Grinded Grin - Charlatan (2024)

Country: Croatia
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Jazz Fusion
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Opening up a prog rock album with horsehead fiddle and throat singing is a plus for me, though it does sound rather like an orchestra warming up. Then again, that may be the point because this is just a quick seventy second intro. Masquerade, the first track proper, leaps headling into a wildly different vibe with a psychedelic guitar solo at the top of the mix and right in our face. A minute in, it steps back and we're in strange territory, appropriately so for prog rock. The drums are pure jazz. The guitar morphs into an exploring synthesiser. And then the throat singing returns as an overlay.

It's an interesting approach that reminds a lot of jazz fusion, because it's generally instrumental, that throat singing apart. However, it's clearly ethnic and I don't believe Mongolia is particularly known for its jazz fusion. The guitar is very prominent too, so loud in the mix and so psychedelic I'd almost call this stoner rock, a tag that is indeed listed on the album's Bandcamp page, along with avant-garde and alternative. Jazz and fusion aren't there, though, and there's no mention of this world music flavour either. Tellingly, progressive rock doesn't show up there either, so I'll think of it as psychedelic jazz fusion instead.

That world music changes as the album progresses, the contributions of Javier Morales left in the openers and the didgiridoo of Michele Fortunato only lasting into Deceptive Delirium, where the Mongolian flavour is replaced by the plaintive trumpet of Josué Garcîa. Ascent into Illusion turns to the saxophone of Vedran Momčilović to be its lead instrument and adds some weird percussion that sounds like woodblocks. The result is a sort of acoustic industrial jazz fusion track that I can't leave alone. After all the exploration of the earlier songs, this one feels repetitive and pounding, but it works wonderfully for me. Even at over six minutes, I didn't want it to end.

I should mention that every name I've mentioned thus far appears to be a guest, because they all show up for one or maybe two tracks and leave again. The band is a duo at heart, with Aleksandar Vrhovec playing guitar, bass and those idiosyncratic synths that tend to sound rather like a swarm of musical bees, and Linda-Philomene Tsoungui contributing drum loops. Of course, that's not the typical make-up of a duo, hence quite the list of guests. Looking back through their Bandcamp at earlier albums, it seems like there have been more traditional line-ups. Vrhovec is at the core of whatever they do.

In whatever form they've held, they seem to be prolific, this being their eleventh album since 2018 with six of those arriving between February and July 2021, one a month like a magazine. Those all seem to have a different mindset, most of them longer than this album but often boasting only a single track and never more than three. This batch of seven shorter pieces isn't typical for them, a twelve minute closure called Epiphany's Exposure notwithstanding. That length pales when faced off against the forty-one and a half of Terra, the only track on the album of the same name.

I haven't heard any of those earlier albums, but each piece of music here has its own character, an overall psychedelic jazz fusion feel throughout but explored in different ways each time, not least through a succession of dominant instruments, the Les Claypool-esque funky bass riff in Pinnacle of Illusion following the respective guitar, trumpet and sax of the first three tracks. The other pieces are less memorable for being ensemble works, though Epiphany's Exposure does find some focus during a squealing saxophone dominated second half when Sebastian Lopez finds the spolight. Until then, it was more of a Frank Zappa orchestral piece.

It took me a moment to understand what Grinded Grin were doing here, but I got on board pretty quickly and I find that I like this album a lot. Jazz fusion is a coin flip for me, as I find that I dislike as many albums as I like. It's a genre that can get very indulgent. However, it's also often led by a virtuoso guitarist and, while I cast no aspersions on Vrhovec's talents there, the spotlight shifts a lot here and rarely to the guitar. It becomes far more of a soundscape album, where Grinded Grin conjure up a new sound for a new track and hopefully take us to a new place. Like the Qilin album earlier in the week, this didn't transport me often but I appreciated those soundscapes anyway.

Now, how have I not heard of Grinded Grin before and which album in a bountiful back catalogue should I dive into next? After I dive back into the delightful Deceptive Delirium, of course. And Ascent into Illusion. And...

Soft Machine - Other Doors (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Jun 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

It's been said that Soft Machine were the most important of the various bands who emerged from the Canterbury scene, but I've not heard enough by them to judge. I know that I've struggled with Gong, whose driving force, Daevid Allen, was a founder member of Soft Machine, but nothing I've heard thus far was quite so experimental. However, they've not done a heck of a lot lately, a string of eleven albums between 1968 and 1981 followed by only one until now, 2018's Hidden Details.

Therefore I was keen to take a listen to this, featuring a few long term members, one for the final time. Drummer John Marshall, who had four separate stints with the band, including the majority of the seventies and the entire period since their reformation in 2015, passed away in 2023, so this is his last contribution to their discography. John Etheridge is still with us but, even though he was in the band in the late seventies and in the eighties, his current run is his longest. Roy Babbington retired in 2020 but returns here to play bass on a couple of tracks, including a memorable showing on Penny Hitch.

That's the second track here and it's more substantial than Careless Eyes before it, that being an agreeable interplay of flutes and electric guitars. This one mixes bass, drums and keyboards, then adds a memorable saxophone that makes it feel complete. An electric guitar solo from Etheridge in the second half is too much for a while, noodling over a textured backdrop rather than merging with it, like Theo Travis's sax does. It works better at the end of the track, but it takes time to get there, as indeed it does on the following track, Other Doors.

As a result, this may play a lot better to jazz fans than rock fans, though the album as a whole fits well between the two. I was expecting prog rock but this is closer to jazz fusion. Whichever it may count as, it's also relatively accessible. Careless Eyes starts out highly accessible, as an incredibly easy song to listen to, and then it gets progressively jazzier as if it's moving up a scale. We might not realise we're listening to jazz until we get to Crooked Usage, when the drums ditch a pretense of playing rhythm and start to jam as a lead instrument and the bass goes off on runs everywhere. However, it's still not wildly out there, the album waiting until Fell to Earth to really challenge.

That's ten tracks into thirteen and it's a prowler from the outset, with rumbling guitar and bass, a teasing set of cymbals and a dangerous saxophone. That saxophone has been our friend for many tracks thus far, always courteous and helpful enough to walk old ladies across the road. It shows up late in Crooked Usage and is almost a voice of reason there, bringing the other instruments back into line. Here, it's a different beast entirely, threatening anyone within range. The piece almost ends a minute in, as if the band are ready to wrap things up with a flourish, but it continues on and only gets more frantic as it does so.

I can easily see unwary listeners liking this album immediately because it's just so nice but getting to Crooked Usage and wondering what they signed up for. More experienced prog fans would be a lot more knowledgeable but still run through the same scenario with Fell to Earth being the point at which they question. Either way, they'll probably skip back to track one and listen through again with very different ears. I take that as a good thing because it doesn't throw us in at the deep end and hope we can swim. It gives us lessons for a while and then reveals that we're over the Mariana Trench. Well, maybe not quite that deep but notably deeper than we were.

There are interesting touches outside those two tracks. Joy of a Toy is one for two reasons. One is that it starts out as if it's going to be a jazz improvisation on Heartbreak Hotel. Those are easy to recognise chords! It doesn't go there, but where it goes instead includes what seems to be a weird effect for Etheridge's guitar that sounds rather like it's being used to tune a radio. I'm not sure it works but it's certainly worth the attempt. Maybe Never features plenty of chirpy keyboards, as if this piece was travelling to the same deep space places that the android in Glass Hammer's Arise did last year.

The other note that I'd throw out is that I really enjoyed the bass on this album. Jazz is a genre in which every instrument can play lead and, well, is rather expected to. What's interesting is that I'd call out both bassists: long term member Babbington as a guest on Penny Hitch and especially on Now! is the Time, where the interaction between guitar and bass the entire purpose for this piece, but also Freddy Baker, his replacement, especially on The Stars Apart.

And so this doesn't start out like it's going to be an interesting album, with the easy listening that comprises Careless Eyes, but it does get there and it stays there, all the way to the final track that may well be the best on the album. That's Back in Season and it's also the longest of them at seven minutes, except for Crooked Usage at eight and a half. I think it's because because once we realise that we've moved from chilling to asking questions, we're engaged enough to want to figure out a firm answer or three. Where this fits within Soft Machine's back catalogue, I couldn't tell you, but it's much more accessible and much more interesting to me than Gong.

Edges - The End of the F***ing World (2023)

Country: Belgium
Style: Jazz Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 31 Mar 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Edges may be a debuting band, but they're a project of a Belgian guitarist, Guillaume Vierset, who has a few solo albums out, along with others with Harvest Group and LG Jazz Collective, plus guest appearances for a variety of other Belgian jazz artists. As that might suggest, this is jazz, but it's a fascinating fusion album because Vierset started playing country guitar with his father, then went to school to study classical guitar and jazz, and diversified from there. He's brought folk music into jazz and a number of songs here play with electronica, rock and even punk.

The vast majority of the album is instrumental, the only vocal piece being the closing title track, a melodious song that's the longest on offer at five minutes but also the most underwhelming, with a lounge music base and almost a subdued Iggy Pop style vocal. It's a far cry from the opener, First Round, which is probably my favourite piece here, a jaunty jazz fusion piece with some fascinating rhythms. It gets a little experimental in its second half but nowhere near to the degree that other pieces will soon relish in. It's a very good entry point to the album.

Of course, if you don't have a background in jazz fusion and you dig this opener, you may be rather confused by Better Call Pam, perhaps my other favourite track here. It starts out as electronica, a pulsing synth that sounds like it's a machine trying but not quite managing to emulate the speech of a human being. There's plenty of glitch early on, but it settles into a comfortable groove, full of movement, as if the piece is walking down the road, all chill and laid back. As it builds, it gets more and more fascinating because the process of walking appears to become more difficult, the stride veering away from what's expected and muscles starting to seize and spasm. Somehow it manages to make it to its destination without tripping over its feet, but it's a constant challenge.

While we wouldn't know this without an explanation, apparently there's a story running through a majority of this album. The first two tracks feature a man declaring the end of the fucking world, a memorable title even with censoring asterisks, because he finds himself torn between a world that is rational and structured and sane and another world "where everything is blown apart". The rest of the album is therefore a struggle between order and chaos, some pieces more structured, but a few far from it. Just as this man thinks he's figured it out on Back, it's time for a Second Round.

And, even though First Round and Better Call Pam are my favourite pieces, I'd give Second Round a place alongside them as a highlight. It starts out delicate and introspective, but gradually finds its way into chaos, the dynamic shift between beginning and end surely the most pronounced that the album gets. In its way, it's the album in microcosm but the album doesn't follow such a direct shift. It wends and weaves and shifts from the world of order to the world of chaos and back again with a playful edge.

After First Round, the most approachable song may be AC Blues, which is tender and fascinating, a lounge music piece to presage the closer but one that doesn't need a voice and whose instruments are constantly interesting. The lounge feel threatens to soothe us into slumber, but nothing being played is willing to let us, so our attention never wavers and we stay very awake and listen actively. I'm reminded here of some of what I've heard from Bill Frisell with some Mark Ribot in there for a bonus.

I don't know any of the musicians, but Vierset played all the guitars and wrote the music, leaving a trio of others behind him. Dorian Dumont may be the most prominent otherwise, as the keyboard player and pianist. Anders Christensen contributes bass and Jim Black the drums, which, in keeping with the overarching concept, often shift from rock structure to free jazz chaos. They cover a lot of ground here, all the way from the punky vibe of I Love Triads to the minimalist, near ambient intro to the title track, simply called Intro, to name just two tracks next to each other on the album.

I may know a lot more about every other genre I've covered this week than I do jazz fusion, but this is a fascinating album that's perked up my day.

Derek Sherinian - Vortex (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Jul 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

Here's something interesting from a name you may not know but a talent that you probably do. It might appear to be another instrumental guitar album, and it certainly includes large amounts of guitar solos, but Derek Sherinian isn't a guitarist. He merely plays his keyboards as if he is, with an array of very recognisable talent jamming along on guitar. This approach comes from very diverse background, his first three professional jobs being with jazz drummer Buddy Miles, rock icon Alice Cooper and prog metal legends Dream Theater.

I didn't hear a lot of Alice here, but I was often reminded of an inventive jazz fusion take on Dream Theater. It's primarily hard rock rather than metal, but it does heavy up at points, unsurprisingly a lot more on Die Kobra, with guests Michael Schenker and Zakk Wylde, than on songs featuring the likes of Nuno Bettencourt, Joe Bonamassa and Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal. The only guitarist to show up more than once is Steve Stevens, of Billy Idol fame, and he helps set the album in motion with a lively and spirited title track, which isn't wildly different from his other contribution, Seven Seas.

It's a good starter because it's warm and welcoming, but I think Fire Horse, featuring Bettencourt, still best known for his work with Extreme, is an even better way to continue. It starts out firmly as hard rock but quickly finds a bouncy jazz fusion riff that feels like it could have been lifted from an iconic seventies jazz fusion album. It focuses initially on guitar but becomes a very palatable duel between Bettencourt's guitar and Sherinian's keyboards. It's my favourite piece here and it gets a little more favourite every time it comes around.

I should mention that not everything is guitar and keyboards. There's a very noticeable bass from Ernest Tibbs on Fire Horse and he's one of five bassists here, the name I recognise most being that of Tony Franklin. The most obvious here may be Ric Fierabracci, even though he's only on one track, Scorpion, perhaps because it's the only one without a guitarist. I didn't know the name, but he's a massively experienced talent who's played with everyone from Tom Jones to Shakira, but perhaps more typically for jazz names like Chick Corea and Billy Cobham. In many ways, he plays lead guitar on Scorpion; he just happens to be using a bass while he does it.

Bonamassa's track also features Steve Lukather of Toto, which is an intriguing pairing. What they conjure up in Key Lime Blues is something in the vein of Fire Horse, but with weaving guitars set to a much funkier backdrop. While this often jazz over rock and often rock over jazz, there are plenty of other genres in play, a dabble in metal here and there and a few dabbles in funk being the most obvious. Nomad's Land is funky too, though as much because of Ernest Tibbs's work on bass as for Mike Stern's guitar. That's as jazzy as you might expect, with a central riff that feels like a jagged, deconstructed and rebuilt version of Herbie Hancock's Rockit.

I knew all the guitarists here, except for him, so it wasn't too much of a surprise to find that he has stayed primarily in the jazz world, albeit from jazz rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears to work with the likes of Billy Cobham, Jaco Pastorius and Miles Davis. The sheer diversity on this album is perhaps best highlighted by Nomad's Land being right next to the much heavier Die Kobra. Both are rooted in jazz, but they feel like they come from different genres and different eras, but not sounding out of place in each other's company. The dots connect in a lot of ways.

The most unusual song here, excepting Scorpion with its deliberate omission of guitar, is the closer because of its length and its approach. It's Aurora Australis, the guest guitarist is Bumblefoot and the ensuing organised chaos is over eleven minutes long, which is close to any two of the others. It starts out as a solo piano piece, with a little percussion—all the drums here are provided by Simon Phillips, last encountered guesting for Lalu and MSG—but it grows and keeps growing. There are a few surprising instruments here, including an obvious sitar to kick off Die Kobra, but the theremin of Armen Ra that's on five of these eight tracks, is most noticeable on this one.

And so there's a lot of variety here, wrapped up in prog rock/jazz fusion clothing. It sounds like an agreeable album from the outset but everything is done so effortlessly, not just the playing of the instruments but the way that they weave together and the way that the musicians were chosen so well, that it's almost inevitably a better album than we think it is. After one listen, it's obviously a very good album but it's only as we start to climb inside it after a few more times through that we come to terms with just how good it is.

Animals as Leaders - Parrhesia (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Mar 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Animals as Leaders will never be my favourite band because they take that djenty approach where every instrument becomes a percussion instrument and I'm just not a fan of that. If I want to focus on percussion, I'll listen to Hossam Ramzy's Egyptian rhythms or a gamelan orchestra or even John Cage's compositions for prepared piano. You may be asking at this moment why I'm reviewing the new Animals as Leaders album, their fifth thus far and first in six years, if I'm just going to hate it. Well, I may not be a fan of that particular approach but this band are wildly inventive and do a lot more than just the djenty thing. How much so I just found out.

Case in point: the opener, Conflict Cartography. Sure, there's a rhythmic element to both the bass and the guitar but this one goes everywhere. It reminded me of a far more traditional progressive metal band, or at least their offshoot, Liquid Tension Experiment. It's wild and it's complex but it's also melodic and ambitious. While it drops into a djenty section halfway, it also develops beyond it relatively quickly into more of the playful intricacy that it began with. It's easily my favourite song here and it feels as fresh on a third time through as it did on the first.

On the other hand, Monomyth, which follows it, simply doesn't want to depart so far from rhythm based everything, and most of the song is grounded in that percussive approach. There are synth melodies and guitar soloing over the top of it, but not as much or as notably as on the opener. The thinking is much more limited and the song suffers for that, at least in my opinion, in ways that I'd say don't apply to Red Miso, which is acutely rhythmic but in a fascinating way, making it feel like a success but Monomyth a failure. Sure, Loudwire listed it, in its single form, in a top twenty metal songs of 2021 chart, but that shows how far adrift I am from mainstream American tastes.

And, as with so much, it comes down to a matter of taste, though more so here than on the recent Meshuggah album, I would think. Sure, Animals as Leaders are incredibly talented musicians and they're doing incredibly intricate work, so the question boils down to whether we enjoy what they do or not. Meshuggah are also incredibly talented musicians but they didn't seem to be trying on that album, which made it monotonous to my ears. Taste allows for a lot, but it seems to me that people who dig what they do would prefer other Meshuggah albums over that one. But hey, what do I know? I'm not much of a fan there either.

Of course, that leaves everything else on this album in between those two polar extremes, which I can't say I'm too shocked to discover. The question I had coming in was always going to be primarily about where the balance would be and the answer is that it's a lot closer to the opener than what comes next, meaning that I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. Then again, I've only really experienced Animals as Leaders through odd tracks on YouTube, rather than complete albums. I'd be lying if I wasn't surprised by some of what I heard here.

For instance, there's a large amount of keyboard work here that I didn't expect, presumably from Misha Mansoor, who isn't an official band member but who produced this album, played bass and arranged the synth work. He's a djent pioneer himself, best known for founding Periphery. Plenty of songs here, especially during the middle of the album, felt like seventies jazz fusion because of that, merely with occasional more contemporary bass overdubs, rather like what Frank Zappa did on Rubber Shirt, taking an old guitar solo and having a new bass part played over it.

Gestaltzerfall is where that approach largely comes in, sounding somewhere between Colosseum II and Herbie Hancock. Asahi is a swirling piece of atmosphere, its noodling guitars over keyboard swells serving as an interlude where one doesn't seem to be needed. That's because the next song is The Problem of Other Minds, more jazz fusion but with the repetitive bass overlay that annoyed me by distracting me with banal simplicity away from all the admirable complexity going on in the background, which I felt ought to be the foreground. Micro Aggressions is more 21st century but in a similar vein, with the keyboards often leading the way and sections sounding like they were sped up artificially, returning us to Liquid Tension Experiment territory.

It's telling that I enjoyed this rather a lot, especially given that I'm not a hardcore fan of the band. It means that it's accessible to outsiders, even for music so progressive and often experimental. It doesn't feel remotely mainstream, not least because they're an entirely instrumental band, but I can't fail to acknowledge how important and influential they've become. This is jazz as much as it's metal and very possibly more so. There's funk here too and I'm also well aware that most of what I hear as bass is really an eight-string guitar. The bottom line is that they sound like themselves and comparisons aren't easy to conjure up. After all, Parrhesia means "freedom of speech" and that's something they're definitely exploring musically. I should listen to them more.

Travis Moreno - Umbral (2021)

Country: Chile
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I have no idea who Travis Moreno is but, even though they're named for him, he is not part of this psychedelic rock band from Chile. Google mostly gives me results for this band which I'm guessing isn't named for the high school student here in Arizona who's good at basketball or, I assume, the sales consultant who works for Buerkle Motor Co Inc in Hugo, Minnesota. I guess it'll have to stay a mystery, but that's somehow appropriate for a band who have so little interest in defining what they do within a single genre. Sure, this is psychedelic rock but that's certainly not all it is.

The opener, Astrovela, is a pulsing, driving effort that brings the Ozric Tentacles to mind. It makes us think that the album will stay psychedelic above all and move into space rock in a very organic way. Of course, it doesn't because it has little interest in repeating itself. Tornasol Fuego kicks off so smooth jazz that it's almost lounge, though it's never entirely traditional. These musicians are always aware that there's a different note or chord to use instead of the obvious one and it keeps us very much on the hop. It's like Peter Gabriel-era Genesis interpreting Tony Bennett and it ends up truly wild, evolving from maybe my least favourite song to maybe my favourite section (except maybe the second half of La Piel de las Sombras).

By the time we get to Selva, it all becomes a blissful sort of organised chaos. It's jazz and prog and fusion. It leans heavily into the experimental, at once insanely tight and completely loose, and we start to think of "progressive" in a krautrock sense of "near impenetrable weirdness that we can't help but like without understanding why because we don't have a degree in musicology". It's this Travis Moreno that I appreciate the most, which is good because it's the most frequent mode that the band play in.

The opening couple of minutes of Selva are outrageous and fascinating, often sounding like a pair of songs playing at once rather than just one. The rest of the song isn't far behind and others are quick to follow in this vein. Fantasma often plays in exactly the same ball park and Copia Feliz does much of the same thing but with even more frantic urgency. When Travis Moreno decide to turn up their complexity levels, they're impossible to ignore. The opening of Tornasol Fuego excepted, this is never going to be background music, whether you dig it or not.

Arguably the most progressive track here, and perhaps not uncoincidentally the best (though I've not given a shout out yet to the delightfully intricate Somnolencia), is the album closer, La Piel de las Sombras, a neatly evocative title that translates to The Skin of the Shadows. While it's clear to me that the band are seeing a very wide range of Latin music indeed as their bedrock, meaning a lot more than merely the various eras of Carlos Santana, this quite obviously delves the furthest into unusual instrumentation.

It has lots of room for that being a breath under nine minutes in length, but bass player Cristóbal Ulloa shifts onto sequencers, flute, ocarina, maracas, acoustic guitar and claves, along with some instruments I had to look up, like huiro and Peruvian cajón; drummer Jorge Rubio adds timpani, djembe and bottles to his repertoire; and guest musician Claudio Sánchez joins in on electric and acoustic guitars and cuica. The latter is a Brazilian friction drum; a huiro may be a guiro, a hollow gourd played with tines over notches; and cajón is a box drum often played with hands. As you can imagine, there are a lot of interesting rhythms on this song, even getting punky late on!

Travis Moreno call what they do "a harmonic/lyrical exploration", which sounds like a pretentious way to say vocal music but it's not unfair. They "pursue multiple escapes" from the "basis of rock", using "a strong connection and roots with the Latin American poetic universe." That sounds very pretentious too, but it really does describe what they do well. This is rock music that often isn't. It ought to work best for those listeners who miss the days of truly progressive rock, which polarised opinions and rewarded those with open minds and the willingness to listen to unusual music many times to figure out what it's doing.

And it's been a while since I heard something that challenging but ultimately rewarding, maybe a year because Neptunian Maximalism is the last band that rang that bell for me.

The John Irvine Band - The Machinery of the Heavens (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Many thanks to John Irvine, who kindly sent me his fourth album, The Machinery of the Heavens, for potential review. I believe he did so after reading my take on Solstice's Sia and that fits, because, like Solstice, Irvine could be categorised as prog rock, though, just as we can't talk about Solstice without bringing up folk rock, we can't talk about this without mentioning jazz. This is fundamentally a fusion album, in the tradition of Allan Holdsworth rather than, say, Brand X.

Irvine lives and works in Scotland, so it's not surprising to hear Scottish elements in the opener, Dark Skies. I think that's a keyboard rather than a guitar, but it's clearly trying to be a set of bagpipes. This is a bright and cheerful opener that doesn't seem to be doing anything wild, except that it ends oddly because Irvine's guitar seems to take up the rhythm in the form of a riff while the drums take the lead by embellishing over them. I like that.

If the album title and cover art don't suggest a futuristic feel, then ...and How Much for the Robot? is going to hammer that point home. Irvine plays everything but the drums here, those being the realm of Rich Kass, and that includes a lot of keyboards throughout, but this one features a more overt use of electronica than elsewhere, inserted as futuristic texture. There are times in this piece of music and in others like Lunar Fields where I wondered if Irvine was auditioning to score a science fiction film.

I drifted a bit through the next two songs, because they're more thoughtful pieces and they need our attention, but Gadzooks, as short as it is, running under eighty seconds, grabbed me back. It's a good interlude. Going back, Dangerous Notes may be the jazziest piece here, especially in its experimental midsection. Given that there are only two musicians involved here, it clearly wasn't improvised, but it feels rather like it was. Take It from the Edge feels a little closer to the Vai/Satch approach to a guitar instrumental, but it's jazzier and not as interested in a killer commercial melody to repeat.

I had the same problem after Gadzooks with Lunar Fields and Blast from the Past. Again, going back, I found that there's a lot going on with these, but I had to pay attention. Lunar Fields is a particularly evocative piece but so much so that my brain automatically assumed it was part of a soundtrack and I ought to be looking at something else. Blast from the Past is a delightful piece but it's inoffensive in its delights so it's easy for it to fade into the background. I plan on listening to this again in the dark to see how it plays without distractions.

There's no way that The Machinery of the Heavens will fade into any background. At fourteen minutes, the title track is easily the proggiest piece of music on this album, not least because of variety. Every song on this album finds what it's going to do and does it, whether it's a guitar piece or an electronic piece or whatever. This one has wider goals than just one single feel, though, bringing us a distinctive set of movements in different styles, as it grows and develops.

The first section, for instance, is jazz funk with a Herbie Hancock sound, hardly surprising given what's come before it, though the backing has controlled urgency taking over from the usual lively jazz. The second section shifts firmly into the territory of the electronic auteurs. Initially, it feels like a Tomita piece, before it grows into a mature Mike Oldfield feel, complete with tribal drums, eventually going back to Tomita and a shockingly introspective ending. If we've spent time inside boxes of circuitry and surfing the stellar clouds here, we end drifting in space reflecting on everything we've heard.

I've come to visualise a sliding scale for what Tom Waits calls "really interesting things to be doing with the air". At one end is post-rock, conjuring up soundscapes for us to interpret visually. At the other is jazz, with its constant efforts to define what music is and can be. In between is prog, moving from one end to the other as it deems fit. This album sits in most of the way towards jazz, as I felt these songs a lot more than I saw them. I felt the neon rush of riding a fast motorcycle through Neo-Tokyo in ...and How Much for the Robot? and the movement of giant space structures around me in The Machinery of the Heavens. If I saw anything, it was the blackness of space and I closed my eyes to it and listened.

Now I should go back to find out how Irvine got to this point. I'm intrigued in the way his covers are themed different colours: Wait & See was red, Next Stop blue and Metaphysical Attractions yellow. Is this purple album a mixture of what he a couple on two of those previous albums, taking the stability of blue and the energy of red to create something ambitious? Inquring minds want to know.

Qüassi - Mareas (2020)

Country: Argentina
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

One of the standard things we critics often do when reviewing music is to compare a particular album to other bands that you're likely to have heard, in order to give you a reference point. I'd do that here but I have no idea who to bring up.

Sure, there's a lot of prog rock here, but Qüassi, from Mendoza, Argentina, don't sound at all like Yes, Genesis or King Crimson, let alone anyone newer. They play entirely instrumental music, but that's not enough to suddenly bring ELP into the mix. There's a lot of psychedelic rock here, so maybe the comparisons should be to bands who mix those two genres, but I didn't hear early Floyd, Hawkwind or even someone like Ozric Tentacles. Perhaps the latter are the closest, but Qüassi aren't as organic and they're nowhere near as reliant on electronics, even on their spacier pieces.

There's a huge amount of jazz here as well, enough of it that I could understand them being described as a jazz band with firm prog influences rather than vice versa, though I don't get the impression that all these songs are improvised jams in the studio, though some songs are looser than others, such as Solitario Spider and Marea. I'm not suggesting that these pieces were planned out meticulously, but I tend to expect pure improvisation to have that recognisable jazz drum sound and the drums here are very confident in where things are going. I often wish I had a deeper grounding in jazz fusion and this is another of those times; I'm sure there are comparisons to be made there.

What I can say is that there are other sounds here, trawled in as needed for a particular song. Vortice could be defined as jazz prog but it's really a sliding scale that veers from lounge music at one end to space rock at the other. Trashilvania has a krautrock feel to it, combining drones and pulses, some of them harsh, into something musical, only for what I presume is a vibraphone to suddenly infuse it all with warmth. That makes for another wild contrast, something that Qüassi handle very well.

Solitario Spider, surely my favourite track here, is led by a melodious guitar that I'd expect to hear in Caribbean music. It repeatedly throws out a melody for the rest of the band to respond to in an array of different ways, which vary wildly. That guitar returns on Matematicofrustrado, which I expected to be a lot more complex given the name (it translates to Frustrated Mathematician), but is still one of my highlights here.

Amapolas is an exotic track, with Egyptian and Indian sounds in the hand drums (and sitar?), though it also finds recognisable melodies. Was that Ravel's Bolero? I think it was. It's an oddity that, given the presence of lounge here, this isn't remotely exotica, merely elements of world music brought into the jazz prog.

I have no idea who any of the musicians are in this band, though their Facebook band photo suggests that there are four of them. While they're all clearly capable, I want to praise whoever's playing vibes because they're a constant gamechanger on an already interesting album. The drummer also deserves special mention for ramping into an outrageous solo on Reverbi, almost without the rest of the band noticing, which is surreal. I like the bass here a lot too, especially on songs like Solitario Spider, when it prowls carefully but confidently.

I liked this a lot, even if it's not remotely easy to pigeonhole. If you like the idea of prog jazz psych, I doubt I need to say much more. If you have no idea what that might sound like and the cover art isn't enough to give you an idea, I recommend checking this album out to see.

Djabe - The Magic Stag (2020)

Country: Hungary
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I hadn't heard of Djabe until now, but they've built quite an international audience for a difficult to categorise Hungarian band through their collaborations with Steve Hackett, the guitarist of Genesis (and much more) fame. They've been around since 1995, but it seems that he began working with them in 2002 when their founder, Attila Égerházi, took on the distribution of Hackett's albums in Hungary. Since then, they've recorded and performed together frequently, Hackett describing them as "the best band I have ever played with." He co-wrote some of this album and plays on seven of its eleven songs, plus the bonus track on the vinyl edition.

Djabe means "freedom", not in Hungarian but in an African language family called Akan, which goes a long way to highlight how this band are rooted in world music. The first sounds you'll hear, during an instrumental intro called Beginning of Legends, are drums, flutes, piano and a Hungarian lute called a cobza. It's exotic and evocative and it sets a fantastic scene. So, they play folk music, or for those of us not in Hungary, world music.

The title track plays in that territory too, but it's clearly prog rock except when it's jazz. Djabe play an enticing prog/jazz fusion, though it's hardly aggressive. Their jazz style is smooth but never less than interesting because of the different sounds it trawls in. The Magic Stag features complex drums and a startling bass, along with a laid back vocal from drummer Péter Kaszás, who also sings on Down by the Lakeside. That one's less progressive and less jazzy, but it's still both with that smooth voice lending a real mainstream touch. Take the Alan Parsons Project and yacht rock them up.

In between those two vocal pieces, Power of Wings is even more immersed in jazz; it's an instrumental that starts with sitar and saxophone, which might seem like an odd mix, and gradually passes themes on to more traditional instruments, like Attila Égerházi's guitar. Far Away is jazzy too, reminding of a Yes instrumental, complete with prominent bass runs, but moved back towards smooth territory with a prominent trumpet. Both of these pieces move themes around the instruments, swapping solos and improvisations, then passing the torch on again. I dig the instrumental fusion much more than those songs with voice, not entirely because of the outstanding basswork of Tamá Barabás.

So, Djabe are a world/folk/prog/jazz group, who write complex songs, most but not all instrumentals, even when telling a story. They're all reasonably but not excessively long. Down by the Lakeside is one of the short songs here, at a blink over five minutes. Power of Wings sits at the short end of the range that Djabe are clearly comfortable with, just shy over seven minutes. Of the ten songs on offer, half of them fit within a minute above that baseline. Only the closer, Uncertain Time, goes further, nudging a little past nine minutes. Seven is clearly the sweet spot for improvisational music to breathe.

Thus far, Hackett has only played on the title track, which he also co-wrote with his wife Jo, but that's misleading because he plays guitar on Unseen Sense, the fifth full track, and contributes to every one of the pieces still to come. I can see why he enjoys playing with Djabe, because he fits in here without remotely standing out, as you might expect an aging British prog rocker to do when teaming up with a Hungarian jazz band. It all feels completely natural, as if his guitar is an established component in a time-honoured Djabe sound.

I don't know if the proggier pieces are because of his influence or because that's always been part of a Djabe sound that dates back a quarter of a century. There's prog in most of these pieces, even if jazz is a little more overt. Then again, this is arguably less jazzy than the current Focus album and how does that usually get categorised? Frankly, I was looking for more prog than I got, and more world too, but the jazz is often proggy, even if Áron Koós-Hutás's trumpet, which is a delightful addition to sweeter pieces like Two Little Snowflakes, always brings it back to the jazz side of things.

The most world we get is Rising Horizon, which is built on keyboards and vocals by Égerházi's father, who recorded them at a folklore festival in Transsylvania in the seventies. It's very world music, albeit backed by very western keyboard textures, for a few minutes before it reverts to the laid back jazz of the previous few pieces. The most prog we get is Uncertain Time, that nine minute closer, anchored by Hackett's acoustic guitar but with that trumpet soaring above. And, in many ways, this starts well and just keeps getting better. I'm certainly going to listen to this a lot more.

Métronhomme - Tutto il tempo del mondo – 1.òikos (2020)

Country: Italy
Style: Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Sep 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives | YouTube

This EP, from an Italian band who refuse to be categorised in a single genre, was sent to me for review and it grew on me so quickly that it was a gimme to start out a week with. Métronhomme are from Macerata and I've listed them as fusion because they clearly cross over the boundary between prog rock and jazz at will and in either direction, but they don't remotely sound like, say, Brand X and there are a host of other sounds here. This trawls in new wave, new age, ambient, world, post-rock, seventies electronic rock and a whole host of experimental genres, not least glitch.

In fact, the opening track is deceptively nice. It's called Quarantine, because the entire seven track EP was recorded during quarantine for COVID-19, which hit Italy early and hard. The last event I attended in person was Wild Wild West Steampunk Convention on the first weekend of March and the featured musical guests, Poison Garden, were Italian.; many of us were worried about whether they'd be able to get home safely. This EP was recorded in March and April, with each of the four musicians in their own homes with whatever instruments were to hand, collaborating entirely via the internet. That's why all the drums are handheld.

Maybe the early quarantine in Italy enabled Métronhomme to adjust to this new way of life quickly. I enjoyed Quarantine, but it's so smooth that it slips right past us in as polite and inoffensive a way as possible. Every time I listen to it, I enjoy it but then it vanishes from me again, as if it's a soundtrack contribution whose only purpose is to accompany. Certainly, Métronhomme have composed that sort of material, for film, theatre, gaming, advertising, you name it.

However, no track on this EP is a mirror of any other. Come la Neve is most obviously different for the inclusion of vocals, which are calm and laid back, but there's a real melancholy in this song that surely speaks to the conditions under which it was written and recorded. The band say that this isn't meant to "speak directly of the lockdown" but that "it captures all the emotional charge" that the band felt "in such a peculiar moment." That rings especially true on Come la Neve, even if I don't understand a word of the vocals.

It's Di una Moneta che Cade where the EP really spoke to me. The opening pair of songs find their groove and wrap up quickly and, relatively to the rest of the album, simply. This third has a very different approach, being wildly progressive, full of dynamic play and constantly innovative. It's jazz to start with, soft but with an experimental edge, almost acoustic space rock. There's no real beat and the synths are extremely playful. Instruments join and leave, like this is a sort of ongoing conversation rather than a song, and those instruments aren't all traditional. Who's credited on fishtank? Then, a couple of minutes in, at the point the earlier songs were ending, this leaps into more traditional territory, with a strong sense of melody but a giallo soundtrack feel. It ends up rather like Brian Eno collaborating with Goblin.

And this experimentation keeps on building. The lively Supermarket somehow reminds of both Gary Numan and Coil, hardly a pair of influences I'd expect to cite at the same time. Arkè is like a Suzanne Ciani solo piano piece but decorated with electronic graffiti and samples. Il Rumore del Mare is 8-bit chiptune underneath alternative rock. This is the other song with vocals, but they're entirely unlike Come la Neve; I presume Tommaso Lambertucci sang one and Marco Poloni the other. La Città di K. is the purest instrumental jazz/prog, with Spanish sounding guitar, a mellow bass, haunting melodies on synths and perhaps wind instruments, and the latest in an impressive line of what are credited as "assorted percussions". Special kudos to Andrea Lazzaro Ghezzi for finding such fantastic ways to deal with not having all the drum equipment he's used to.

While the early two minute songs felt short, more fragments than completed pieces, the EP as a whole feels fleshed out and vibrant, yet it still wraps up in under twenty-five minutes. It's definitive proof that, while COVID-19 continues to ravage the globe and lockdowns, quarantines and restrictions can't yet be confined to the past, that doesn't have to quench the creative forces. I'd have enjoyed this EP in any circumstances but, knowing that it was written and recorded with no band member in the same place as any other, it shows the way for others who might be feeling stifled in these trying times. And, if that wasn't obvious enough, this is part one of a release that will be completed in traditional style when this crisis is over.

Chris Poland - Resistance (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

If you only know the name of Chris Poland from old Megadeth albums, this may come as quite the surprise, not least when rapper Rhymefest starts to do his thing on opener, Battle Bots. No, this isn't a rap album, it's a solo guitar album and Poland works through a heck of a lot of styles over a dozen songs, most of them entirely instrumental. And no, it's not remotely like his first solo album, Return to Metalopolis, either, because that was shred. This is a fusion album at heart, even if it gets heavy at points.

If you're an older school rock fan with at least a few Jeff Beck albums in your collection, you'll immediately see a similarity. For all that a couple of songs do have vocals on them, this isn't about writing songs. It's about exploring what the guitar can do within a framework that non-guitarists can appreciate too. And, for the most part it works, because the guitar can do a heck of a lot and Poland has fun underlining that here.

I didn't know until reading up on him that he used to play jazz fusion with drummer Gar Samuelson even before the pair of them joined Megadeth. That he went back to it after Megadeth and a brief stint on bass in the Circle Jerks shouldn't be too surprising. He's recorded a bunch of albums with OHM and a joint project between OHM and Umphrey's McGee called OHMphrey.

After that fascinating opener, Poland gets heavy for a little while with The Kid and I Have No Idea, jazz fusion numbers with a lot of bass and a soaring guitar. He gets older school later with Sunday, the sort of accessible track that Tommy Vance would have spoken over in between blocks on The Friday Rock Show. The album wraps with a couple of jazzier songs, Maiden Voyage and Song for Brad, that are more for the die hards.

My favourite tracks ably serve to highlight the variety and versatility that is on offer here. Moonchild kicks off quiet and melodic, then, as the drums stay slow, Poland's guitar gets all bluesy and wild like a hair metal guitar solo. If it goes with half a dozen notes where one would usually do the job, Django flips that around and aims for a sparse but exquisitely beautiful Roy Buchanan approach. It's delicate and

And, hey, if you haven't heard of Roy Buchanan before, go and check out any version you can find on YouTube of The Messiah Will Come Again. I'm happy to be your introduction! Guitar playing isn't just about notes and how fast you can play them, it's about tone and emotion and dynamics and finding magical sounds that have never been played before that people will still be talking about decades on from your performance. I'm not saying that Poland nabs any of them here but he's certainly looking and Django is the piece in which he looks the most.

I'd also suggest that Django is the song where the backing musicians get the most to do beyond just supporting whatever Poland's doing. Billy Dickens is the bassist on everything else, but it's Kevin Woods Guin on this one, with co-producer Jim Gifford on drums and, I believe, David Taylor on the second guitar. It's easy to get lost in Poland's performance but kudos to the rest of the band on this one too.

As I mentioned earlier, if you like Jeff Beck's solo albums, you should like this too. The opener notwithstanding, it's not either as ambitious or as experimental as what Beck's done lately, but it ought to play well with his older albums. If you've never heard solo Jeff Beck and have no idea what jazz fusion is, I would suggest that this is as good a place as any to start.