Table of contents for Issue 156 in Prog

What started life as an annual post-everything free festival in a moderately small pub in Brighton circa 2008 sprang into life as a vehicle for self-releasing in the pre-streaming-is-everything days. After just under a decade of promoting various post-rock, math-rock and everything in between live shows around the UK, Nice Weather For Airstrikes Records morphed into a residential studio, retreat and post hub on the south coast, hosting artists such as Rolo Tomassi, Yndi Halda, Delta Sleep, Black Peaks, Nordic Giants, Meet Me In St Louis and many more. After the pandemic, focus has shifted well and truly back to the label with releases from Poly-Math, VLMV and Overhead, The Albatross – with plenty more to come! Download this issue’s sampler for a taste of what’s currently on offer. What’s…

Steven Wilson will release his eighth solo album The Overview via Fiction Records on March 21 – and it marks his long-awaited return to prog territory. The follow-up to 2023’s The Harmony Codex is a 42-minute concept album that features just two songs: the 23-minute Objects Outlive Us and the 18-and-a-half minute title track. It hinges around the idea of what Wilson calls “perspective” and stems from a conversation the musician had with Alexander Milas, founder of the Space Rocks organisation, who introduced the musician to something called‘The Overview Effect’. “It’s a recognised phenomenon that astronauts get when they look out into space,” says Wilson. “A cognitive shift reportedly occurs in their mental perspective – the understanding, in a split second, of just how insignificant we are. The album all…

Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe’s An Evening Of Yes Music Plus, originally released in 1993, is being reissued in a new two-CD/two-DVD set via Esoteric on January 31. Fully remastered and presented in a clamshell box, the package features the group’s appearance at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in September 1989 and contains the entire concert across two CDs with the full concert-video on a region-free DVD. Also included is an additional region-free DVD, In The Big Dream, featuring promotional videos, interviews and commentary as the quartet recorded at AIR Studios on the island of Montserrat and excerpts from the concert itself. The footage captures the former Yes members at the height of their popularity. While fans were thrilled at the group’s live appearances, this enthusiasm was not shared by Yes’s management who sought…

“If you’re a purist, look away,” warns Sel Balamir. Ready to bust eardrums on April 4 via Rockosmos Records, Amplifier’s Gargantuan is loud, cosmic, and expansive – yet was recorded very, very quietly. Singer-guitarist Balamir and drummer Matt Brobin created the album in The Old Forge, a former smithy, in an idyllic hamlet in Sussex. “I couldn’t really make a load of noise,” says Balamir. “It just wouldn’t be possible in a small village without waking everyone up at two o’clock in the morning. So, I had to find a way of working on my monitors and headphones. I ended up getting rid of all my amplifiers and getting little zero-watt amplifiers, and Matt switched to electronic drums.” The duo had samples of Brobin’s acoustic drum kit that they’d captured…

(Atlantic Records, 1998) As soon as Tori Amos released her debut solo LP – 1992’s Little Earthquakes – she drew comparisons to the queen of progressive/art pop-rock, Kate Bush. However, in a May 1998 interview with Q magazine (in support of her fourth studio record, From The Choirgirl Hotel, released the same month), Amos admitted that although she was “blown away” by Bush’s music, she wasn’t directly influenced by her. “I was shocked because the last thing you want to hear is that you sound like someone else… But I could hear a resonance in the voice where you’d think we were distantly related or something,” she said. Her revelation is surprising given how much of her earliest work (from Crucify and Little Earthquakes to Cornflake Girl and Father Lucifer)…

“After Rick Wakeman left we started working as a four-piece and got the flow going. We spent a long time rehearsing getting the basic ideas for Relayer in place before going in the studio. That was one of the albums where there was a lot of spontaneous stuff happening in the studio with a lot of things coming to fruition really quickly. ‘We were very prog-minded in those days. We were looking for anything that sounded different. From a percussion point of view, it extended to Jon and myself working together. We would end up going to a scrap yard and banging pieces of metal in the morning for about an hour to see what sounded good. We actually built a framework in the studio made out of springs and…

As the adage goes: “Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.” Or, in the case of Marillion’s Steve ‘H’ Hogarth, the kitchen table. It’s very late when the singer steals his way down the stairs in the half-light. Something has woken him from a dream; the memory of something. His father, he thinks. He grabs a sheet of paper and starts writing. “All the words were written quickly in the middle of the night,” says Hogarth. “I woke up, wrote it all down, went back to bed, and then got up in the morning and read it and thought, ‘Holy shit!’ It was all sort of rhyming and had a certain nature. God knows where it came from, but it came more or less…

Swallow The Sun’s new album, Shining, is aptly named. It isn’t exactly bursting with joy – the Finnish quintet are far too steeped in melancholia for that – but it does provide glimmers of hope that shine like distant stars in the darkness. It’s also an album that guitarist, keyboard player, founder member and main songwriter Juha Raivio felt that he had to make at this point in the band’s career. “I needed it to feel different to our last album for my own sake, because Moonflowers was so dark,” he explains. “It was so painful. Anyone who knows us knows the music has a lot of weight from my own personal life. It started to be quite dangerous for myself, to play the music and go on tour and…

To say that Dilemma have had a stop-start career would be an understatement: three albums across a 20-year period is hardly a world-beating hit rate. Yet they’ve returned with a remarkable concept album, The Purpose Paradox, and their career is now definitely back on track after myriad line-up issues, not to mention the same geographic problems that have blighted many bands with members in multiple countries over the last five or so years. The band formed in the early 90s by keyboardist Robin Z, but momentum created by their hugely popular debut, Imbroccata, came to a halt when Dutch label SI went into liquidation. An invite to reform for a festival appearance saw a revival in the band’s fortunes and a well-received second album, Random Acts Of Liberation, in 2018,…

Stupid Says Run TALKING ELEPHANT MUSIC Second solo album from Kaprekar’s Constant singer. Prog readers may be more familiar with Dorie Jackson’s charismatic contralto than they realise, as her silky tones have been heard in Francis Dunnery’s band as well as Chris Difford’s solo work, and she’s also regularly featured on her father (ex-VdGG) David Jackson’s work. But the project most relevant to this, her long-gestating follow-up to 2008 solo debut The Courting Ground, is British folk-prog collective Kaprekar’s Constant, whose three albums to date have all featured her vocals prominently. “Imbues folk traditions with a warm melodic glow.” Many of the instrumental contributions on Stupid Says Run come from Jackson’s KC bandmates Al Nicholson and Nick Jefferson, along with guest input from Papa Jackson and KC producer Mike Westergaard.…

Softs ESOTERIC John Etheridge’s Softs’ debut remastered. Originally released in 1976, Softs was something of a make-or-break album in Soft Machine’s career. It came after the band had suffered a serious setback following the abrupt departure of guitarist Allan Holdsworth, who quit the band to join Tony Williams’s Lifetime in the USA. That he took off just as Bundles, their first album for EMI’s Harvest label, came out in 1975 added insult to injury. Fortunately, Holdsworth made amends by suggesting his replacement should be the relatively unknown John Etheridge. “It was a make-or-break album in Soft Machine’s career.” What Softs makes abundantly clear is that whereas Holdsworth’s fiery legato technique tended to skim over Karl Jenkins’s ornately structured contributions, Etheridge digs deeper into the material. Previously with Darryl Way’s Wolf…

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Former Nightwish bassist-vocalist Marko Hietala has described his second solo album Roses From The Deep as a “musical fusion reactor of the decades” as he and his band make mosaics from a wide rang of influences. Released on February 7 via Nuclear Blast, it’s described as more “rock focused” than its “atmospheric” predecessor – 2020’s Pyre Of The Black Heart – as Hietala and his band lean into a collaborative writing process. “We originally discussed the band having its own name,” he admits. “Without my bandmates the album would be completely different, and much less adventurous.” Augmented by guitarist Tuomas Wäinölä, keys player Vili Ollila and “Finland’s most recorded drummer” Anssi Nykänen, the group have woven together different sonic eras, making 70s shock rock and modern prog bedfellows. Hietala says,…

As Coheed & Cambria’s enigmatic ringleader Claudio Sanchez began writing the 10th record in their sprawling, scifi-propelled Amory Wars series of concept albums – out in spring – he started to wrestle with himself. “Two big themes that happen on a lot of Coheed records are identity and mortality, and the older I get, those themes become louder,” he reflects. “Initially I was writing without the rules of the story, and I found a very personal theme – of thinking about my past and the choices I’ve made – that revealed itself to me. I feel a personal connection to all of the Coheed records, but this one resonates differently.” Sanchez wrote 30 songs for Vaxis Act III: The Father Of Make Believe, named after the fact Sanchez has devised his…

Wire’s bassist Graham Lewis – recording as Edvard Graham Lewis – has revealed that the title of his new solo album Alreet, which is out on January 24 via Upp Records, isn’t so much sweetening the pill of the record’s ominous contents that include mortality and economic collapse as baiting a trap for the listener. “‘Alreet’ is like the North East’s version of the French ‘ça va’ – that you’re alright,” says Lewis. “I needed a title that was going to offset the album’s complete darkness.” He adds with a chuckle, “But it can mean lots of things. I’ve heard people say ‘alreet’ when they mean, ‘Shit’s really going to fucking go down here’.” Recorded under the aegis of Swedish producer, songwriter and musician Max Lorentz, whose credits include ABBA’s Agnetha…

“I first saw Kate Bush on Top Of The Pops in 1978 and I loved the gothicness of Wuthering Heights. She was just extraordinary – there was this woman that was doing this sort of erotic mime all by herself. She was just phenomenal. And, of course, I went out and bought the album, The Kick Inside. I wasn’t as embraced by Lionheart, but with the later singles, Babooshka and Breathing, you’d just go, ‘Wow! This is deep! She’s talking eco, Mother Earth shit here.’ Musically, Never Forever stopped me in my tracks and I became quite obsessed. This may sound like an odd analogy, but there’s something almost James Joyce about The Dreaming. Ulysses is a fucking phenomenal book. When you first read it, you don’t know what it…

“‘Community’ is the word I always use,” says Shelby Logan Warne as she speaks of her ambitions for Sensible Music Studios, the recording, rehearsal and mastering facility she co-owns with her business partner Grace Hayhurst. Based near King’s Cross in north London, the studios have, over the years, hosted a number of prog luminaries including Dream Theater, Roger Waters and Tim Bowness. Now, having bought out the premises in April, the pair are reaching out to prog’s musicians, labels and festivals to enable this community. Both will be familiar to prog fans. Logan Warne is the singer-keyboardist and producer of electro-proggers Kyros while Hayhurst is a solo artist and Prog contributor. The former managed and engineered at Old Street Studios and her partner ran a podcast studio, and with their eyes…

PINK FLOYD FANS will prick up their ears at Overhead, The Albatross; their bandname is grabbed from the opening line of Echoes. “Myself and Stevie, the bass player, we would have been massive Pink Floyd fans when we were teenagers,” reflects piano and keyboard player David Prendergast. “So, when we started the band I was listening to Pink Floyd all the time – staying up late, doing the thing where you press play on The Dark Side Of The Moon at the exact same as the The Wizard Of Oz. I was that guy.” The Floyd connection starts to dissipate beyond the name, though, since the Dublin quartet are more post-rock than prog rock, but there’s some shared DNA in the experimentalism and soundscaping. Fresh from the release of their…

“My cousin, who knew my musical tastes, said I should come to London to see this band that he’d discovered. So we left the Weald of Kent and ended up in Dagenham where Yes were playing. They’d just released The Yes Album. It was around the summer holidays of my first year at the Royal College of Music and, for me, it was the most important gig in that I’d at last found a group playing with more than three chords, with different time signatures, wonderful lyrics, and all expert players. “I was a callow youth and I didn’t really understand about gigs but I had to go and say thank you and speak to the band afterwards. I knocked on the door of this tiny dressing room and Chris…

David Surkamp’s emotive, stratospherically high voice and aching, melancholic songs distinguished 1975’s Pampered Menial and 1976’s At The Sound Of The Bell, the two revered classics for which his band, Pavlov’s Dog, remain best known. The group formed in St Louis, Missouri in 1972, and their baroque strings, foggy Mellotron and children’s choirs proved the perfect backdrop for Surkamp’s tales of Arthurian legend, lovers distanced by the Colorado gold rush, and the seemingly unattainable Julia, subject of the truly special piano ballad of the same name. “We’re still doing all those songs in the same keys, you know!” Surkamp tells Prog proudly, prior to heading to Greece, Germany and Belgium for gigs with Pavlov’s Dog’s current line-up. At 72, his voice remains a marvel, but his band have never really…

A sensitive behemoth, hulking yet graceful, Mogwai’s 11th album arrives with the Glaswegian band bearing a higher profile than at any time during their three decades of delicacy and disruption. Its predecessor, 2021’s As The Love Continues, became a UK No.1 hit, which they found “totally surreal”. A documentary, If The Stars Had A Sound, was recently released, which wisely chose not to analyse what it is about the band’s noise which moves so many so deeply. Mogwai aren’t the types to pontificate earnestly about creating effervescent rainbows of liminal meaning or somesuch. The key to their alchemy is to not overthink what they do. Any lyrics are half-heartedly, almost sheepishly, mumbled, all but inaudibly, and the musical structures ebb and flow as they see fit, rather than following conventions.…

Live At The Royal Albert Hall CHERRY RED Triple-disc live set captures the space rock veterans’ sonic destruction. The cynical response to the release of yet another Hawkwind live album – at least their fifth since 2015 – is to wave a dismissive hand as if wafting away a hippie’s morning-after lentil curry fart. But to do so would be to deny the aural document of what was billed as An Evening Of Sonic Destruction 50 Years On… Celebrating The Rituals And Odyssey Of Space at the Royal Albert Hall in September 2023 at an event ostensibly celebrating Space Ritual’s half-century while actually revelling in a career-spanning set. “The current line-up is arguably the best since the mid-70s.” And what Live At The Royal Albert Hall emphatically proves is that,…

An Evening Of Yes Music Plus ESOTERIC Yes break-off faction captured live in sound and vision in 1989. Following the release of their sole, self-titled studio album in June 1989, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe embarked on an extensive and well-received world tour. With the Chris Squire-led Yes languishing in singer-less limbo in Los Angeles, this tour was the closest fans would get to the Yes live experience throughout 1989 and early 1990. Recorded at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California on September 9, 1989, An Evening Of Yes Music Plus was originally broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio show and as a pay-per-view concert film before being commercially released in 1993 on double CD and in 1997 on the then-new DVD format. While the former was reissued…

VENUE THE GARAGE, LONDON DATE 02/12/2024 When a band offer up arguably one of their best-known and most-loved songs as second in their set, you know you’re in for a treat. And that’s exactly what Finnish brethren Von Hertzen Brothers do, launching into a rousing version of the Prog Award-winning Flowers And Rust at an impressively busy Garage. The audience respond as expected, by joining as one to sing along to its epic and uplifting chorus. That said, a VHB gig is always a treat. The band exude fun, even when engaging in the most intricate of prog songs, and especially with frontman Mikko Von Hertzen’s witty and self-deprecating between-song banter. They also have a new album to promote, the rather joyous In Mumuration, and they start this evening’s proceedings…

VENUE BUSH HALL, LONDON DATE 10/11/2024 SUPPORT SAIICHI SUGIYAMA It’s mid-afternoon on a grey, damp Sunday in west London, but such is the draw of iconic Dutch progressive trailblazers Focus that Bush Hall is absolutely heaving, even for the support set from veteran British-born Japanese singer-songwriter Saiichi Sugiyama and his band. Armed just with acoustic guitar, bass and fiddle, the four-piece combo deliver Saiichi’s occasionally hearty, often whimsical, sometimes quite ethereal folk-based songs to a receptive audience. The guitarist also features on lead vocals and there are some very pleasant two-part harmonies. There’s a warm, comforting quality about the material, which is ideally suited for hunkering down in this regal Edwardian dancehall and acting as a foil to the weather outside. It’s an almost understated start to Focus’s set. Thijs…

VENUE REBELLION, MANCHESTER DATE 19/11/2024 SUPPORT MONOSPHERE It’s been four years since Finnish-British prog metal outfit Wheel last went on a headline jaunt across the UK. Buoyed by the two albums that have arrived since – including 2024’s coming-of-age Charismatic Leaders – they’re now playing in venues twice the size, eager to show their growth, and tonight’s set highlights where they excel but also where their pitfalls swallow the ground beneath them. On a frost-quilted night, Germany’s Monosphere make their UK debut in dynamic and propulsive fashion. They’re heavy, there’s no doubt about it. Yet their ability to balance technical metal, metalcore’s in-vogue thump and delicate lulls that share a stylistic border with post-rock makes for entertaining viewing. Backed by a simple but effective light show that flashes and flickers…

Where’s home? Old Tappan in New Jersey, which is about 45 minutes away from midtown Manhattan. What’s your earliest memory of prog? Watching MTV in the early 80s and seeing a video of Kansas’s Dust In The Wind and Yes’s Owner Of A Lonely Heart. MTV played some good music back in those days! We had just emigrated from the Soviet Union and I’m the son of a classical musician – MTV was a culture shock, and my gateway to the ‘dark side’. What was your first prog album? One of the first prog bands I got deeply into was Rush. I bought Presto when I was 14 – I dug it and quickly bought their entire back catalogue, and started going to their shows regularly. And the latest? Jon…

Norwegian art-rockers Dim Gray have announced the release of their third studio album, Shards, which is out on February 28 via Grim Day Records. The album follows on from 2020 debut Flown and 2022’s Firmament. Led by core members Håkon Høiberg (guitars, vocals), Tom Ian Klungland (drums) and Oskar Holldorff (vocals, keys), Dim Gray expanded to a quintet in 2023 with the addition of bassist Kristian Kvaksrud and Milad Amouzegar on guitar and keys. “Seven of the songs on Shards are about change, upheaval, severance: something shattering to pieces,” says Holldorff. “Although most are sad or dramatic, some have a tinge of hopefulness, as sometimes the pieces of something shattered can be rearranged in different and better ways. These seven songs are bookended by two that deal with the opposite;…

Yorkshire-based proggers Ghost of The Machine are set to return with the release of their second album, Empires Must Fall, which is out via the Essentials label on March 7. Their latest continues the story that began with the Scissors suite on debut Scissorgames. “Our first record concluded with the tyrannical Puppet King being vanquished by his final victim – she slew him with a pair of scissors! So, we wondered what the consequences of that violent but liberating final act would be,” explains frontman Chris Bramald. He says, “We started with a simple question which has only complex answers: what is true justice? Is the Puppet King’s slayer – the newly-crowned Empress Of The Light – succeeding at being a benevolent ruler? And what will it take to finally…

“MANY PEOPLE ASK why we’re called Oddleaf, and we couldn’t really explain, so we thought we would do a song about it,” says composer and keyboard player, Carina Taurer. The explanation comes in the hauntingly intricate Ethereal Melodies, signature song from their shimmering debut album, Where Ideal And Denial Collide. Its multilayered symphonic lushness pays homage to Renaissance and Camel, two bands that Austrian-born Taurer and co-founding flautist Mathieu Rossi are fans of. They also cite Wobbler, Änglagård and Big Big Train as major influences. Throughout the six interconnected songs, they thread personal, heartfelt ecology and humanist themes. “When you look at our album cover, you see the World Tree,” says Taurer. “The introduction song is The Eternal Tree: as we’re engaged with social matters, we wanted to tell a…

THE CANTERBURY SCENE extends well beyond the usual geographical boundaries and, it seems, is also exerting an influence among an increasingly younger generation of musicians. France’s Tom Penaguin is one such example. The multi-instrumentalist’s self-titled album of original compositions is clearly influenced by the tone and timbre of the likes of Egg, National Health and other luminaries, but he also brings his own idiosyncratic stamp of authority to music that boasts quirky time signatures, complex arrangements and strikingly melodic themes. Now in his late 20s and playing guitar with stoner post-rock outfit Djiin, Penaguin was captivated by all things Canterbury as a teenager. “I was 14 or 15 years old. I heard a specific sound on a record, I don’t know which one, and I was like, ‘What’s this instrument?…

DAVE PEN AND Robin Foster first met through MySpace more than 15 years ago. It was the nascent algorithms that brought them together, with the bots frequently suggesting fans of Pen’s band Archive might like the music of Foster, and vice versa. “So we started spying on each other,” remembers Foster, an English musician who’s been based in Brittany for the best part of 15 years. “And then I received a message from Dave out of the blue suggesting we should meet up.” Pen had checked out Foster’s music and liked what he heard. “On his profile were the words ‘Englishman lost in France,’” remembers Pen, “and so I sent him a message saying, ‘I know what it feels like to be an Englishman lost in France.’” Archive are big…

Jon Anderson is looking back on events that happened 50 years ago when, as a 30-year-old man, he was fronting one of the most commercially successful bands of the time. He laughs incredulously as some of those memories come to the fore. “There’s a brilliant photograph somewhere where we’re all holding the faders on the mixing console, and everybody’s got hold of their own lever. That’s the perfect picture of what the band was like at that time. Everybody wants to do their best, but everybody’s on top of each other and not quite knowing what’s next. It’s a funny photograph but it actually depicted where we were and musically; we were all just trying to do some really good stuff.” The Turkish-American electronic music composer İlhan Mimaroğlu once said,…

Richie Castellano, bassist with Blue Öyster Cult since 2004, is also known for his work as part of The Band Geeks, who’ve garnered a reputation for their forensic renditions of classic Yes songs such as Close To The Edge. In 2023, The Band Geeks toured with Jon Anderson and in 2024 not only toured with him again but recorded and released the acclaimed True album. “I was heavily into The Beatles as a 13-year-old, but my uncle challenged me by playing Yes’s Heart Of The Sunrise. I wasn’t ready for it – it was beyond my understanding, really out there. So I tried learning it and that was almost like taking a look under the hood and you could see there was a lot going on and how brilliantly constructed…

When Pól Brennan returned to his family band – 21 years after leaving to work with Peter Gabriel at Real World Studios – he had a specific ambition in mind. It took Clannad a further 13 years to realise that ambition, and it may be the last thing they will ever do. The Irish group – Pól’s sister Moya, brother Ciarán and late uncles Pádraig and Noel Duggan – first turned heads in the wider world with 1982’s Theme From Harry’s Game: a haunting, dark, close-harmony ode for the TV series that lamented Ireland’s Troubles. The first Gaelic hit single outside their own country, it proved to be a levelling-up experience along with its parent album, 1983’s Magical Ring. The most immediate result was an invitation to do more TV…

“I feel like the band seem pretty comfortable in our own skin at the minute,” says Ewen Friers, bassist of Belfast’s prog-math-post-rockers And So I Watch You From Afar. From their origins in the small town of Portrush, Northern Ireland, the quartet have arrived at a point in their career where they played two headline sets at last August’s ArcTanGent festival. Seemingly flush with confidence, they devoted one set to performing their new album, Megafauna, in its entirety. The shows followed the success of their first US tour in seven years, yet it appears that their exponentially growing status isn’t something they’ve actively planned or pursued. “We’re in no massive rush to chase this or chase that,” says Friers. “What we’re really chasing is making albums that we can be…

Heard Noises ACID JAZZ Some of the best noises to hear this new year. At some point, Matt Berry will be fully appreciated for the innovative musical maverick he truly is. Heard Noises – unbelievably, his 13th album – is yet another example of his fathomless imagination and instrumental prowess. His records are communal spaces for the strange: every diversion is explored, no byway left untrod; ideas and genres ebb and flow, snapping into focus, occasionally careering out of control. Whereas 2020’s Phantom Birds was a Dylanesque break-up album and 2021’s The Blue Elephant was more rooted in 60s freakbeat, Heard Noises jauntily moves across styles and influences while remaining unmistakably Berry’s singular, oblique vision. “One of the greatest instalments of his idiosyncratic career.” The scene is set by Who-like…

Eyes Of The Living Night KSCOPE Swedish folk-prog maverick expands his horizons dramatically. Jonathan Hultén’s pivot from extreme metal to something more ethereal has been one of the more welcome transformations of the past few years. On his 2020 debut album, Chants From Another Place, the former guitarist with Swedish growlers Tribulation stripped away the gnarled noise in a favour of a liminal beauty: Nick Drake resurrected and relocated to a wintry Scandinavian forest, dressed in 1920s movie-star makeup and a widow’s veil. “Transcends its influences to sound like nothing else.” Where the debut was painted in shades of muted blue, green and grey, Eyes Of The Living Night feels like an explosion of colour, the hushed and haunted ambience of its predecessor blossoming into something more expansive. If his…

Birna MUSIC FOR NATIONS/SONY Dark Nordic folk collective bear down on another extraordinary concept album. Can a project as rooted in the past as Wardruna truly be considered progressive? The Norwegian group utilise recreated Viking-era and Stone Age instruments to ancient cultural and mythological themes. And yet this is a place where experimental archaeology meets pure creativity. There are sounds and instruments that distant ancestors might have been familiar with, but arranged and expressed in a way that might never have been heard before Wardruna spearheaded a burgeoning movement of Norse-inspired folk – and certainly not by modern ears. “As meticulously constructed as any modern prog album.” With no way of knowing what music those ancients actually created, this is guided by Wardruna’s contemporary vision and that marries subtlety and…

Bananamour ESOTERIC Vinyl reissue of one of the Canterbury scene great’s most accessible LPs. The last of Kevin Ayers’ initial four solo LPs for Harvest, 1973’s Bananamour has an inside-cover photo that captures him in all his louche decadence. Dressed in a suave white dinner jacket, bottle of red to hand, he’s playing chess with phallus-shaped pieces carved from the yellow fruit in question. Bananamour? Kinky! Though quality control peaked a tad lower than on 1971’s Whatevershebringswesing, there’s still much to savour here, not least the short, whimsical Oh! Wot A Dream, Ayers’ Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band-like tribute to his friend Syd Barrett. With Doris Troy, Liza Strike and Barry St John providing backing vocals – all three had just graced The Dark Side Of The Moon – the Floydian…

VENUE WORLD CAFÉ LIVE, PHILADELPHIA, USA DATE 22/11/2024 SUPPORT RANDY MCSTINE Led by the superbly vulnerable vocals and cynically poignant lyricism of Bruce Soord, The Pineapple Thief have been going strong for 25 years. That’s particularly impressive given that they’ve released 15 studio LPs without ever losing sight of what makes them singular (a characteristic balance of sophisticated arrangements and top-notch songwriting). Tonight’s show clearly reflects that, as the quartet journey through the last decade or so of their recording career (including a full recreation of 2024’s It Leads To This) with plenty of variety and panache. Aided by touring guitarist/singer Beren Matthews – who also contributed to It Leads To This – and a great opening solo set from Randy McStine (Lo-Fi Resistance, Porcupine Tree), The Pineapple Thief have…