Music Blog

Here’s the next five of my Nick Hornby-like list of 20 favourite albums.

Dream Theater – Metropolis II: Scenes from a Memory

Dream Theater are the pack leaders of the prog-metal scene. Earlier albums such as “Images and Words” showed they had the chops, even though some of the songs turned into poorly-structured jams. They progressed through the darker and heavier “Awake”, and the tighter, more radio-friendly “Falling Into Infinity”. Their masterpiece, “Metropolis II” combines the best elements of these three preceding albums, and shows how they’ve developed compositional and arrangement skills to match their undoubted instrumental virtuosity. It goes without saying that this is a concept album, the theme being memories of past lives, and a murder mystery.

Genesis – Selling England by the Pound

I’ve reviewed this album on this blog before. I find it difficult to choose between this and “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”; both show the band at their peak, before Peter Gabriel left and the band began to turn away to a more commercial, blander direction. This is what 70s prog-rock was all about; Peter Gabriel’s sometimes surreal lyrics, complex classically-influenced arrangements, and lengthy instrumental workouts spotlighting Steve Hackett’s liquid guitar and Tony Banks’ keyboard skills.

IQ – Subterrainea

IQ had a chequered history. They began in the early 80s, and their early albums “Tales from the Lush Attic” and “The Wake” were clearly derivative of Gabriel-era Genesis. With a different singer they tried a more commercial approach with the “Nonzamo” and “Are You Sitting Comfortably” albums. They vanished for several years before reforming, back with the original vocalist Peter Nicholls. Their new sound was a more polished combination the best elements of the two earlier phases of their career. Of the three post-reunion albums, the second, the double concept album “Subterrania” shows them at their best.

Jon Lord – Sarabande

Attempts to combine rock and classical music get a bad press. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. This 1976 solo album by Deep Purple’s Jon Lord is an album that works, and is the best of several solo albums he’s released in parallel to his career in Deep Purple and Whitesnake. It’s based on the concept of baroque dance suite. Featuring Andy Somers, later of The Police on guitar, the rock band and the orchestra integrate into a single whole; sometimes the band play the theme with the orchestra adding tonal colour, in other places the orchestra takes the theme with band providing rhythmic support. Listeners are also treated to an extended jazz-rock workout from Jon’s Hammond.

King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King

King Crimson were to define the progressive rock sound, and then move on to different things as soon as making this musical statement. Although later incarnations of Crimson formed around guitarist Robert Fripp, this one is dominated by the soaring vocals of Greg Lake and the mellotron on Ian McDonald, and of course, the marvelous baroque lyrics of Pete Sinfield, although Fripp shines on the metallic opener, the classic “21st Century Schizoid Man”.

Over on BlogCritics, someone (can’t remember who) suggested the reviewers came up with a list of their top ten albums to give people an idea of where they’re coming from musically. He admitted the whole thing is a bit Nick Hornby-ish, but a lot of people like compiling lists, so here’s the first part of mine. Mine’s a top twenty because I couldn’t pare the list down to ten, even by ruling that no artist could have more then one album in the list.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the first five, listed alphabetically

Anathema – Judgement

Anathema began life as a standard death-metal act, all grinding riffs and death-grunt vocals. But once their original vocalist left, and rhythm guitarist Vincent Cavanagh took over vocals, things started to change. By the time they recorded “Judgement”, a strong Pink Floyd influence had crept in and they were sounding as much progressive rock as metal. “Judgement” is an atmospheric and emotional work, musically balancing light and shade, metal riffs contrasting with delicate acoustic passages.

Asia – Asia

Most critics scoffed at the idea of this supergroup, consisting of ex-Yes men Steve Howe and Geoff Downes, ELP’s Carl Palmer John Wetton of King Crimson, Uriah Heep and UK fame. While many expected a prog-muso chops-fest, what we got was a superb AOR pop-rock album, with the instrumental breaks cut back to fit the songs. Great combination of good playing, good songs, and powerful production, sadly they were never able to repeat the quality of this debut.

Black Sabbath – Heaven and Hell

I know I’m probably a heretic for prefering Ronnie Dio’s operatic melodrama to Ozzy’s angst-ridden howl, but to me Dio’s voice and Toni Iommi’s guitar seemed a perfect match. As much the follow-up to Rainbow’s “Long Live Rock and Roll” as to “Never Say Die”, this is a great metal album when considered on it’s own merits rather than in comparison to the Ozzy canon.

Blue Öyster Cult – Secret Treaties

Blue Öyster Cult have always been my favourite American band, with their multi-layered sound, high wierdness lyrics and Buck Dharma’s wonderful guitar playing. All their albums are good, most of them are great, and this album, their third, is their best.

Deep Purple – Machine Head

What can I say about Deep Purple? One of the defining groups of the heavy metal genre, with the riffs that inspired a generation of bedroom air-guitarists, some of whom would go on to pick up real guitars and form the next generation of bands in the 1980s and beyond, even if most guitar shop owners are sick of hearing “Smoke on the Water”. Every song on this album is a classic; no filler at all.

The media have predicably being going overboard about the 25th anniversery of Elvis’ death. Maybe I’m the just of the wrong generation, but I only remember Elvis as the bloated has-been crooning cheesy MOR. His apparent deification totally mystifies me. Scott at The Gamer’s Nook clearly feels the same way.

Meanwhile Andrew Ian Dodge over at Dodgeblog doesn’t mince his words – “Elvis was an ignorant drug-addled over-eating cretin. He would have been forgotten if he had not died on the bog from an overdose.“. See his comments board for the flames from Elvis fanatics.

Of course, not all Elvis fans are like the family from My Trailer is Bigger Than Your Trailer, but that site’s worth mentioning for their award-winning Amazon wish list.

Now Blogcritics.org is fully up and running, I’ve got four reviews up! These are expanded versions of the reviews I posted to this very blog a week or so ago.

• Rhapsody – Power of the Dragonflame (Operatic Dungeons and Dragons pomp-metal)
• Arjen Anthony Lucassen’s Star One – Space Metal New project by the main man of Ayreon with SF-influenced lyrics
• Rush – Vapor Trails – the long-awaited album by Canada’s finest
• Muse – Hullaballoo – Live album by young and trendy British act.

Blogcritics is now up and running. The reviews I’ve written aren’t up yet, but they will be!

An announcement from Eric Olsen at Tres Producers, concerning the launch of Blogcritics.com.

The launch is tomorrow!! Please tell your neighbors, relatives, media, and readers. We will be interviewing Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA as well as posting a boatload or two of great reviews, essays, ruminations and the like. Below is the current roster – if I have missed you, please let me know. If you would like to join us, send me an email.

For those interested in the Twelfth Night piece I wrote a couple of days ago, Twelfth Night – The Collector is a new (ish) Dutch site containing the full history and discography of the band.

No, not the Shakespeare play, but a neglected progressive rock band from the early 80s. While contemporaries Marillion went on (at one stage in their career) to play enormo-domes like Wembley Arena, and lesser bands like IQ and even the derivative Pendragon went on to lengthy careers, both commercial success and critical acclaim were to elude Twelfth Night.

I first encountered Twelfth Night as a four-piece instrumental band when I was a student at Reading University, in 1980. The band were students themselves at the time, and played the student’s union and local clubs in the Reading area at the time. The band’s sound revolved around guitarist Andy Revell’s extensive use of an echoplex. With song titles like “Fur Helene part 1″ and “Afghan Red”, they were either loved or hated by the student fraternity. Old-school rock fans loved them, punk and new-wave fans hated them with a vengeance.

This lineup recorded a live album, “Live at the Target”, which gives a good impression of what the band sounded like at the time. I was in the audience for this recording, in a underground pub with the band’s equipment crammed in a tiny stage at one end of the long, narrow room. The music, described by the band as a “timeless kaleidoscope of sound”, climaxed with the 20-minute epic “Sequences“, which condensed all the best bits of their sound; spacey echoplexed guitar in the early sections, atmospheric keyboard sections, and fluid guitar soloing.

The band sensed they needed to add a vocalist to move forward. After a unsuccessful start with a woman named Electra Macloed, and an awful, awful single called “The Cunning Man“, they chose fellow Reading fine art student Geoff Mann. Then they gave him a baptism of fire; to debut as singer in front of the biggest crowd Twelfth Night had ever played to; the 1981 Reading Festival, adding vocals to “Sequences“, transforming the instrumental epic into an the story of an idealistic recruit swallowed up in the horrors of World War One.

A year later, they recorded what was probably their best studio album, “Fact and Fiction“. This established Geoff Mann as a lyrical force to be reckoned with. The lengthy “We Are Sane” and “Creepshow” were both drawn from his experiences with art therapy at a psychiatric hospital, while the cynical “Fact and Fiction” reflects the arguments about nuclear weapons raging at the time. One critic described “We Are Sane” as ‘Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” summarised in ten minutes’. The overall tone of the album was dark and gloomy, reflecting the times – the early 80s were dark and gloomy, the feeling Thatcher and Reagan had declared war on the young and the poor, and with the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Mann’s voice was an acquired taste; more Peter Hamill than Jon Anderson, but there was a passion and humanity in his lyrics, reflecting his strong Christian faith.

They played the Reading Festival again in 1983, opening the bill on the Sunday, and I had the opportunity to see what a great frontman Geoff Mann had become; his charisma and lyrics more than made up for his shortcomings as a singer. However, just as things looked as though they taking off, Geoff left the band. The live album “Live and Let Live comes from his final gigs with the band at the Marquee club in London. Perhaps the band’s best album overall, the band on excellent form, featuring some material from “Fact and Fiction“, the previously unrecorded “The Ceiling Speaks”, and the full version of the epic “Sequences”.

Geoff Mann went on to train as an Anglican priest. He continued to gig and record with his new band The Bond, who I saw live a couple of times. To my tastes, they lacked the musical scope of Twelfth Night, and it seemed to me that Geoff had lost his lyrical edge too. Sadly Geoff was to die of cancer a few years after being ordained. Who knows where his career might have gone?

Twelfth Night themselves regrouped with new singer Andy Sears, and recorded the mini-album “Art and Illusion”. By now the sound was a little smoother and more commercial, but still retained enough depth to be interesting. In 1985 they finally signed to a major label, Virgin Records.

Sadly, the resulting album, titled simply “Twelfth Night” was a mess, musically, and a major disappointment. It’s as if they couldn’t decide whether to be Pink Floyd or Duran Duran. If it was an attempt at commercialism, it was a dismal failure. Only “Take a Look” came together and reflected the Twelfth Night of old. It didn’t sell, and year later the label dropped them. The band split.

But this wasn’t quite the end of the story. In 1988, the Geoff Mann lineup briefly reunited in the studio to record “The Collector”, an 18-minute epic played live but never recorded. This was to appear on the 1988 compilation “Collector’s Item”, a retrospective look at the band’s entire career.

Today, two albums are still available on CD; the live album “Live and Let Live”, and compilation “Collector’s Item”, recently re-issued with three new tracks replacing “Sequences” (which is on the live album). Other albums, including the classic “Fact and Fiction” remain out of print.

Update: According to the site Twelfth Night – The Collector, the classic “Fact and Fiction” is to be re-released.