Tag Archives: Panic Room

What I did on my holiday, part 1

Posted on October 4, 2009 by Tim Hall

Been a while since I’ve blogged about anything much – been too busy doing things rather than blogging about them. So we’ll go back a few weeks to my week’s holiday in mid-September.

Paul Davies at Swansea

The week started with a gig, Panic Room at their home town in Swansea. On the previous tour I’d managed to get to several of the shows, but other commitments meant that this one was the only one of their short tour I could get to.

The Milkwood Jam is a funny venue, a sort of glass box on the top of the building.  The band were as tight as ever, with great performances from all five members, and the sound was as good as can be expected for a smallish club venue.

With their new album Satellite written and recorded, new songs made up the bulk of the set, interspersed with a few favourites from the debut album. When I say new songs, quite a few of them have been in the set for a while, with the likes of “Sandstorms”, “Black Noise”, “Go” and “Yasumi” already becoming live favourites.  The band are moving more in the direction of shorter, more direct songs rather than sprawling prog epics, and this material comes over very well live.

I took quite a few photos, but the lighting, with low levels and all the light coming from the side of the stage, meant the results were disappointing.

66204 at Newport

Monday was trains day, and a chance to use my new Sony 50mm Lens for action photography in full sun. I’d bought it for use in low light, especially for situations like Panic Room’s gig in Swansea.  In full sun you don’t need to stop the lens right down to f1.4, and I was amazed by the sharpness of the images I was getting – completely blows away the kit zoom.

Newport doesn’t quite have the volume of freight traffic I remembered from previous visits in the 80s and 90s, but there was still quite a bit of steel traffic. EWS class 66s seem to be ubiquitous nowadays; there weren’t any 60s to be seen. There were, though, a couple of loco-hauled passenger trains; an FGW Cardiff-Taunton top-and-tailed by a pair of 67s, and Arriva Wales Cardiff-Holyhead, complete with first class and a dining car, allegedly subsidised by the expense accounts of members of the Welsh Assembly (me, cynical?)

As with the Panic Room gig, I’ve uploaded some of the photos to my fotopic site.

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Panic Room – Satellite available for Pre-Order

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Tim Hall

Panic Room’s new album Satellite is now available for pre-order.

As it says:

“Satellite” will be available from all good retailers and on-line stores as a single 11-track album towards the end of the year, but you can pre-order the Special Edition now! This edition is a deluxe version with expanded lyric booklet plus a bonus disc featuring 4 new songs recorded at the ‘Satellite’ sessions, but not included on the standard edition of the album.

Having heard several of the songs from Swansea’s finest played live on the band’s last tour, it’s something to be ordered without hesitation.

Jon Edwards has posted the track listing for Satellite on the Panic Room web forum – several of the songs they’ve been playing live are relegated to the bonus disk. Which says something for the quality of the material on the main album.

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Last.fm needs to fix the disambiguation problem

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Tim Hall

I’ve been a user of last.fm for a while – most of the time it’s a great way of getting to hear new music.  It works by ‘scrobbling’ whatever music you’ve been listening to on your computer, and then allows you to stream a personalised internet radio station with songs similar to the sorts of things you’ve been listening.  I’ve discovered several bands, including Pineapple Thief and Alestorm

Unfortunately there’s one big thing wrong with it.  They’ve made a major database design screwup, in which they defined the unique identifier for an artist as being the artist name. This may work perfectly well for major label artists, but once you get into the “long tail” it’s more common to find multiple bands sharing the same name, often for bands in different countries, or bands sharing the same name as a long-defunct outfit.  This has now happened to Panic Room, who now find themselves sharing a last.fm page with an Italian nu-metal band.

Last.fm’s hopelessly broken solution is to treat multiple artists as if they were one, and all the songs and photos are jumbled up with no indication as to which ones belong to which band. Sometimes one band is vastly more well-known than the other, so it doesn’t matter except for the other band which gets marginalised.  But when you get two very different artists of roughly similar popularity, it creates a lot of animosity, with energy wasted in pissing contests between fans of the two bands over who’s first in the wiki, who’s photo is shown first, etc.

Last.fm have got to get their finger out and fix this – and I’m sick and tired of hearing excuses as to why it can’t be done. I work in IT, I’ve got a lot of database design experience – I know full well that they’re bullshitting when they say it’s “impossible”. If it requires a major database redesign, then so be it. They really can’t afford not to.

Even if the fix isn’t perfect, and might take some sort of manual intervention to determine which ‘new’ tracks belong to which band, anything is preferable to the present mess. I’m sure find fans will be prepared to spend time and energy if there’s any manual disambiguation required.

If last.fm doesn’t fix this, and fix this soon, then people are going to be abandoning last.fm for rival sites.

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Classic Rock Presents Prog – my thoughts.

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Tim Hall

I picked up a copy of the new magazine “Classic Rock Presents Prog” at the weekend, and here are my thoughts on the thing.

First, the price.  I cannot honestly say that £7.99 for a magazine with approximately the same number of pages as Classic Rock, which retails for a little over half that amount, really represents value for money in these recessionary times. The price is printed in such a tiny font many people aren’t realising the damage to their wallet until they reach the till.  It’s even been suggested that that they’re betting on people being too embarrassed to change their mind at that point. It also seems to have fairly limited availability; smaller newsagents that stock Classic Rock don’t seem to be selling it, and the only place you can buy it appears to be W.H.Smiths.

There are some good articles on artists like The Reasoning, Steve Wilson, Pendragon, Coheed and Cambria, and good (if somewhat sexist) piece on Women in Prog mentioning Mostly Autumn, Breathing Space and Panic room, among others. The recent London gigs by Panic Room and Mostly Autumn also get glowing reviews.

But there’s also a lot of recycled material from the past. The cover story on Pink Floyd doesn’t really tell us anything we haven’t read many times before, as do the similar retreads on Rush and ELP.  Worse still, the magazine contains too much very obvious space-filler. The worst offender is the 10 page article with Phil Jupitus discussing Genesis album covers, mostly taken up by large images of the album sleeves themselves, pure padding with little or no worthwhile content. One wonders how future issues will fare if they’re struggling to fill the very first one.

There’s also another serious concern. While it’s great to see bands like Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, Breathing Space and The Reasoning get some very positive reviews, I can’t help thinking that there’s going to be a very much reduced coverage of anything remotely “Progessive” in the parent magazine.  This makes me wonder if shunting progressive music into an overpriced, limited availability low circulation ghetto magazine will ultimately be a net loss.

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Panic Room, Swansea and London

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Tim Hall

I started my live music for 2009 with two gigs on two nights by the same band, in two completely different cities.

While Friday night’s gig in Swansea was really a warm-up for the high-profile London show the next day, it also featured a one-off guest appearance from violinist Liz Prendegast, who’d played on several songs on the album “Visionary Position”.

The Garage is quite a nice little venue; capacity of perhaps 200, although it was nowhere near full. Unfortunately the gig did suffer from a disappointingly high level of background chatter which was noticeable during the quiet bits. And everyone hung at the back of the room despite Anne-Marie Helder trying to persuade people to move forward.

Panic Room’s set suffered badly from technical glitches, the worst of which was Anne-Marie’s microphone not being switched on at the very beginning, resulting in a false start to ‘Electra City’. But the band managed to rise above the gremlins, and played an entertaining and varied set lasting not far short of two hours. While they played some  favourites from their debut album, such as the atmospheric epic ‘Endgame’ and the arabesque ‘Apocalypstick’, those amounted to something like a third of the set.

Some of the newer material they’d been playing at the end of last year have already become live favourites, such as the spiky guitar-driven rocker ‘Go’ and the industrial-sounding ‘Black Noise’, and they added another couple of brand new songs for their first live airing; of those ’5th Amendment’ was the most impressive.  Anne-Marie did her customary mid-set acoustic solo spot, of which the a cappella ‘Hadditfeel’ was the highlight. They ended with their groove-orientated cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘No Quarter’, including a few bars of ‘Kashmir’ for good measure. When she joined them on stage, Liz’s electric violin added an extra dimension to the sound, especially on the ‘Apocalypstick’ and ‘No Quarter’. I’d love to see her accompany the band for a whole tour.

Saturday’s gig at The Peel was the replacement for the show in April cancelled due to power failure, and this rescheduled gig attracted the largest crowd I’ve seen at a Panic Room gig to date, while I don’t think they quite sold out, the place was pretty much full. Support was prog veterans Jump, who delivered a highly entertaining set; a band I’m getting to like more and more every time I see them. John Dexter Jones is a great frontman; while he looks a bit like Morrissey,  he sounds more like Fish; you can certainly hear the influence of both Marillion and Fish’s solo material in their sound.

Panic Room then delivered the best performance I’ve seen them play to date. Playing a shorter set than the previous night, they went pretty much full tilt all the way through, high energy levels, fantastically tight, and hugely appreciated by the crowd.

What I love about this band is that while they’re all clearly virtuoso musicians, they always play exactly what the songs need and no more; they never descend into the sort of self-indulgent noodling that ‘prog’ is all-too frequently accused of.  And I think the fact that I’ve got several of their new songs stuck in my head means they’re capable of writing memorable songs that ought to appeal to mainstream audiences. And after many years as a backing singer to Rachel Jones in Karnataka and Heather Findlay in Mostly Autumn, Anne-Marie Helder proves she’s in the same league as either of them when it comes to fronting a band herself.

Their next gig is in Stocksbridge near Sheffield in March.

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Farewell to The Storm

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Tim Hall

After many years, the original Karnataka mailing list TheStorm is finally closing it’s virtual doors. Moderator HippyDave will be leaving the archives up there in read-only form, but new discussions should be directed to the web forums for the three bands that arose from the ashes of the old lineup, the new Karnataka, Panic Room and The Reasoning.

Many thanks to HippyDave for moderating this list, along with a great many others (where does he find the time?)

Through a case of very bad timing, I discovered the music of the original Karnataka just before they unexpectedly split up, and never got to see that incarnation of the band live. I joined the mailing list just after the split to find out what on earth had happened. I didn’t actually find out, but did meet a great number of really cool people, many of whom I’ve subsequently met at gigs.

And it was on that list that I first heard of the various successor bands. Without that I doubt that I’d have travelled down to Swansea in the aftermath of a hurricane to witness The Reasoning’s very first gig, or to Lydney in the remote depths of the Forest of Dean to witness the first live appearance of Panic Room.

So a final farewell to the list, but almost certainly not farewell to anyone on it, who I’m sure we’ll see on one or more forums, and at gigs.

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Top Ten Albums of the Year 2008

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Tim Hall

I wasn’t originally going to arrange these in order, but in the end I did it anyway, just to annoy those people who hate ranked lists.

10. Van der Graaf Generator – Trisector
Reduced to a trio after the departure of David Jackson, this album proves the slimmed-down version of the 70s progressive rock veterans can still deliver an album in the same league as their 2005 comeback album “Present”

9. Magenta – Metamorphosis
Magenta are very much old-school Prog, wearing their Yes, Genesis and Mike Oldfield influences on their sleeve, playing 20 minute epics with titles like ‘The Ballad of Samual Layne’. They get away with it though superior songwriting and arrangement, and stunning individual performances from Christina Booth on vocals and Chris Fry on guitar.

8. Josh and Co – Through These Eyes
This solo album from Bryan Josh of Mostly Autumn appeared out of the blue at the end of November. Has a similar sound and production to Mostly Autumn’s last album, but the songs are looser and more contemporary-sounding. Quite dark in places, playfully self-indulgent in others, and Bryan cuts loose on the guitar in a way that shows how much he’d been holding back on recent Mostlies releases; I haven’t heard him shred like that for ages. Although Bryan naturally handles most of the vocals, there are also some quite stunning contributions from Olivia Sparnenn which really make me look forward to the next Breathing Space album

7. Uriah Heep – Wake the Sleeper
Nine years since their last studio album, and the mighty Heep are back with a powerful statement that the hard rock veterans are very much in business. Ironically for a band who have spent much of their career in the shadow of the much bigger and more successful Deep Purple, they’ve now come up with something that blows away anything Purple have done in the last nine years. It compares very favourably with their best output from their 70s heyday, and I don’t think they’ve ever rocked harder than this.

6. Panic Room – Visionary Position
The debut from the band that grew out of the ashes of Karnataka, fronted by Anne-Marie Helder. Three years in the making, it’s a rich multilayered album with a real mix of styles from hard rock, folk, pop and full-blown prog which was well worth the wait.

5. Pineapple Thief – Tightly Unwound
Pineapple Thief are one of the new generation of progressive rock bands who mix elements of 70s progressive rock with more contemporary influences to give a streamlined modern sound rather than produce a pastiche of older bands. You can hear the influence of both early Radiohead and Porcupine Tree on this album, although thankfully we’re spared Thom Yorke-style whining vocals, and there is definitely no shortage of tunes.

4. Mostly Autumn – Glass Shadows
A strong release which is a marked improvement on the patchy and badly-produced “Heart Full of Sky” even if it doesn’t quite match their best work. Written entirely by Bryan Josh and Heather Findlay this time around, it’s more mainstream melodic rock than the celtic-tinged prog of their early work, but retains the 70s vibe that’s still a major element of their sound. Musically it has hard rockers, shimmering piano ballads, dreamy atmospheric numbers and soaring guitar-driven epics. Lyrically they’re certainly not singing about Hobbits any more, this is a true life story about heartbreak, joy, tragedy and hope.

3. Opeth – Watershed
2005′s “Ghost Reveries” wasn’t an easy album to follow, but Opeth managed to equal it with “Watershed“, which contains all their trademark elements; piledriving heavy passages alternating with delicate guitar harmonies, Mikael Ã…kerfeldt’s vocals swapping back and forth between harsh ‘cookie monster’ and heartfelt clean vocals, typically all in the same song. It’s not an easy listen, songs average ten minutes, and don’t have anything as crassly commercial as conventional verses or choruses. But when you get what they’re doing, the result can only be described as ‘symphonic’.

2. Marillion – Happiness is the Road
This double album is a vast improvement on last year’s patchy “Somewhere Else“. The two disks are conceived as two separate single albums; the atmospheric “Essence“, and the rockier “The Hard Shoulder“. Both contain plenty of gems and very little filler. Stylistically it’s the same contemporary sound as recent albums rather than a reversion to an earlier sound. Steve Hogarth is on great form, using his voice as much as a musical instrument rather than solely to express the lyrics, and Steve Rothery demonstrates in many places why he’s one of the best rock guitarists out there.

1. The Reasoning – Dark Angel
It’s difficult to choose just one album as my album of the year, but in the end I’ve settled for The Reasoning’s second album. Last year’s debut “Awakening” was one of my top albums of last year, a great mix of melodic hard rock with progressive flavouring, with three-part vocal harmones and a powerful twin lead guitar attack. This one takes things to another level, adding some metal to the mix, full of melodies that get stuck in your brain, sublime vocals from Rachel Cohen, and some amazing but never self-indulgent playing from new guitarist Owain Roberts.

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Panic Room – Crewe Limelight, 5-Dec-2008

Posted on December 7, 2008 by Tim Hall

Back to the world-famous Crewe Limelight for Panic Room’s final live appearance of 2008.

Support was Jump, who I’d seen (briefly!) at that ill-fated double headliner at The Peel when the power failed just at the point where things were starting to come to life. Tonight we got to see them complete a whole set, and they were very good indeed. More prog-tinged bluesy rock than prog, although you can hear a strong Fish influence in the lead singer. Nice one; I’m looking forward to seeing them again at the rescheduled Peel gig in the new year now.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen Panic Room, and was the best one I’ve seen them play to date. Their sound is an eclectic multi-layered mix of hard rock and prog with bits of folk and electronica, and the five-piece band do a splendid job of reproducing it live; amazingly tight, but they also rock out pretty hard.

Sound was pretty good, certainly better than for either Breathing Space or Karnataka’s gigs in October. Anne-Marie Helder was on stellar form vocally, despite suffering from a cold which I hope she didn’t get it from me, and struggling with a non-functioning pedal board. Can you name any other band where the singer has more effects pedals than the lead guitarist?

Setlist was much the same as the Halloween gig in Worcester, right down to the cover of ‘Enter Sandman’ as the final encore, albeit with a few changes in lyrics. High spots were many; ‘Apocalypstick’ was fantastic, and of the new songs ‘Yasumi’ and ‘Go’ are rapidly becoming favourites. Anne-Marie’s Santa outfit for the encores raised a few eyebrows; I think the rest of the band should have dressed as elves.

Next gig is at The Peel in Kingston on January 31st. Be there!

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Panic Room, Wolverhampton, 24 Oct 2008

Posted on November 2, 2008 by Tim Hall

Gaul was divided into three parts
– Julius Caesar

All three of the female fronted prog (or gorp) bands that grew out of the ashes of the original incarnation of Karnataka have been touring in October, making it a busy month gig-wise for those of us that actually like all three. I’ve already reviewed The Reasoning, who were on tour at the beginning of the month, the second part of the month was the turn of the other two bands, Panic Room and the new incarnation of Karnataka.

First was Panic Room at the Little Civic in Wolverhampton. I hadn’t seen this band since their very first gig at Lydney back in April, not counting the ill-fated gig at The Peel where I didn’t actually get to see them play because of a power failure. The Little Civic is one of those slightly tatty but loveable small venues, walls covered in posters. It’s basically just the upstairs room of a pub, with the stage at one end of a long narrow room. As is normal for this sort of gig, the place contained an awful lot of familiar faces, from the infamous HippyDave to Mostly Autumn’s Andy Smith, who was doing the lights.

Support was Quecia, playing with an acoustic lineup consisting of two female vocalists and two acoustic guitarists. I’m afraid they didn’t really do a lot for me; their lead singer has an excellent voice, but none of their songs were strong enough to be memorable, at least for me.

Panic Room have definitely grown as a band since I saw them last. They’ve got a very different sound live than on record; rather than the complex multi-layered approach of their album Visionary Position, on stage their music is harder-edged and more guitar driven; for instance, on ‘Apocalypstick’, Paul Davies’ guitar replaces the absent electric violin. They’re not resting on their laurels when it comes to material; the set included no fewer than five new songs written since the recording of the album. A couple of those, the quite poppy ‘Into the Fire’ and the very spiky ‘Go’ had been in the set in April, but the others were completely new, including the vaguely industrial-sounding ‘Black Noise’ written by Alun Vaughan. The strength of the new stuff is such that they could afford to leave out a couple of songs from the album.

High spot was the first encore, a full band arrangement of ‘Blood Red Skies’, a song from Anne-Marie’s solo album “The Contact”. This was a powerful song when I heard it 18 months ago performed as a solo acoustic number; backed by the whole band it’s an absolute barnstormer. The small but enthusiastic audience wasn’t prepared to let them get away with just one encore, and they were back again for their take of Led Zep’s ‘No Quarter’.

That was definitely a good one. Paul Davies was in fine form on guitar, completely recovered from his hand injury that caused him to miss the end of a gig last month. And Anne-Marie Helder, despite apparently suffering from a really bad lurgy, still gave a fantastic vocal performance, and looked extremely sexy (if I’m allowed to say something like that in these politically-correct times).

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Panic Room/Mermaid Kiss, Lydney

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Tim Hall

I never did get to see the original incarnation of Karnataka live; with impeccably bad timing I discovered their music just at the time the band split. While four members of that band soon regrouped as Panic Room, it would be another three years before they went back on the road for a long-awaited tour, starting at the Town Hall in Lydney, Gloucestershire.

Lydney is not exactly the rock and roll capital of the universe. In the late afternoon, Arriva Trains Wales delivered me to an unstaffed railway station called “Lydney”, surrounded by fields. Before the infamous Dr Beeching this station went by the name of “Lydney Junction”, where you could change to a branch-line train which might have taken you to the town itself. With no sign of anything resembling a taxi to be seen, it meant a lengthy walk through the Gloucestershire countryside to my B&B, which, although only a mile from the venue, turned out to be in the next village, a picture postcard place called Alyburton.

The Town Hall is on the road into the town. I knew I’d come to the right place when I bumped into the No 1 Mostly Autumn fan, Aniel Jangra. One of the next people I met turned out to be Jamie Field of Mermaid Kiss, who recognised me from my MySpace photo! After meeting HippyDave in the pub next door where I’d gone in search of food, we proceeded to the 300-capacity hall.

Support band Mermaid Kiss played what they described as a ‘semi acoustic’ set. The five piece band included keyboards and bass, acoustic guitar and assorted woodwinds, but no drums, and included Panic Room’s Jon Edwards on keys, who was on stage the entire night. The stripped-down arrangements certainly gave lead singer Evelyn Downing’s voice the opportunity to shine. Their confident set, including some songs from their most recent album “Etarlis“, the only album of theirs I’d previously heard, a few older songs, and some new material written for their next album, a concept album based on a journey across a mythical America.  With further support slots for both Breathing Space and The Reasoning in the coming months, we’ll be seeing and hearing more of this band, and that’s something worth looking forward to.

When I heard Panic Room’s excellent album “Visionary Position“, one of my first thoughts was “How on Earth will they reproduce that live?”. The album is a rich, multilayered work, with important contributions from guest musician Liz Prendegast on electric violin on several songs. Not that I should have worried; the simplified live arrangements, though harder-edged and more guitar-driven, still do the songs justice. The band were amazingly tight considering this was their first ever live appearance as Panic Room, and Anne-Marie Helder was fantastic as a lead vocalist. While I’d never really had any doubts about her abilities as a singer, this was still the first time I’d seen her fronting a band rather than playing solo acoustic sets or performing as an instrumentalist.

As for the setlist, they played the whole of Visionary Position, with Paul Davies’ guitar taking the place of those violin lines on songs like ‘Apocalypstick’. Filling out the set were two impressive-sounding new songs, “Into the Fire” and “Go”, a couple of Karnataka oldies and a short solo interlude from Anne-Marie while the rest of the band took a break. Final encore was an amazing Led Zeppelin medly, incorporating a groove-orientated cover of “No Quarter” and a few bars of “Kashmir”.

Panic Room have certainly started their live career with a bang.  I hope I don’t have to wait another three years to see them again.

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