This is rather old news (a week old news are old these days), but Riverside had posted an interesting piece of information on a website dedicated to their upcoming album. It seems there is a chance they’ll finally release an album I’m going to like. Read on.
Some time ago I’ve been approached by a Swedish Rock’n'Roll band from Malmö asking me to write about them. It went somewhere along the lines: “If you like our music it would be splendid if you wanted to help us out by writing a couple of lines about us on your blog”. Well, I do like their music and although it’s not prog I thought I’ll try to help them spread the word.
This is a bit off-topic, but for me classical music is equally interesting to prog and even though I spend more time listening to the later I do enjoy the former as well. After listening to Ray Manzarek’s interpreation of Carmina Burana today (I’ll try to write something about it soon) I put on one of my favorite classical recordings, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, played by non other but the English Chamber Orchestra and Nigel Kennedy himself.
To make this day even better I just saw on local TV a great two-piece version–the first part being a jazz-like interpretation of original score and the second a heavy metal one–of Beethoven’s Für Elise performed by one of my favorite Polish cabarets Grupa MoCarta:
They are all well educated instrumentalists who graduated from prestigious Academies of Music in Warsaw and Łódz, but they decided to play classical music in a humorous way. What is more, they created something like a musical cabaret, one in which the music, not the words were the source of laughter.
I didn’t manage to find the complete recording on the web so here’s only the second–heavy–part.
Dave Martone is one of my favorite guitar shredders ever since I first listened to A Demon’s Dream, so I was glad to hear that just a couple of months ago he had released his fifth solo album, Clean. Among the musicians invited to this recording, which includes Joe Satriani soloing in Nail Grinder, Greg Howe in Hard Wired, Jennifer Batten in Moron Face and Nickelback’s Daniel Adair drumming the whole time, the name of the most fierce and definitely one of the world’s best bass players, Billy Sheehan, stands out the most.
Back in January I’ve mentioned Terminal’s upcoming debut album featuring Virgil Donati. Although the CD has not been release so far, band’s MySpace profile now contains two songs from the soon-to-be-released album: The Maze and Mind Destruction. Even though that’s not exactly on spot with my musical tastes, I’m still looking forward to hearing the CD itself.
After first listening to Flagship’s Maiden Voyage I considered it a pretty lousy recording instead of a highly praised album I’ve read about. But somehow I kept coming back to this CD and in time I even begun to like it. Obviously I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece of symphonic prog–maybe because of lack of any substantial experience with the genre–but rather a funny crossover prog, somehow similar to Metal Majesty or Gamma Ray’s pop-like songs from Power Plant (It’s A Sin and Heavy Metal Universe, or rather Happy Metal Universe, for example).
Judging from what I’ve heard so far from the Hungarian progressive scene I can say it’s unique and definitely cognisable, mainly because of the use of many non-rock sounds like piano, string and brass instruments and mostly avoiding the heaviness that the whole Western progressive world have already adopted. One of the bands that populated Hungarian progressive landscape of the 90s was Townscream, formed by Vedres Csaba after he parted ways with After Crying. Nagyvárosi Ikonok, which translates to Metropolitan Icons, is the band’s only album written mostly by Vedres Csaba–of course–while lyrics, in Hungarian, came from Egervári Gábor. All the tracks of this piano driven album are bound by a common theme: the big city and it’s comparison to countryside.
This is an interesting finding. Last week I’ve received a self-released self-titled digipak EP of the band Elsie. It turns out that the band was originally formed in January 1988 in Poznań, Poland by Zbigniew Ślatała and Eugeniusz Pierzchlewicz and in eight months time they managed to prepare for their performance on Jarocin Festival–the biggest rock festival in Poland at that time–in August 1988. The band suspended activity in 1995 and re-activated ten years later, this time as an instrumental progressive rock band. Current line-up comprises of Zbigniew Ślatała on guitar, Eugeniusz Pierzchlewicz on bass, Przemysław Nader on drums and Jacek Fajfer on keyboards.
Well, it’s nice to read that Dream Theater had begun work on their–so far untitled–10th studio album. What’s more interesting is the planned release date of “early summer” and a promise of a world tour. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for DT visiting Poland again.
A Different Point of You is Alias Eye’s–a southern Germany band–second full-fledged studio album. I’ve first read about it on Andrew Kauz’s blog and, given that I often enjoy albums Andrew picks for his This Week’s Featured Album series, I thought this CD might be interesting and gave it a try.
Although not near excellence, A Different Point of You is definitely a very interesting recording, mainly because you don’t get to hear too many bands playing similar to what Alias Eye shows here. Or maybe I haven’t heard too much crossover prog so far… Nonetheless, what I really like about this album is the gathering of other than typical rock sounds: a saxophone (one of my favorite instruments), contrabass and couple of interesting keyboards effects, including my second favorite piano.
Prog events near me