Evraak - Evraak I (2022)

Country: Japan
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Nov 2022
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something interesting that was submitted to me from Japan. Evraak are a prog rock band, for the sake of placing them into a single bucket, but they're progressive from a sixties mindset of taking a bunch of musicians with completely different backgrounds and throwing them together in a melting pot of sonic ingredients. The resulting sound is variable but fascinating, as indeed it was when the Beatles went to India, Robert Plant met Alison Krauss or Frank Zappa sent out a batch of invites to one of his in-house salons.

There are six musicians here and that line-up has been consistent since their founding as recently as 2018. According to their biography, guitarist Hayawo Kanno and bassist Koji Kawashima are of a prog rock mindset, so I presume they're the starting point for this sound, though their influences are a mixture of English and Italian prog bands. Drummer Takeshi Yoshida is a Bill Bruford fan, so it's not surprising to hear a lot of King Crimson here, albeit without a lot of Yes. Miki Hasegawa is a keyboardist with a musical theatre background and Tengoku Imagawa is a jazz saxophonist. That makes for a fascinating mix, with vocalist Marina Seo skewing the band in a number of directions, according to her mood. She can be soft and traditional, but she can be overt and experimental.

What's most surprising is how heavy this starts out. The first thing we hear as Saethi begins is the sound of tortured guitar feedback and a lound and very deliberate beat. If we're not expecting it, and I wasn't from a prog rock album, it can shock us. It feels loud, even if we turn down the volume, especially as the second half kicks in vicious and angry, reminding us a lot more of Swans than King Crimson. Sure, Marina Seo delivers clean and clear vocals, Imagawa joins in with a smooth sax and it calms down a lot in the midsection, but it's an anomalous opener for a good chunk of its running time. But hey, it certainly has us pay attention!

While the band claim that Sacrifice is their signature piece, it's Stigma that stood out the most for me and that's where the album finds its feet. All these songs are long—the shortest takes up seven minutes—but this is the longest at almost thirteen. It's fascinating from the beginning, a deceptively simple groove giving way to a jagged King Crimson-esque workout. It's simultaneously jazzy and carefully constructed, a combination which always perks my ears up, and it covers a heck of a lot of ground. Parts of it are pure prog, technical and complex, while other parts are smooth and accessible. It grabbed me late in the first half when it juggled elegant middle-eastern themes with an ebullient squealing sax. It's quite the journey, especially during its second half, which keeps on getting better.

While that's the longest song here, I enjoyed the shortest two as well. Asylum Piece starts out as a strange ambient song with noodling piano but then a lively riff launches at us on what I presume are keyboards but which feel like bagpipes or accordion. This piece feels like world music hurled at jazzy prog rock, especially early and late, with a soft but confident vocal from Seo in between.

The other is Cure, which runs a minute longer at eight and a breath and seems the most obviously King Crimson influenced piece, from the opening riff which reminded me of 21st Century Schizoid Man—Sacrifice has some more of that. Seo was almost post-punk one song earlier on Into the New World but she's more traditional here in another song that expands musically whenever she gets involved. Again, the second half is my time, when it goes urgently exploring through the dark, to discover Seo in experimental mode.

Half of the six tracks here were previously made available on an EP, Cure among them, but Stigma is one of the new trio which debut here. That tells me that they were good two years ago when the band was new but they're putting out excellent new material too. Now, when can we expect Evraak II?

Colosseum - Restoration (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Jazz/Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Apr 2022
Sites: Facebook | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

Here's another band I remember from back in the day who have surprised me not only with a new release but with the fact that they're still together. Sure, they weren't for quite a while, as this is their fourth incarnation, but they weren't gone for anywhere near as long as I thought. They were a pioneering jazz rock band on their first go around, from 1969 to 1971, and a similarly pioneering jazz fusion band during their second shot, as Colosseum II from 1975 to 1978, with Gary Moore and Don Airey in their roster. And I thought that was it, but apparently not so.

The original line-up at the time of their split in 1971, including such luminaries as Dave Greenslade and Chris Farlowe, got back together in 1994 and stayed that way for a couple of decades, knocking out a couple of albums to add to the three from each previous period. They split up in 2015 but got back together in 2020 just in time for the pandemic. Greenslade didn't return and neither did Jon Hiseman, who had died in 2018 (Dick Heckstall-Smith had also died in 2004), but Farlowe did and so did long term members Dave Clempson and Mark Clarke, who collectively cover vocals, guitar and bass.

I remember Colosseum II more than Colosseum, but I remember them sounding more like heavier pieces here, albeit with the prominent soloing of Dick Heckstall-Smith's saxophone. By "heavier", I mean heavier from the perspective of the start of heavy music, in 1969 when Colosseum were the first band to see an album released on the Vertigo label, ahead of Black Sabbath. They played jazz rock so the songs were complex and the technical skill level needed to play them was high, but they drove songs hard back then, just like they do songs like I'll Show You Mine and Hesitation here, the former especially reminding of Cream and the way the latter moving into sax typical Colosseum.

And, with that said, it's the lighter stuff that stands out the most for me here. I like those heavier pieces, but Hesitation is more notable when moves into sax solo and wailing backing vocal, as if it could have been on The Dark Side of the Moon. That sax, played nowadays by Kim Nishikawara, is a constant highlight, often elevating songs. If Only Dreams Were Like This is a good one anyway, but the laid back sax makes it better. The bluesy Home by Dawn is another highlight, but the excellent sax solos make it better still. It doesn't do as much on the soulful blues called Need Somebody, but it helps anyway, as does the organ of Nick Steed, another new fish who joined in 2020. Tonight has an impressive balance, especially in its bookends, between sax, organ and Dave Clempson's guitar.

The highlight on Need Somebody is Chris Farlowe, demonstrating yet again that age doesn't make much difference when you have a stunning voice. Farlowe's been around for ever, as epitomised by the fact that he had a UK number one single in 1966, but he sounds great here at 81 years old. He isn't the only vocalist here, but he's the only dedicated vocalist, so that's him at the front just as it was for a couple of years half a century ago. What's perhaps most impressive is that he's always a highlight even when somehow turning it down a notch on songs like Tonight to not steal the show.

Instead, this feels like a group really finding these grooves together rather than a large collection of highly experienced stars swapping moments in the spotlight. Half the band were in the band in its heyday in 1970, if not 1969, while the other half only joined this most recent incarnation in 2020. They're veterans anyway, even if they ony have a mere three decades of professional work behind them, like Nishikawara and Steed, who are presumably here because they've toured and recorded with Farlowe. That leaves drummer Malcolm Mortimore, who's OG and played with everyone from Mick Jagger to Tom Jones, via Gentle Giant. There's a lot of talent in this band and I'm very happy to say that the material they play doesn't let that promise down. Welcome back, Colosseum!

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.

Gunshee - Friends Through Here (2021)

Country: Romania
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Jul 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

I don't know who's in Gunshee, an instrumental progressive rock band from Bucharest, the capital of Romania, but photos online suggest that they're a trio and it doesn't sound to me like any of them is new to the business. While this is clearly an intricate prog album played by musicians who are easily comfortable enough with their musical ability to experiment a great deal with what they can do with their instruments, especially whoever the particularly adventurous bass player is, this isn't pure prog by any means.

Even if the guitar tone is pretty clean, this isn't more than a stone's throw from a desert rock album, with more than a little psychedelia thrown into the mix. That's especially obvious in the echo effects in The Great Crippler I but it's there from the outset on Inward and Sayid. If you can imagine a stoner rock band trying not to be a stoner rock band, Gunshee may be pretty close to what you're conjuring up. Conversely, if you added copious amounts of fuzz and decreased the complexity of the songs quite severely, this wouldn't be light years away from an ambitious stoner rock band.

That isn't what makes this album rather odd though. Everything here is interesting at the very least, but the album as a whole is quite the patchwork quilt. Sayid follows Inward pretty consistently, but it all starts to change from there. Peaceful Indifference is an acoustic guitar piece that doesn't merely function as an interlude. The two parts of The Great Crippler are prog at its most intricate with quite the jazz influence. Then there's a live track that doesn't sound like a live track, until the audience get to make themselves heard after its done. And it wraps with what sounds like a brief live experiment that doesn't claim to be live. I'm still puzzled as to how this is all supposed to flow.

That's not to say that the songs aren't worthy. They're all fascinating, though that final piece is easily the most dispensable even if it would only shave a minute off the running time.

The best is surely The Great Crippler, though I couldn't elevate one part over the other even if I tossed a coin. I rather like Sayid too and Thomas highlights a real versatility to the band, starting out almost with a gothic vibe and reminding me of the Sisters of Mercy's song Ribbons. It soon underlines that it remains a prog piece though, moving more towards King Crimson in the midsection. It's an odd song that's led by its bass rather than its guitar and very effectively too, even with a wild guitar solo soon into its second half. The bass is notably prominent throughout this album, but it's totally in charge on this one.

And I can't dismiss Peaceful Indifference either, even if it primarily serves as an interlude between an opening pair of desert rock jams and the jazzy prog of The Great Crippler. It has one foot in folk music and the other in the ocean. The guitar here almost sounds like a ukelele and what we initially take as an acoustic interlude gradually becomes the whole piece.

I keep coming back to The Great Crippler though. I've listened to both parts a bunch of times to track what each of the instruments is doing and what I took away from it is how quintessential a prog piece this is. Each of these unknown musicians is doing their own technically impressive thing throughout, but somehow they still gel perfectly as a band as they do it. Whether you focus on the guitar, the bass or even the drums, you'll hear a fascinating piece of music with a different emphasis. And, as that's a little more overt on the first part, you can twist my arm and make me say that's the best thing here, but the second part isn't far behind it at all.

This is one for the adventurous prog fan, which I fully realise ought to be every prog fan but isn't. I'll still puzzle over why what appears to be a debut album was presented in this fashion, and I've docked a point for that, but I'm still eager to here more.

Perfect Storm - No Air (2021)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

If you're in Perfect Storm's native Holland, then their debut album came out a couple of weeks ago; if you're anywhere else, it technically doesn't come out until 19th March, but it's worth highlighting it now because it's a worthy release and I hope it does well. Perfect Storm play modern prog rock with a slight contemporary jazz edge, as if they're a combination of Porcupine Tree and Steely Dan. The line-up of six includes three vocalists, two dedicated and one who also provides the warm keyboards, so it isn't surprising that it's so accessible.

Those keyboards, courtesy of Ard Offers, tend to lead the songs in and help them develop. It's rare for him to not be obvious here, even when he's underpinning everyone else with texture. There are seven pieces of music here, none short but none notably long either; they all fall within a comfortable six to ten minute range where they can really breathe but can't develop into full-blown suites with multiple movements to build epic stories.

Maybe a few manage two movements. The Search is one of those and it ably demonstrates the sides of the band. The first is commercial, driven by the male voice of Adel Saflou and with a smooth solo from Gert-Jan Schurer. The second is just as accessible, but it's more adventurous, led by the female voice of Hiske Oosterwijk, and with an edgier, more brooding feel to it. I should add that both these voices are very appropriate for this music. Neither sounds like a solo artist lending a hand; they're two inherent facets to this band and the result would be very different if there was only one of them here.

With that said, I think I prefer Oosterwijk, because Saflou is a little too smooth for my tastes. "Living is easier," he sings on Hope and we can believe it. He sounds like everything is easy and effortless and he's never had to suffer through hard times. Oosterwijk doesn't sound like she's had a hard life but it hasn't always been easy, so there's more depth of feeling when she's singing. They work well together in the sense that they bring different things to the band that complement each other. They work less well together when they're both at the mike at the same time, as Saflou dominates almost every time.

Schurer can work either way. His solos early in The Search and late in Hope are wildly different, neatly highlighting his versatility. It feels a little odd talking up the vocals on a prog rock album, which may underline just how this moves towards smooth jazz and soft rock. Mind's Eye, for instance, is surely as close as this gets to Steely Dan, until it mixes it up in the midsection with Schurer getting jaunty and sassy and Oosterwijk adding some more edge. Oddly, it's often right after the band get really smooth that they decide to get really edgy.

There aren't any poor tracks here, let alone bad ones, so the conversation shifts to the highlights and the consistency. I think there's a lot of consistency, however much light/dark play goes on, because it's a very mature debut album. I believe everyone in the band performs with other Dutch bands, so this is about them learning how to combine their experience and ideas not starting from scratch.

As for highlights, Mind's Eye is one of the growers for me. The title track is the one that leapt out for me on a first listen, while The Search took two, one to experience it and a second to realise how much it was doing. Mind's Eye, on the other hand, has quite the arc between beginning and end and it gets better each time I hear it as I understand it more. The epic of the album is How It Ends, and it's a good song with some great instrumental passages, both hard and soft, which also happen to gift drummer Jesse Bosman and bass player David Klompmakers with moments of their own.

How It Ends is also how it ends, as it wraps up the album, leaving us wanting more but satisfied with what we were given. This isn't a perfect storm, but it's a pretty damn good one and I live in a desert. I wonder if finding this album is why the skies have opened over the last couple of days to refresh us. If so, thank you!

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.

Neptunian Maximalism - Éons (2020)

Country: Belgium
Style: Jazz Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Neptunian Maximalism only made two end of year lists that I'm looking at, at Pop Matters and Treble Zine, but they were high in both of them and they sounded so wild that I had to check them out (and a record label that they record for too—I, Voidhanger, named for a Darkthrone track—who release what they describe as "obscure, unique, and uncompromising visions from the metal underground.") That does fit this release, which is metal, I think, though it's jazz first and foremost.

It's a rather daunting release, a triple album of experimental music from Belgium running two hours and ten minutes and covers Bandcamp tags as wildly diverse as "dark ambient", "drone metal", "free jazz", "heavy psych", "stoner metal" and "tribal", among others. The band include two drummers and one saxophonist, with Guillaume Cazalet covering everything else: bass, guitar, sitar, flute, trumpet... whatever he can find, it seems. Its press claims that it's the "quintessential mystical and psychedelic journey of 2020." Even having already reviewed the Oranssi Pazuzu album, I'm not going to argue.

What I will say is that, as wild as this is, and it does indeed dip deep into free jazz, it felt surprisingly accessible to me. Tribal drumming and pixie-like saxophone render the first two pieces of music lively, engaging and shockingly organic. Sure, Lamasthu slows things down to paint a sonic picture of a trip through Hell itself, dark and eerie from the outset but all the more eerie as the layers peel away with us left in near silence, punctuated only by demonic voices. At least that's what I heard. Its full title is translated from the French to Lamasthu: Seeder of the Primordial Fungal Kingdom and Infanticide of Neogene Monkeys. And yes, there's definitely some Ummagumma weirdness here, but this is heavier and freer and jazzier.

These titles do offer clues as to what's going on, or at least to what we ought to be thinking about as they play. These opening songs comprise a six track cycle called To the Earth. The full title of part one is To the Earth: Daiitoku-Myōō no ōdaiko 大威徳明王 鼓童—L'Impact de Théia durant l’Éon Hadéen, which includes three languages and two scripts: English, Japanese and French. So let's figure out what all that means.

The "odaiko" is the largest drum in a taiko performance of Japanese drumming; this one belongs to Daiitoku Myōō, one of the five Great Light Kings of Esoteric Buddhism. Google Translate tells me the kanji translate from the Japanese to Yamantaka Kodo, but Yamantaka happens to be a Sanskrit name for Daiitoku Myōō. Kodo has a double meaning: both "children of the drum" and "heartbeat", which is the primal source of all rhythm. The French means "The Impact of Théia during the Hadean Aeon", referring to an ancient planet that may have collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, so creating our moon.

So we're delving into Japanese mythology and archeoastronomy. Nganga brings in African culture in primal times, the title belonging to a spiritual healer, and Lamasthu Mesopotamian, as she's the most terrible of all female demons. Ptah Sokar Osiris is an Egyptian composite funerary deity, while Enūma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth. Clearly, there's a lot of birth and death here. We're also running through billions of years: two supereons, at least five eons and mere periods like the Carboniferous. What are Neptunian Maximalism telling us in this grand sweep of history and mythology?

Well, I'm glad you asked! "By exploring the evolution of the human species," the band "question the future of the living on Earth, propitiating a feeling of acceptance for the conclusion of the so called 'anthropocene' era and preparing us for the incoming 'probocene' era, imagining our planet ruled by superior intelligent elephants after the end of humanity." So there you have it. I think I need notes. It's all ritual, but it's heavily researched, multi-cultural, multi-mythological ritual that's explored in fascinating style.

To the Moon encompasses the next six pieces of music, with three of those being about Vajrabhairava, a third name for Daiitoku Myōō/Yamantaka, this time the name used in Tibetan Buddism. The reason why Yamantaka is important is because he destroyed Yama, the God of Death, thus stopping samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, which is the goal of the journey towards enlightenment. I guess if you're going to go with a concept, it's worth making it a deep one. I couldn't name one deeper than this.

Oddly for such a desirable goal, Zâr is doomier in nature with a lot more cymbals in play, aspects that continue throughout this suite. While much of this feels theatrical, the initial part of Vajrabhairava, The Summoning, is especially evocative. It seems like it should be performed live while demons roam the stage, speaking to us in dark voices. The final part, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, is thoroughly theatrical as well, initially an assault of percussion, mostly sticks banging against each other rather than drums. It feels like there's an associated dance that I'm missing. Even when it calms down, it still feels like it's a soundtrack to something visual.

The third part of Vajrabhairava is the one that spoke to me, The Great Wars of Quaternary Era Against Ego. It's chaotic free jazz for a while, until the emergency of a driving trance-inducing riff that sounds like it's played on bass and emphasised by percussion. It persists but so does the chaos, like we're here to witness the age-old battle between chaos and order in microcosm.

That leaves four pieces of music to constitute To the Sun and they're generally longer and much more patient. With the sole exception of the previous track, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, Eôs, the first part of To the Sun, is twice as long as anything thus far, at eighteen and a half minutes. It takes its time, pitting that exploratory saxophone of Jean Jacques Duerinckx against a set of dark textures, sans any percussion, and, when it evolves, it does so into a commanding presence, as if this were an avant-garde opera. The latter part of the song gets all trippy and psychedelic.

I'm not as fond of To the Sun generally. It doesn't seem to have as much purpose to it, Heliozoapolis a fifteen minute jumble of hesitant jazz drumming, sitar noodling and ambient spirituality. It does end well for me, but it's easily my least favourite piece of music here and the rest of To the Sun pales when compared to To the Moon and especially To the Earth.

But hey, given how generous this release is, it's still at least a full album more originality than most albums can boast and I'm comfortable giving it a solid 8/10. The best music here is easily worthy of the highest ratings I give out. Now, I need to come back down to Earth for whatever I can follow this with.

Enslaved - Utgard (2020)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Black/Viking Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 2 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I'd think that it's fair to say that Enslaved have become one of the most interesting black metal bands nowadays, but they've moved so far away from the genre that they're gradually losing a lot of the old school fanbase they've been building since 1991. This is their fifteenth album and there's not a heck of a lot of black metal left in their sound, though it's still there if you pay attention.

Jettegrytta starts out in black metal style, with fast guitars, faster drums and the recognisable harsh vocal of Grutle Kjellson. Homebound does the same, as does Flight of Thought and Memory, but each of these songs drops away from black metal at some point into some flavour of prog rock. Maybe the key point to make here is that, even in black metal assault mode, this feels a little subdued. It's not a traditional wall of sound to bludgeon us, it's a filter of the black metal style that's compatible with a proggier and often jazzier section to come. The opening of Jettegryta may be about as traditional as this gets, but I kept turning up the volume and it still refused to punch me in the throat.

Whether you're going to dig this album or not may depend on your reaction to that last paragraph. I like raw and bleak black metal on occasion, because it seems to me the most extreme metal out there. However, I'm nowhere near die hard enough to restrict my listening to that end of a subgenre. I really like bands like Enslaved who take extreme metal and mix it with non-extreme genres to make it learn new tricks. There's a heck of a lot going on in this album and that's one of the reasons that I like it so much. Storms of Utgard is Celtic Frost, Mekong Delta and maybe Radiohead.

Fires in the Dark opens the album with Viking chants and atmospheric guitar. Somehow a riff arrives and Kjellson's harsh vocals duet clean equivalents from Håkon Vinje and Iver Sandøy. A later riff feels almost Middle Eastern. Jettegryta, after the hard black metal, drops into avant jazz. Sequence starts out commercially with a bouncy riff in the vein of Satyricon's K.I.N.G., but finds its way into complex jazz, before dropping into an oasis of calm generated by an acoustic guitar and supporting keyboards. It ends up reminding more of Voivod, or maybe Voivod doing Pink Floyd. The most Floydian song has the honour of wrapping up the album and that's Distant Seasons.

It's the longer songs like Sequence and Flights of Thought and Memory that best highlight what this band is doing nowadays though. The latter starts out black metal again, but drops into prog and then ratchets up to a serious pace. Kjellson's vocals here are black, but the music behind them almost feels like speed metal for a moment. The melodious sounds in the later jazzy section could almost be called lounge, except there are busy drums and a dramatic voice overlaying them. These are deep songs and their various components are woven together tightly. They're all part of a natural whole, not there to jar us with wild contrasts like a band like Mr. Bungle.

What I should point out here is that these are the natural next steps in a journey they've been taking for some time. They shouldn't seem surprising in any way. This is what Enslaved have been becoming for a decade and a half and they're getting better and better at it each time out. What's surprising to me is the double shot of Utgarðr and Urjotun. The former is really an interlude right at the heart of the album, all swirling keyboards and spoken word. The latter could easily be called post punk with a firm embrace of electronica. It's like Joy Division at their fastest and perkiest. That I wasn't expecting but it's good stuff.

Where that leaves us is that you may hate this for the same reasons I love it. If you're looking for an old school black metal album from one of the pioneers of the genre, this sure ain't it. If you're open to an evolving sound almost thirty years in the making, however, then this may be right up your alley.

Kraan - Sandglass (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

I hadn't previously heard of Kraan, but they've been a band for longer than I've been alive and I turn fifty in three months. They've also kept a pretty consistent line-up over the years, with guitarist Peter Wolbrandt and bassist Helmut Hattler being founder members who never left the band. Drummer Jan Fride did, for a few years between 1978 and 1984, but otherwise he's been there throughout too. That's the core band, though there are a few guests here and there too.

They apparently started out playing krautrock, but gradually morphed into a jazz fusion take on prog rock. This is their fourteenth studio album, arriving a full decade after its predecessor, Diamonds, and it's a thoroughly enjoyable one, even if it feels a little safe. There are no extended jams here, though many of the thirteen songs on offer are instrumentals and some run neatly into others. Gleis 10 into Pick Peat means eleven minutes without any voice, and those are the longest two songs here.

The most experimental they get is perhaps on the title track that opens the album but, oddly, it's the most commercial they get too. The vocals are distorted and pleasantly robotic, while the music plays along with that, melodic and melodious but with effects and colours and distortions here and there. There are hints at world music, only hints but enough to bring solo Peter Gabriel to mind. It isn't his voice in the slightest, but it sounds like something he might do as a single.

I really like Sandglass and Funky Blue too, which follows it. This is a mostly instrumental piece, with a prog guitar over what often feels like a reggae beat. It's part Alan Parsons Project and part the Police, but this is jazzier and perkier and a little less electronic. None of these songs are long, with only one reaching the five minute mark, but this is one that I wished was a lot longer; it's one of a trio of songs to wrap up in under three minutes.

My other highlight right now is Hallo Kante, which again mixes up Alan Parsons but this time with an Eric Clapton guitar at his most mellow and melodies straight out of sixties psychedelic pop. There are a lot of pieces of music here that could be seen as highlights, but I believe it's an album to grow with. The title track may be a catchy single and a few other songs get there at points, but this isn't the sort of album that stamps itself on your brain. It floats around you and you gradually focus in on the bits that speak to you.

Everything here is upbeat, even a song like Solitude, whose very title suggests it won't be but a guest tambourinist, Juergen Schlachter, has other ideas. Almost everything is smooth too, so letting it just wash over you will improve your mood without you realising it. Wolbrandt's guitar especially avoids abrasion; it's easy to just dismiss him as easy listening until we realise what he's actually doing. That one note smooth guitar is actually doing a heck of a lot of things: funky things, soulful things, bluesy things, jazzy things. It just takes a while to reconcile what he does on Solitude or Funky Blue with the Hippie Jam that closes out the album.

And the album follows his lead. It's immediately enjoyable, but it takes time for everything to sink in and realise just how much is here behind such a bright and inoffensive veneer.

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.

Kanaan - Double Sun (2020)

Country: Norway
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Prog Archives

Kanaan are a relatively new band, formed in Norway in 2018, but they're not unafraid to put out material. They issued their first album, Windborne, that year, and have followed up with another two this year, Odense Sessions and Double Sun. I haven't heard the former yet but I've enjoyed this one, which is rather like Pink Floyd had known what stoner rock was in 1975 and kept a closer focus on their spacier explorations of the past.

A combination of A Saucerful of Secrets and Wish You Were Here is a decent place to start and that's Worlds Together. It has the calm pace of Wish You Were Here but a psychedelic layer of je ne sais quoi that takes the result somewhere else entirely. The band are more than able to recreate that sparse beauty but they clearly decided that they wanted to play music that isn't as clean or as nice. The guitar here starts soft and acoustic and ends up like a building site tool.

Not clean or nice is where we really go once the couple of minutes of Worlds Together wrap and we move into Mountain. Ingvald André's drums keep a simple beat as Eskild Myrvoll bass explores an echo chamber like it's on the prowl for a fight and Ask Vatn Strøm's guitar solos around oblivion. After five or six minutes of sheer emphasis, it goes all introspective like it was aiming for the stratosphere and finally burst through into space, where we float in contemplation and under the influence of acid.

The sound is heavier here and could easily be described as stoner rock, but I'd stay with psychedelic rock instead. These are instrumental trips rather than songs and they're less interested in big fuzzy riffs and more in where they can go during these jams. Mountain is appropriately named because it's a behemoth of a jam but it's a jam nonetheless. And, as we move into a more grounded Oresund, we realise that they're playing with jazz here as much as rock. You can always tell from the drums at the start of a track.

The jazz background of these musicians, who apparently met at the Norwegian Academy of Music, is most obvious early in Oresund but it's there throughout the album if we pay attention, even when André finds some ruthless rhythms. The way Oresund builds is just as complex as the first half of Mountain was simple. Worlds Apart finds that complexity from moment one, a jazz eruption of a piece of music that bursts into activity like a new star, only to burn itself out in three minutes, like a celestial herald tasked with announcing the arrival of the title tracks.

There are two of them, almost appropriately given the title. Double Sun I is as calm as Worlds Apart is frantic, at least until the guitar gets heavy in the second half. Double Sun II is another exercise in escalation, throwing a basic idea out there as a riff then continuing to build it for eight minutes until it's far from basic. While it isn't the most ambitious piece of music on this album, I think it's my favourite.

I'd love to be able to explain the sound to you better, but Kanaan do a good job of escaping their influences for the most part. There's certainly a lot of Pink Floyd here, from way back in their Set the Controls era, but there's also a lot of Hawkwind too, not just in the spacey sound effects but also in the sheer drive of Double Sun II, which wouldn't seem out of place on Space Ritual alongside songs like Brainstorm, even if it has no words or bridges. Take those influences and jazz them up and you'll have an idea of where the band are playing in the stratosphere.

I liked this a lot and it got better on repeat listens. Now I need to track down Odense Sessions, which the band released a couple of months earlier in February. It features only four songs, all of them long, and adds the guest guitar of Jonas Munk.

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.

Lindbloom - Lady Opium (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Jazz Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Apparently I just can't keep away from Swedish bands at the moment! Here's one more that sounds nothing like any of the others. Lindbloom are named for guitar player Magnus Lindbloom who leads this jazz rock outfit and he's an accomplished musician indeed.

Then again, like any viable jazz band, so are the rest of the band, who have played for people as varied as Frank Zappa, Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Joe Lynn Turner. While Lindbloom's guitar is always the centrepiece, the other band members get plenty of opportunities here. The title track kicks off with a twenty second drum solo from Morgan Ågren and Approximation of Bliss starts out like a Jon Lord solo album with some glorious heavy seventies-style organ from Samuel Olsson.

There's a lot going on here, as you might expect for a jazz rock band. The album could be divided up into heavier and softer tracks or into vocal ones and instrumentals, but it's really not that easy. There's a lot going on in each track!

For instance, the title track may kick off with drums but, when the rest of the band join in, we get all funky. The solos remind of Frank Zappa but it all wraps up with a keyboard run that's more reminiscent of Focus. And sure, Approximation of Bliss starts out with keyboards, but a crunchy riff shows up as if this feels like being metal rather than just rock. Instead it goes funky again with wild vocals that could be Zappa-influenced but might be a little more Primus. And it gets heavy towards the end with a neatly liquid pyschedelic guitar spilling all over it. Psychedelic, man!

My True Love is an instrumental that's surely as soft as the earlier tracks weren't but the softness of the overlay, mostly courtesy of the keyboards, contrasts wonderfully with the frantic bass and drums. Lindbloom's guitar is happy to move back and forth from soft to frantic. Is this love or sex? I'm half convinced that it's both.

The other really soft song on offer is My Own Way, which is a velvet covered lounge song, ladies and gentlemen. It's another instrumental but it's much more laid back than My True Love, not least because of its long saxophone solo, and it doesn't seem to have any obvious underlying theme. Perhaps the whole point is contrast, given that these two softer tracks are separated by Junkyard Dogs and bookended by Approximation of Bliss and Snakebite Kiss, which are all playful vocal pieces.

That said, I have no idea what Junkyard Dogs is really about and am pretty convinced that it's not about anything at all. Surely it's all about finding that groove, which it does quickly with a Stevie Ray Vaughan-style opening solo. Like Approximation of Bliss, Snakebite Kiss sounds like it could be a Frank Zappa song if only it wanted to be rude or subversive instead of playful.

It's almost impossible not to like this, because it's generally perky and cheerful and incredibly well played. The question is whether it's going to slip into the background or not. Perhaps that's the reason for Göran Edman's presence. He's a fine and versatile vocalist and he does a capable job here, but I wondered whether the album needs him. As music, I don't think it does because there's so much going on instrumentally. However, it's probably his vocals that keep us paying attention rather than just sinking into grooves.

One of these days I'm going to find a Swedish album that's generic. There's good stuff up there and bad stuff too, but none of it seems to be boring. I guess there's something in the water up there. Given this and some of what I've been reviewing lately, maybe someone dropped some acid in there too.