Those of a certain age should remember this hard working Scottish rock band formed in Glasgow in 1981 and when you name your band after an album by the sublime UFO then you have made a statement of intent about the style of rock you are going to trade in. Formed by guitarist Gordon Bonnar,..
MANTRA – MEDIUM (FINISTERIAN DEAD END)
It is a joy to see that progressive music is alive and well and there are bands like Mantra that are pushing the progressive boundaries rather than settling for rehashing the past. Let me start with a very minor gripe: the band’s name. Spotify identifies 35 bands/artists with this name and that’s excluding dozens of..
STEELWINGS – BACK (SLIPTRICK RECORDS)
If you like an hour of good honest rock and roll then you won’t go wrong listening to this one. It really is extraordinary how Sweden seems to be churning out quality rock bands like hot cakes these days. Here is yet another one although they are not actually that new. Back in the late..
GIANT DWARF (SOUND EFFECT RECORDS)
This band could go a long long way.... Giant Dwarf are a new band from Perth, Australia, and this their eponymous debut album is an absolute gem. Musically, they plant their flag firmly in stoner territory with the stars of that genre (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age) being a visible influence along with the..
SAMANTHA MARTIN & DELTA SUGAR – Run To Me (Delta Soul)
Run to Me is the follow-up album to Send the Nightingale, the debut album from Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar, who are an eleven piece Blues / Soul band from Canada. For a woman marketed as a blues vocalist, and who’s been nominated for awards in various blues categories, she has a voice ideally suited..
IAN ANDERSON
I think you can look at many, if not most of the Jethro Tull albums, as containing elements of progressive rock - not necessarily prog, which is a bit more fanciful, but progressive rock. In November 2019, Ian Anderson announced that in September and October 2020, he’d be playing a series of eleven dates across..
Roger Dean
I can’t honestly say I had a conversation with Syd Barrett. We had a few shots at it, but it really didn’t work... “I have often said, I wish Relayer wasn’t called Relayer, I wish it was called Gates of Delirium,” muses the artist Roger Dean, sitting at a huge wooden table in a large..
IO EARTH / HEKZ – Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, 15/12/19
...there is a trip back to the very first IO album for a tremendous rendition of the epic Creation, which is greeted like an old friend by the assembled throng When you go to a gig, you often tend to learn something new. Sometimes it’s about the bands, sometimes it’s about the venue, sometimes it..
MIGHTY BABY – At A Point Between Fate And Destiny: The Complete Recordings (Cherry Red / Grapefruit)
Then things got strange. They proposed a second album, to be called Day Of The Soup, recorded it and promptly abandoned it... I don’t know quite where Cherry Red keep exhuming some of these names from, but I have to say that almost every time they do so I’m glad about it. Most of the..
BYWATER CALL – Bywater Call (Gypsy Soul Records)
The whole band manage to tread that razor's edge between sounding tight and well rehearsed yet still liable to start a bar-room brawl at any moment You know what? One of the great things about writing about albums on a regular basis like this is being reminded every now and again that you really can't..