Record Reviews Blog

Album, EP and DVD reviews, with an emphasis on the UK progressive rock scene.

Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Tim Hall

When I first heard the preview track “The View”, my first reaction was “What on Earth were Reed and Metallica thinking”? If you’re going to recite words over a rock backing, someone like William Shatner does that sort of thing far better.

Despite lyrics which have been described as sounding like the work of a 14 year old Goth, and an utterly uninspired sludge-metal backing, The View is by far the best thing on it. I have listened to the whole album all the way through (only the once, mind you), so that you don’t have to.

It’s awful.

There is no absolutely no evidence of the rhythmic inventiveness that made Metallica the genre-defining act of the 1980s on display on this record. I was tempted to say their contribution makes Load sound like Master of Puppets. But that would be most unfair on Load.  Much of what we have never rises beyond the level of formless jams which don’t deserve to be dignified by the word “song”. There’s no energy to any of it, either Hetfield’s sloppy tuneless strumming or Lars Ulrich’s appallingly half-arsed drumming.

The combination of Lou Reed’s incoherent and endless ramblings about sex and death and Urlich’s lumpen thud-thud-thud drumming is the sound of a ranting drunk at the bus stop fronting a broken cement mixer. And that’s the best bits.

I am entirely unsure as to what purpose this record serves. Is the whole thing an elaborate practical joke, and if so, at whose expense? Certainly the metal community has decided more or less unanimously decided that the emperor isn’t even trying to pretend he’s wearing any clothes here. Not being a Lou Reed fan, I have no idea if any of them will claim it a work of genius, just to be perverse.

This is a terrible record which will do nothing for the legacy of either artist.

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Sankara – Enigma

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sankara is the band formed by vocalist and keyboard player Gareth Jones and drummer Vinden Wylde, both formerly of The Reasoning, and guitarist Jay McDonald, formerly of The Bluehorses, with bassist Rhayn Jooste completing the lineup. “Enigma” is their first release.

The four track EP gets off to a strong start with the opening title track. Building from a piano arpeggio to a big soaring chorus the end result is a song you just can’t get out of your head. This and the following hard rocker “Exalted Star” with it’s growling riff and multi-layered vocal harmonies recall bands like Styx before they descended into cheese. The ballad “Lay My Body Down” is perhaps the weakest of the four songs, never really coming to life despite some good guitar work from Jay towards the end, but the EP ends on a high note with the hard rock of “Full Flow”.

This highly melodic mix of hard rock and AOR ballads is quite a way from the prog-metal leanings of Gareth’s and Vinden’s previous band. But there are still definite echoes of some of Gareth Jones’ earlier songwriting contributions for them, and his accomplished vocals prove he’s more than capable of fronting his own band, not that it was really in any doubt. On this disk he sings all the harmonies as well as lead, which makes me wonder how they’ll reproduce the songs live; I guess it depends on how well the rest of the band can cope on backing vocals.

This is a promising start for the band. Even if the production isn’t slick and polished, the quality of the songs and playing shine through, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more good things from them in the coming months and years.

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Opeth – Heritage

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sweden’s Opeth have proved themselves one of the most original and creative prog-metal bands of the past decade. On recent albums such as “Ghost Reveries” and “Watershed” Mikael Ã…kerfeldt and his band balanced moments of delicate beauty with moments of brutal heaviness, and it was the way they seamlessly combined the two that was a big part of the appeal.

With their tenth album they could have taken the easy option of trying to repeat a successful formula. But instead they’ve taken an abrupt turn, and done something completely different.

Gone are the death-metal growls. While it still has it’s heavier moments it’s can’t really be described as a metal album. The whole thing has a warm, retro 70s vibe, with echoes of artists as diverse as King Crimson, Frank Zappa and Uriah Heep. There is still much here that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the quieter moments of the last couple of albums, and they still eschew traditional song structures in favour of complex epics with constantly shifting moods. Mikael Ã…kerfeldt again shows how good a vocalist he can be when he sings in a ‘clean’ style, and he’s got a keen ear for unorthodox but beautiful melodies.

Even with death-metal stripped out, it’s an enormously varied album. It begins with a very simple unaccompanied classical piano piece, a gentle lead-in for the delights to come. The hard rock of “Slither” with it’s barrelling rhythm comes over as a very deliberate homage to Deep Purple, with a riff and solo that’s pure Ritchie Blackmore. Then there’s the strongly jazz-tinged “Nepenthe” and “Hāxprocess”. An undoubted highlight is the penultimate track “Folklore” with a dramatic closing section which has to be one of the most exciting pieces of music I’ve heard all year. It ends, as it began, with an instrumental. The semi-acoustic “Marrow of the Earth” starts out sounding like a Blackmore’s Night piece, but builds to assume a melancholic grandeur beyond the scope of anything that band have done.

While this is likely to disappoint some out-and-out metal fans, this is still a very impressive release, and a strong candidate for progressive rock release of the year. There is endless debate in prog circles as to whether the term should refer to bands who try to capture the actual sound of classic 70s progressive rock, or for bands who evoke the same spirit of adventure of music without boundaries. Opeth are a rare band that fulfil both of these, sounding both unapologetically nostalgic and absolutely contemporary at the same time. Almost nobody else can pull that off as well as Opeth can.

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Anathema – Falling Deeper

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Tim Hall

Anathema are a band whose music has changed a lot over the years. They started out playing doom metal, but later evolved towards avant garde progressive rock with strong influences of Pink Floyd and Radiohead. Very little trace of metal remains in their most recent albums.

“Falling Deeper” isn’t an album of new songs, but orchestral reinterpretations of their back catalogue, much of it from their very early metal years. It’s an ambitious project. The songs are completely reworked, stripped down and rebuilt so that only the basic chords and melodies remain.

This is really an album where you sit back and let it all wash over you. Although songs like “Everwake” feature the ethereal vocals of Anneke von Geirsbergen, much of the album is instrumental, with piano or strings taking the original vocal line. The result is an album of atmospheric soundscapes drenched in melancholy. With the repeated piano figures, e-bowed guitar and washes of strings it’s far removed from the doom metal of the original recordings. In places I can hear echoes of Sigur Ros and even Godspeed You Black Emperor. The magnificent “Sunset of Age”, which closes the album, is a case in point. Female vocals replace the original death metal growls, strings replace the grinding metal riff, and one of the most amazing moments is when the orchestra takes up the spiralling solo. Epic is an overused word, but it’s entirely appropriate for that song.

Pretty much at the opposing end of the progressive rock spectrum from the technical virtuosity of someone like Dream Theater, Anathema have delivered one of the surprises of the year. Even if the none of the songs are new, the new versions are so dramatically different it’s as good as an album of completely new material.

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Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn Of Events

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Tim Hall

Dream Theater’s first album without founder member Mike Portnoy has been one of the most eagerly awaited releases of 2011. Following his somewhat acrimonious departure from the band many fans loudly declared that the band were finished without their charismatic drummer. But others, including myself, had felt the band had been coasting for the last few albums, and wondered if the enforced lineup change might be just be the thing the band needed to shake them up and make them hungry again.

I wasn’t sure about this album for quite a few spins. At first it felt like just another recent Dream Theater album, good but not especially outstanding. All the trademark sounds of the bands that defined prog-metal as a genre are there; machine-gun riffs, tricky time signatures, neo-classical piano fills, and of course all those solos. But on repeated listens the songs started coming alive and lodging in the brain. This is definitely an album that a bit of time before it hits home, but when it does, it hits hard.

There’s a noticeably stronger sense of melody than on recent albums, whether it’s the anthemic stadium-rock chorus of “Build Me Up, Break Me Down”, the gentle opening section of “This Is The Life”, or the piano-led ballad of “Far From Heaven”. James LaBrie, sometimes the weak link in the band, sings far more than he screeches, especially during the less heavy moments.

Naturally, being a Dream Theater album, there are still plenty of opportunities to showcase the band members’ virtuosity in some serious instrumental wig-outs. But this time the technically superb musicianship doesn’t completely overwhelm the songwriting. Petricci shines in particular, and his solo on “Breaking All Illusions” is one of the high spots of them album.

So, while this album isn’t quite a career-defining masterpiece, it is a significant improvement on the last couple of albums; “Breaking All Illusions” and “This Is The Life” have all the makings of Dream Theater classics, and there’s relatively little in the way of filler. As the first album with new drummer Mike Mangini the band have something to prove, and it shows.

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Judas Priest – Nostradamus

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

Judas Priest’s double album “Nostradamus” came out back in 2008. At this stage in their career, it seems that the veteran genre-defining metal act had decided there was no point doing just another generic Judas Priest album like 2005′s “Angel of Retribution” that marked the return of Rob Halford. So they went for something altogether more ambitious.

Nostradamus is a concept album based on the life of the legendary seer. Rather than singing about the notorious prophesies themselves, they’ve taken the far more interesting path of telling the story of the life of the man himself.  With tales of persecution, plague and love won and lost it does occasionally veer into slightly cheesy melodrama. But this is a Judas Priest album after all. What did you expect?

It’s been compared with Kiss’s infamous “The Elder”, although I feel Judas Priest have made a rather stronger album. It’s immensely varied musically. Alongside the twin guitars of Glenn Tipton and KK Downing there’s extensive use of keyboards, and the album is full of atmospheric moments which owe as much to prog-rock as metal. Occasionally it even strays into even more un-Priest musical territory that’s dangerously close to the sound of a West End musical. But despite these diversions you’re never that far from plenty of their archetypal pile-driving guitar sound either, and the end result can only be described as epic. Both disks flow as one continuous piece of music, songs running into one another, sometimes with short instrumental pieces bridging the gaps between them. Like many double albums, it doesn’t quite manage to be consistently great all the way through, and there are one or two passages that feel like filler. But it’s also of those albums where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts even when some tracks don’t necessarily stand up on their own, and it has more than enough high points to satisfy all but the most narrow-minded of fans.

Rob Halford is still a force to be reckoned with as a vocalist even in his fifties, and those piercing screams of his upper register are in good working order. He’s a little less effective on the album’s many ballads; he’s not as good trying to convey emotion as he is using his voice as a lead instrument on the heavier songs.

Despite a few flaws, I like this album a lot. Many people accused them of going all Spinal Tap with the 12-minute song about the Loch Ness Monster on “Angel of Retribution”, and their response was to take things far, far further with this epic concept album. It’s not as if they haven’t done plenty of albums filled with short punchy songs in the past. If they never do another album it will be a fitting close to their career. And if they do make another one, I’m not quite sure how they’re going to follow this.

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Mostly Autumn – Still Beautiful

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

“Still Beautiful” is Mostly Autumn’s third live album in three years. A cynic might accuse them of milking the fanbase with yet another live release, but the success of last year’s “That Night In Leamington” and the two disks of “Live 2009″ does suggest there’s a market for a live document of every tour. This one is significant as it’s the first to feature Olivia Sparnenn as the band’s lead vocalist.

Let’s get the one negative out of the way first; the packaging isn’t terribly inspiring, with very little about the band apart from a black and white photo of each band member. Very little too in the way of credits and nothing about when or where it was recorded. It’s been criticised for looking like a bootleg, and those criticisms can’t easily be dismissed.

But the actual quality of the album is anything but an official bootleg; they’ve taken a lot of care mixing and mastering this. The huge sound of the seven-piece band is immensely powerful. If you’ve seen the band live on the 2011 spring tour you’ll know just how good they’ve been, and this recording captures all that energy and intensity, if anything better than on “Live 2009″. If you haven’t had the chance to see them live, you’ll hear what you’ve been missing; they really have been that good.

The running order is odd, bearing little resemblance to the actual running order on the tour. I think the whole set is present bar “Fading Colours” and “Spirit of Autumn Past”, drawing heavily from the most recent album “Go Well Diamond Heart” including a couple of songs from the second disk of the now sold-out special edition, including the beautiful “Forever Young”.

This album showcases new vocalist Olivia Sparnenn’s power and range as a vocalist. In her second year fronting the band her interpretation of oldies such as “Evergreen”, “Passengers” or “Caught in a Fold” proves that the back catalogue is in safe hands, and her performance on newer songs written for her voice is stunning. Perhaps the high spot on the entire album is the powerful and intense “Questioning Eyes”, the former Breathing Space number now a fixture in Mostly Autumn’s set.

If you’re a Mostly Autumn fan you will want this album. If you’re not familiar with their music, this is as good a place to start as any. The album is available now from Mostly Autumn records.

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Yes – Fly From Here

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Tim Hall

Yes are just about the last of the major-league 70s prog-rock bands still standing. While ELP still play the occasional festival headliner, and Roger Waters has recently been touring the Pink Floyd classic The Wall, Yes are just about the only one of the really big bands still putting out new material.

It’s probably best not to dwell on the politics behind some of the recent lineup changes. First we saw Jon Anderson replaced by Benoît David, recruited from a Yes tribute band. The, with Trevor Horn as producer, we saw Oliver Wakeman sacked in favour of Asia and Buggles keyboard player Geoff Downes, a member of Yes for 1980′s underrated “Drama” album. It’s better to judge them on the quaility of the actual music.

As might be expected with Trevor Horn in the producer’s chair, this album is closer to the streamlined, commercial Yes of the 1980s than than an attempt to recapture the sound of their 70s heyday, more “90125″ than “Fragile”. Benoît David acquits himself splendidly on vocals. Yes, he’s a soundalike, recruited for his ability to reproduce Anderson’s distinctive style live on the band’s extensive back catalogue. But those choirboy-on-acid lead vocals are an important part of what makes Yes sound like Yes, and he nails it perfectly. Steve Howe is also on great form on guitar, his style in it’s way just as distinctive. Despite his age he’s very much still got it.

The 25-minute title track, largely written by Horn and Downes, forms the heart of the album. Full of big soaring melodies, rich harmonies and repeated motifs it’s a prog epic with pop sensibilities, although Steve Howe’s spiralling Zappa-like “Bumpy Ride” section should keep diehard prog-heads happy. There’s definitely something of “Drama” about the whole piece, which given the writers shouldn’t really surprise anyone.

The rest of the album is a bit of a mix. High points are “Life on a Film Set”, another Horn/Downes number in a similar vein to the title track, and the anthemic full band composition “Into The Storm”, which closes the album. “The Man You Always Wanted to Be” comes over rather pedestrian to start with but picks up in the second half. But the weakest numbers, “Hour of Need”, and Howe’s pleasant but unremarkable instrumental “Solitaire” do come over as little more than filler. Which is perhaps the album’s weakness – an album with running time of an LP-length 48 minutes shouldn’t need padding out with substandard material.

So no, this album doesn’t reach the heights of their classic 70 and 80s albums. Neither does it quite match have the creativity and energy of the best of the current generation of progressive rock bands. But despite it’s flaws it’s still a strong album, far superior to the last couple of very forgettable albums they did with Jon Anderson. Time will tell if they have the courage to feature the album as heavily in the live set in their next tour as they really should, but this album is evidence that Yes are far from a spent force.

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Blood Ceremony – Living with the Ancients

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Tim Hall

Canadian four-piece Blood Ceremony have been making a bit of a stir recently, as much for the theatrical nature of their shows as for their records. But as this disk shows, the actual music more than stands up on it’s own.

It’s all quite heady stuff. It’s got doom-laden guitar riffs, bewitching female vocals, folk-inflenced flute, and swirling Hammond organ. The result is a sound like a cross between Black Sabbath fronted by Angela Gordon, and a dark twisted version of Uriah Heep.

There’s a very strong 1971 feel of the whole thing, albeit with slightly cleaner production. Guitarist Sean Kennedy is clearly a disciple of Tony Iommi, and one or two of his solos could have come straight off “Black Sabbath Vol 4″. The rhythm section also has the same slightly jazzy groove of early Sabbath. But vocalist, flautist and organist Alia O’Brien turns them into far, far more than a Black Sabbath tribute act. If her haunting lead vocals aren’t enough, her flute and especially her sinister-sounding organ end up defining the band’s sound. Her keyboard work reminds me a lot of Ken Hensley.

With Song titles like “The Great God Pan” (not a cover of The Waterboys’ song) “The Coven Tree”, “The Witches Dance” and “Daughter of the Sun” as a paean to the 1970s horror movies from which they take their name,  the end result comes over as the soundtrack for the best film that the Hammer House of Horror never made.

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Journey – Eclipse

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Tim Hall

If they’ve heard more than one song, the general public only know Journey for their radio-friendly power ballads. But rock fans have always been aware of the other side of the band; the classy hard-rock outfit capable of filling quite major venues with their high energy live shows. In their eighties heyday there was sometimes a tension between these two aspects of their music. Interviews suggested the record company constantly demanding more ballads while at least some of the band wanted to rock out rather more. With less commercial pressure nowadays to be radio-friendly, this, like many of their recent albums, shows more of the hard rock Journey rather than the commercial power-ballad Journey.

After regrouping a few years back they’re now on their third singer since Steve Perry’s retirement. Following from Steve Augeri, forced out with vocal problems trying to reach Perry’s high notes, and Jeff Scott Soto, who never quite sounded right, comes Arnel Pineda. On his second studio album with the band he still sounds close enough to Steve Perry to make it sound like Journey, but on this disk he has enough of an identity of his own to be more than a mere clone.

From the opening guitar barrage of “City of Hope”, it’s clear that the songs on this disk are written more for live performance rather than for daytime radio airplay.  The following “Edge of the Moment” is in a similar vein, the sort of genre-defining hard-edged highly melodic AOR that Journey have made their own. There’s room for plenty of Neil Schon’s shredding jazz-metal guitar with songs typically stretching for five or six minutes, but they don’t neglect the stadium-friendly big choruses either. Other highlights are the Zeppelinesque “Chain of Love”, and “Human Feel” with the African-style drums and Hammond backed riff. The last three tracks are pure gold;  the epic power-ballad in “To Whom It May Concern”, the quintessential Journey pop-rock of “Someone” and finally the monstrous instrumental “Venus”.

The album’s by no means without it’s flaws. Jonathan Cain’s keys take too much of a back seat at times, and the album could have done with a bit more light and shade. And like too many albums it’s just a little overlong, and could have done with losing some filler towards the middle of the album. The mediocre “She’s a Mystery” in particular really shouldn’t have made the cut.

This album might leave some Glee or X-Factor fans disappointed, but reality TV viewers aren’t exactly Journey’s core audience. The is really an album for fans of melodic hard rock. While it doesn’t quite reach the standard of 80s classics like “Escape” and especially “Frontiers”, this album shows Journey are still as much a force to be reckoned in the studio as they are live, with a quarter of a century after their commercial peak. 

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