A reminder of the Trinity Live cancer charity show at The Assembly in Leamington Spa on May 18th.
The show was originally part of a triple-headline tour featuring The Reasoning, Touchstone and Magenta, postponed because of Magenta’s Christina Booth’s treatment for breast cancer.
Touchstone and The Reasoning decided to go ahead with a charity show on the original date, and have since added acoustic sets from Alan Reed, Heather Findlay and Matt Stevens to the bill.
Since I’m thinking about another redesign, a few questions for regular readers of this blog: Continue reading
Morpheus Rising are now taking pre-orders for their album “Eximus Humanus”. The band funded the album with a successful Kickstarter campaign. Those of us who backed the have already downloaded the digital version of the album, and it’s exvellent. Now is the turn of those of you who missed the kickstarter.
Morpheus Rising will be playing a launch gig at Bilston Robin 2 on 23rd February, with Luna Rossa as the support, which ought to be an excellent night.
Every time I see an Upworthy-style link-bait headline beginning with “You won’t believe…”. I have to fight the urge to want to kick a “Viral Content Editor” in the bollocks. This probably makes me a Bad Person….
Mostly Autumn announce their eleventh studio album “Dressed in Voices“, with an album launch party in May. They are now taking pre-orders from Mostly Autumn Records, including tickets for the launch party, which will almost certainly sell out well before the event. The special edition limited to 2000 copies will be a double album, with a regular single album edition to follow.
In the words of Bryan Josh:
What can I say about our new “Dressed in Voices†album? Well, without giving much away, it all started when I went away last October to write a jolly old Josh n Co album. The first thing that happened was a song that wrote itself on the first touch of the piano. I knew immediately that this wasn’t a jolly old Josh n Co song but indeed had the heavy dark stamp of a Mostly Autumn song with a concept within it. I tried to ignore it and wistfully carry on with the original plan but found it impossible to ignore, and so the album story continued to present itself and I knew we had no choice but to fulfil the concept.
To sum it up as best I can for now… this certainly isn’t a set of cheery pop songs… but there is sunshine in the darkest places – be prepared for a journey – we have “mostly†never sounded like this album before!!
The double-disk edition of the last album “Ghost Moon Orchestra” sold out well before the official release date, and included some songs as good as anything on the single-disk retail edition. So don’t delay getting your order in!
Panic Room have released a promo with teasers from the forthcoming album “Incarnate”, to be released on 10th March.
There are many bands within the progressive rock scene who take a modernised streamlined approach to the genre, stripping out the fabled self-indulgent excesses to make their music relevant for a new generation of listeners.
Transatlantic are not one of these bands.
The supergroup consisting of former Dream Theater and Spock’s Beard alumni Mike Portnoy and Neal Morse, along with Marillion’s Pete Trewavas and The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt have always been a byword for prog-rock excess. They’re the sort of band who can play a three-and-a-half hour live show that consisted of just seven songs, the mere mention of which can make some mainstream music writers quiver in fear.
The quartet’s fourth album, “Kaleidoscope” finds them doing what they do best. Clocking in at 75 minutes in length, not far short of Yes’ legendary “Tales From Topographic Oceans”, it contains just five songs, three shorter numbers bookended by two lengthy epics, the twenty-five minute “Into The Blue” and the even longer title track.
True to their inspirations from the golden age of prog, the record has an organic sound, all swirling Hammond organ, Mellotron and soaring overdriven guitar. Despite the unashamed self-indulgent excess, there is still room for plenty of memorable tunes.
The two longer numbers include symphonic rock riffs, quiet reflective passages, jazz-inflected instrumental sections and huge anthemic climaxes with recurring motifs. It all sounds impressive, though you can’t help feeling that both epics might have benefited from a little judicious editing. They do go on a bit, and title track especially occasionally descends into rather formless jamming in places. At one point it leads into a climactic solo that sounds as though it fits the end of the piece, but no, there’s still another ten minutes to go.
While the two epics attract the initial attention, it’s actually a couple of the shorter numbers that stand out on repeated listens. The rocker “Black as the Sky”, driven by an archetypal neo-prog synth riff, is great fun. And the ballad “Beyond the Sun” is a thing of beauty, both the simplest and the shortest track on the record.
Transatlantic are a band you either love or hate. Their lack of any kind of restraint is both their greatest weakness and their greatest strength, and the resulting 30-minute songs are not for the faint of heart. But at its best it captures the essence of 70s progressive rock, evoking bands from Yes to Uriah Heep, and the whole thing is at least as good as anything they’ve done since their 2000 début.
This review also appears in Trebuchet Magazine.
Vocativ thinks it is, using disease epidemics as a parallel.
Like the bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually come to an end.
According to new research from Princeton, which compared the â€adoption and abandonment dynamics†of social networks by “drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,†Facebook is beginning to die out.
Specifically, the researchers concluded that “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.â€
As I’ve said before, Facebook’s big problem is that its “All your friends gathered together in one place” model is broken for anyone who has anything more to say than banal platitudes or sharing baby photos. It’s become the online equivalent of the awkward family dinner where there are subjects you can’t mention because they set off racist Uncle George.
I’ve getting more convinced that serious discussions on culture or politics should be taking place on forums with like-minded people where you’re not obliged to walk on eggshells because of the aforementioned Uncle Georges.
I know a lot of people who hate Facebook but are only on there because everyone else is. It’s been alienating users of late with increasingly intrusive advertising, ever-changing rules determing who does and doesn’t see content you post, and a perpetually cavalier approach to privacy. I’ve oten thought that Facebook was doomed the moment anything better came along, but now I’m thinking we don’t need somebody to go and build a better Facebook, we need to create smaller overlapping communities of like-minded people. Like we used to have, in fact, before Facebook came along.
As an aside, if you read the rest of the above link, it’s a poster child for DON’T READ THE COMMENTS. More evidence that media websites should only allow comments if the site owner is willing to invest time and effort into moderation.
Alan Moore thinks Superheroes are ‘a cultural catastrophe’
“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” he wrote to Ó Méalóid. “It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”
Somebody had to say it.
Despite being an avid fan of science fiction and fantasy, I have always found the tropes of superhero genre inherently silly. It’s probably a consequence of not reading superhero comics as a child. So with the excaption of the camp 60s version of Batman (Wallop! Blatt! Kapow!), I only encountered the rest of the genre as an adult. And having not grown up steeped in the genre from a formative age it’s a lot easier to recognise the whole thing as selling adolescent male power fantasies.
If people did have superhuman powers, why would they don Spandex and capes and spend their time having fist fights with equally ridiculous supervillans? Why do they always have to have mundane secret indentities? And why would the presence of hundreds of costumed heroes have absolutely no impact on the world’s history or politics?
I’m not alone in thinking this, given the way this post of mine on Twitter (the cartoon isn’t mine) went viral with something like 400 retweets.
What’s wrong wiith the whole superhero genre – pic.twitter.com/JQ2KaLTiaR
— Tim Hall (@Kalyr) January 14, 2014
That cartoon neatly sums up my problem with the genre….
