to lay down a bed of rhythm using delays and samples while playing beautiful guitar filigrees on top of it. His style is much simpler than Stevens’, however, as he stresses the groove above all else. The bottom line for me is that his music makes me feel happy when I listen to it. (Which makes sense if you read the band’s name backwards!) Snatches of wordless chants swim in and out of the mix, Anomie Belle adds her siren vocals to several of the songs, Eno-esque audio effects burble along, and the percussion percolates with a world music feel. All of this creates an overall atmosphere of relaxed bliss. This is music for a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Drawing on a cultural heritage that took in My Bloody Valentine alongside hip hop and heavily influenced by various forms of electronic music, psychedelic soul and rock, his music often mixes guitars shoved through massive reverbs/delays, keyboards/synthesizers, live drums, and other techniques.
Can hip-hop influenced music find a place in the prog music universe? Listen to “Happy To See You” below and decide for yourself. Beginning with a nice little guitar riff, the swelling synth background soon takes over and we are soaring through the clouds pictured on the album cover. There’s a brief detour to listen to a children’s chorus sweetly chanting us along our journey before the guitar comes back, turbocharged this time, to shoot us into the stratosphere.
If you’re interested in more, watch the in-studio performance below. A word of warning: Anomie Belle does some rapping in the second song, “Film Burn”, but it’s quickly followed by some beautiful violin work (she’s a classically trained violinist). And hey, if Rush can rap in “Roll The Bones”, then I guess it’s OK, right?
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Progarchy 