As reported by Prog magazine, former Touchstone singer Kim “Elkie” Seviour reveals album plans.
She plans to release a solo album to be produced by and co-written with John Mitchell of Lonely Robot, Frost*, Arena and It Bites fame, a man who’s in so many bands because he’s so prolific that nobody else can keep up.
There is to be a single “Fantasise To Realise” released next month, a standalone track that will not feature on the album.
Dream Theater are a band who strongly divide opinions. For some they’re the epitome of progressive metal, with levels of instrumental virtuosity that render them without peers. For others, they’re all emotionless technical showboating, too many notes and not enough soul. The truth is probably somewhere between the two, but there’s no denying they’re one of the genre-defining bands of their generation.
They’ve been coasting a little in recent years, releasing albums that have their moments but don’t quite reach the heights of the 1990s work that made their reputation. Their last great record was 2002′s “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence”, and their thirteenth studio effort, like that one, is also a double album.
The Astonishing is a sprawling ambitious concept album with a science-fantasy storyline that includes The Map and a vast cast of character with names like Emperor Nafarys and Faythe. The concept and music owe as much to musical theatre as to progressive rock. Unfortunately what could have been their 2112 turns out a lot more like their version of Kiss’ “The Elder”. Except The Elder didn’t go on for two and a quarter hours.
It starts strongly with the instrumental Dystopian Overture, but it soon becomes clear that they’ve spread themselves far too thin, and there just isn’t enough worthwhile music here to fill a double album. There is very little that stands out strongly, and there’s too much mediocre filler, often with melodies Graham Kendrick would have rejected as too banal.
The problem with this record isn’t too much unrestrained instrumental virtuosity. If anything, the opposite is true; a few tasteless irruptions of widdly-woo might have livened up some of the dull bits. The biggest problem with this album, aside from the sheer amount of filler, is that there’s far too much of James LaBrie, and he’s never been one of the world’s most expressive singers. Not only that, the sheer portentousness of the whole thing gets wearing after a while, eventually leaving you with the feeling that only metal bands with enough of a sense of humour to include undead unicorms should be making science-fantasy concept albums.
It does have its moments, such as “A New Beginning” towards the end of disk one with its inventive spiralling solo from John Petrucci. The album does leave the impression that there might be a worthwhile 50-minute album in there struggling to get out. But the listener has to wade through a lot of forgettable dross to find enough diamonds in the rough.
Dream Theater remain a hugely important band in the history of progressive rock, but sadly this record adds little to their legacy. Anyone new to the band would do better to give this album a miss and instead go for one of the classic earlier ones instead.
Now that Terry Wogan is up there, Heaven can hold a Eurovision Song Contest with Lemmy as the British entry. Something that should have happened when the two of them were still on Earth.
“If only they realised that their favourite genre didn’t just stop when fashion moved on” – Comment from Paul E in this thread.
At the end of the 1970s, three village idiots from the north-east of England began meddling with forces they didn’t understand, and unleashed an entity into the world which they could not control.
Black Metal, it came to be called. It took root in Scandinavia,where it developed a reputation for arsonous things which might have made some Methodist Church property stewards wish it had caught on in parts of the south-west of England.
Over more than thirty years, Black Metal has evolved out of all recognition, giving us the gloriously ridiculous Dimmu Borgir and the fiendishly innovative Ihsahn. Myrkur’s “M” doesn’t sound much like either of those bands, but like them it still sounds like something well beyond the limited imaginations of that notorious original trio.
Myrkur is a solo project from Danish singer and multi-insrumentalist Amalie Bruun. Opening number “Skøgen Skulle Dø” begins with a ghostly vocal leading into dark medieval soundscapes that come over like Blackmore’s Night’s evil twin, blood-curdling screaming, and ending with the sound of a church choir backed by walls of distorted guitar. That combination of beauty and menace sets the tone for the album.
It’s difficult to believe all the lead vocals are the work of the same singer; Myrkur can do deeply scary black metal screaming, but there’s as much layered ethereal folk-inflected vocals, and the contrast is remarkably effective. Sometimes the guitars give way to classical piano accompaniments, their fragile beauty contrasting and complimenting the heavier numbers. Like a lot of contemporary metal there are no solos, but with lyrics sung entirely in Danish Myrkur’s remarkable voice frequently comes over as a lead instrument. She’s an accomplished pianist as well, ending the album with the melancholy instrumental piano piece “Norn”.
With elements of folk and classical music as well as metal, this is a remarkable piece of work, quite unlike much of what gets released under the banner of Black Metal. If it’s ultimately descended from the music of Venom, then it’s the missing link between them and something like Enya.
David Bowie, Suede, Mantra Vega, Steven Wilson, Dream Theater, Megadeth. Can anyone remember so many high-profile releases in January?
Panic Room have released a video of “Dust”, the dramatic closing number from the album “Incarnate”, and announced their 2016 tour dates.
There are a handful of dates at the end of March and the beginning of April taking in Milton Keynes, Norwich, Derby and Manchester, the already-announced two-day convention at Bilston in May, and a second leg of the tour across June including a showcase gig at Islington Assembly on June 18th, which will be filmed for a DVD. Full details for all the dates on the tour can be found on the the Panic Room tour page.
These will be the only Panic Room dates of 2016, as the band will be spending the second part of the year in the studio making their next album.
The above image is comes from a Tweet by the rapper BoB quoted in The Guardian. Did you know that the West Coast Main Line is single track and isn’t electrified? Neither did I.
I am not entirely sure whether the recent emergence of the Flat Earth Movement is a terrible consequence of rising anti-intellectualism and wholesale rejection of enlightenment values, or whether the whole thing is an epic wind-up that a few ignorant suckers have fallen for. I suppose it’s orders of magnitude less harmful than the celebrity anti-vax moement.
Occams Razor and Poes’ Law both suggest rapper BoB’s public embrace of this nonsense is nothing more than a clever publicity stunt. It’s entirely possible that astrophysicist and cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson is in on the joke.
Good to see Nellie Pitts honoured as one of the ten Women of the Year in Prog Magazine’s end-of-year reader’s poll. The people who do all the work behind the scenes to make music happen don’t get the credit they deserve.