Rob Reed, leader and keyboard player of Magenta has announced a new supergroup featuring Luke Machin of Maschine and The Tangent on lead guitar, Dylan Thompson of Shadow of the Sun and formerly of The Reasoning on lead vocals, and Andy Edwards of Frost* on drums.
The album is due on January 18th, and you can pre-order it now from the Kiama website right now.
Mostly Autumn have announced a Live Acoustic EP featuring Bryan and Olivia as a duo, recorded when they supported Steve Hackett last year.
They have also announced that they will be joined by Anna Phoebe on violin and Chris Backhouse on sax for their showcase gig at The Grand Opera House in York in November, as well as at the December Christmas show in Leamington Spa. The latter will also include a support set by Anna Phoebe.
But before then, the band hit the road this coming weekend, with shows in Crewe on Friday 23rd, Wath upon Dearne on Saturday 24th, Norwich on Sunday 25th and Southampton on Monday 26th. Full details on the Mostly Autumn website.
Some tantalising hints on the Odin Dragonfly Facebook page suggest something might be stirring in the Odin Dragonfly camp. It’s been a long time since their last live appearances and an even longer time since the release of the album Offerings.
This is a bit of a rant.
I’m not going to name the band because it won’t do them any favours having this come up in Google searches for their name. You can probably work out who they were if you really want to know. But it’s not really about them, it’s about you.
I travelled to a gig a couple of hours away from home and booked an overnight stay in a hotel since it would finish well after the last train back. It was in one of the largest cities in England other than London. The gig was in an established rock venue within easy walking distance of the city centre, in the smaller of two rooms, but still with a capacity of a couple of hundred at least. The band have released several albums, won annual “best of” awards, and gone down a storm at festivals, and they’re on fire live on this tour. It was a Friday night rather than a midweek graveyard shift.
There were thirty-five people there.
Thirty-five people.
The band themselves gave what could easily have been their best live performance of the year, pulling out all the stops. And only a tiny handful of people were there to see it, most of them familiar faces you see at gigs all across the country. Many of them were not local but, like me, had travelled a significant distance to be there.
People constantly complain on the interwebs than nobody plays gigs in their towns. The trouble is, when bands do book gigs, these people then can’t be arsed to turn up. It’s not for me to tell the band where they should or shouldn’t play, but if I was in their shoes I wouldn’t be playing either that venue or that city again in the foreseeable future. There’s no way such a poorly-attended gig could have covered its costs.
I know that time and money are finite, and some people have a lot of other commitments in their lives. But a lot of you have no such excuses. If superb bands like this are to survive, and are to be able to continue making music, you’ve got to get off your collective arses and support them. I’ve seen too many bands fold due to lack of success, only to see “fans” complain that they “never got to see them live”. Perhaps if you’d bothered to see them when you had the chance, they might not have split?
If a band you like or have heard positive things about are playing a small club near you, and it’s physically possible to get there, support them. Otherwise the live scene outside the corporate mainstream will be nothing but tribute bands.
Yesterday I compared the announcement of the nominations for the Mercury Music Award with the England vs Pakistan Test Match. It may have been a day premature; had the Mercury nominations turned out the same way, the 12th nomination following eleven soundtracks for middle-class dinner parties would have Napalm Death’s Apex Predator: Easy Meat. But it wasn’t.
Sometimes you read something that makes you nostalgic for the really bad writing from student newspapers. The arch, bombastic style that can only come from a writer too young to have developed any sense of self-awareness. The way they don’t let little things like serious lack of knowledge of the subject get in the way of their enthusiasm.
To be over-critical of such things can feel like kicking a puppy.
But this article on Progressive Rock is still one of the worst pieces of music writing I’ve seen since Ian Gittins’ review of King Crimson.
Some examples.
Of course, The Beatles were and are unlikely to ever be labelled a “progressive rock band,†Portnoy was simply arguing that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was perhaps one of the first albums in western musical society to take rock music away from a fugacious bop-along catharsis and to begin an ascent towards higher musical artistry.
I’m not sure that “fugacious” is a word. But it gets worse:
Quickly, however, the First Wave of Prog faltered upon the rocks of punk and disco. Rebellious youth themes such as nihilism, violence, anarchy, and the macabre (not to mention pop music’s tendency towards love and dance), forced the philosophical themes of human transformation and utopian society back into niches within the rock. Excuse the puns.
Forget the puns. What about the hoary old clichés?
… a small list of rising acts who drove the Second Wave of Prog, more commonly known as neo-progressive rock. What separated these two waves was the greater influence that keyboards and synthesizers began to have on the music. Organs and Mellotrons became clunky and clichéd.
Reading lines like this I do begin to wonder exactly how much 70s or 80s progressive rock this lad has actually listened to.
But Goodwin had less success with these bands, managing to acquire only small iconoclastic audiences rather than a large countercultural movement such as the hippie, psychedelic phase that had inspired original prog. The Second Wave’s greatest creation was perhaps Marillion, who famously began the ‘pre-order’ initiative, through which they would fund an album’s writing, recording and production via the loyalty of their intense fanbase.
You use the word “iconoclastic”. I do not think you know what it means.
Through the rise of heavy metal bands Metallica and Iron Maiden, and the continued peripheral success of progressive rock bands such as Yes, Rush and Gentle Giant, the late 1980s and early ‘90s led to the Third Wave, a movement which exists today.
This is the point at which it completely loses contact with reality, and looks as though he’s throwing out names at random without doing the most rudimentary research on those bands’ histories. Gentle Giant split up in 1980. Rush have been filling arena-sized venues throughout the 80s and 90s, so could hardly be described as having “peripheral success” unless daytime radio is your only source of information.
It goes on like that. At one point he describes The Flower Kings as “vigilantly fantastical“, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I personally find The Flower Kings to be utterly dull, their formless music devoid of energy or tunes. It’s easy to imagine The Flower Kings as what those who cannot stand progressive rock believe all prog bands must sound like.
I can’t fault his enthusiasm, and progressive rock does need its younger ambassadors. He clearly enjoyed Spock’s Beard’s recent tour. But the quality of both the writing and the research here is just embarrassing. Reading it is like sitting through a Flower Kings set at the festival.
If this student submitted an essay as poorly-researched and written as this, he would not expect a good mark from the professor…
What has the Kepler Space Telescope found around the mysterious star between Cygnus and Lyra? Are the objects orbiting the star some previously unknown natural phenomenon, or are they really, as some have suggested, massive structures built by an alien civilisation?
Spock’s Beard were one of the first of the third generation of Progressive Rock bands, emerging in the mid 1990s when the genre was at its all-time lowest ebb. Over the years they’ve gone through a few ups and downs, including two changes of singer, and have survived to become something of elder statesmen of the scene. They came to Islington Academy to promote their 12th album “The Oblivion Particle”, the second to feature newest vocalist Ted Leonard.
They had two support bands on the tour, and with the customary early curfew due to the following club night, the opening act Synaesthesia were already on stage playing to a near-empty room at the ridiculously early time of 6pm. This extremely youthful band had made a strong impression at HRH Prog last year, and again on supporting Marillion back in April, but on this occasion they didn’t seem quite as together. There were moments of impressive guitar work, especially during the final song, but the set as a whole seemed to lack groove and coherence.
Hungarian four-piece Special Providence were far more impressive. The instrumental band were the missing link between prog-metal and jazz-fusion, a concept which had the potential to be truly awful in the wrong hands. But Special Providence turned out to be one of the best previously-unknown supports act of the year, with tight grooves, fluid guitar and an emphasis on solid composition rather than endless soloing.
Spock’s Beard kicked off with the opening number of the latest album, “Tides of Time”, all swirling keyboards, hard rock riffs and anthemic instrumental passages, pretty much the quintessential SB sound. Their music is rooted in 1970s sounds, the keyboards and guitars of classic first-generation progressive rock and the vocal harmonies of west coast rock, all presented with a modern sensibility without the self-indulgent excess.
One of the things that makes Spock’s Beard an entertaining live band is not just that they’re all talented musicians who clearly enjoy being on stage, but they also have a sense of showmanship many of the peers lack. The most charismatic figure is not frontman Ted Leonard or lead guitarist Alan Morse, but keyboard player Ryo Okumoto, his battery of keyboards down at the front of the stage and deployed side-on so the audience can see him play. His love of vintage 70s keyboards is one of the defining elements of the band’s sound. Though this gig didn’t see a genuine Mellotron or Hammond B3 on stage, there was still a real Moog with twiddleable knobs.
The bulk of the set came from the new album or its immediate predecessor “Brief Nocturnes and Dreamless Sleep”, all of which comes over impressively on stage. They did throw in a couple of much older songs from the Neil Morse era, both from 1998′s “The Kindness of Strangers”, “The Good Don’t Last” and the acoustic “June”, the latter turning into an enthusiastic audience singalong.
Although he often seems to play second fiddle to Ryo Okumoto’s keyboard wizardly, Alan Morse is a great if sometimes underrated guitarist, and is far more than just a foil. This was readily apparent whenever he cut loose, for example the climactic solo in “Waiting For Me” which closed the main set.
After a brief acoustic excerpt of “Bennett Build a Time Machine”, they encored with a real oldie, the multi-part epic “The Water” from their 1995 début album, stately anthemic passages alternating with jazz-rock workouts, with a few bars of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” thrown in for good measure, and the infamous “**** You” passage predictably became another singalong.
And so ended an excellent performance. Even twenty years into their career Spock’s Beard have avoided the all-too-easy the trap of turning into their own tribute act playing sets filled with crowd-pleasing early material, instead challenging and winning over the audience with a heavy emphasis on their most recent albums.
The world would be a far better place if we were all more willing to unfollow those who unthinkingly reshare every viral outrage of the day on social media, but never bother to post corrections when the stories they’ve been signal-boosting turn out to be completely bogus. One major SF author and a well-known game designer are currently on Yellow Cards over this….