Been a hot minute since I made a Flower Kings review, let’s change that.

I think there are two types of Flower Kings albums, the grassy albums, and the aquatic albums. The grassy albums are more of the pastoral, almost prog folk albums that contain more of a flowery atmosphere, whilst the aquatic albums feel a lot more seaside oriented, with a lot of marimbas, blue images, and very tranquil sounds. The only exceptions for me in these two Flower Kings archetypes is Retropolis, Stardust We ... read more

2005 seems to have been a really good year for prog. While I wasn’t born in, or even saw the year unfold in my very eyes, it was the year that gave us Ghost Reveries, Frances The Mute, Octavarium, Alaska, and today’s topic of Hinterland, the debut album for the eccentric retro prog rock group of Wobbler. I have known about the existence of Wobbler since I decided to get more into modern prog, and after listening to From Silence to Somewhere, I’ve been enjoying their fairly ... read more

After Little Lucid Moments Motorpsycho has been pumping out hit after hit in the realm of their new found prog tendencies. However, it goes without saying that their magnum opus, the highest peak they reach in their prog rock ideals, comes in the form of a very strange, beautiful, intense, and highly magical album that is best described within the subtitle: “A FANCIFUL AND FAIRLY FAR-OUT MUSICAL FABLE”. This is The Death Defying Unicorn, the album that really gave Motorpsycho the ... read more

One of the first big releases this year, and one I have been looking forward too, is the latest Riverside album of ID.ENTITY. Riverside, to me, is one of Poland’s finest prog bands out there, besides the curious cases of SBB and CzesŁaw Niemen. Mixed with the top tier contemporary sounds of Porcupine Tree with a more drive for metal, this band has been a recent favorite of mine. However, I feel like they have started to trickle down to safety rather than progression after the release of ... read more

Generally speaking, most, including myself, consider the first four Mars Volta albums (Deloused through Bedlam) to be the best the band has to offer due to their mix up of wild, fenetic progressive rock that merged latino sensibilities with almost punk-like styles of playing. I really love their music, they were a grower for me but after I fully sat comfortably within their highly vigorous prog-hold, I just have been loving most, if not all their works. As of late, I have been listening to The ... read more

After the release and recording for the band's more alternative oriented anniversary album, Motorpsycho gets back on track with more progressive rock music. This time around, they sort of shift back a bit to a more heavier, grungy sound that originated from their first three records, specifically Demon Box. Unlike those days, they have improved on their songwriting and playing techniques considerably over the past 19-20 years, and so we get one of their heavier, but still masterfully ... read more

PFM? PFM! In the grand scale of the RPI movement, there are three bands I commonly think of: Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso, Area, and Premiata Forneria Marconi, or PFM for abbreviation. PFM is kind of the most stand out and recognizable band of the whole RPI movement, kinda like how, say, Caravan was for the Canterbury Scene, or Can in the Krautrock department. There is a good reason why, they are not only the most accessible in terms of RPI, with all the weirdness of Area or the more psychedelic Le ... read more

In terms of metalcore music that is combined with prog metal, my favorite has got to be Between The Buried and Me, but a close second goes to Periphery.

I knew of Periphery since I first started to get into more progressive metalcore music, though I haven’t heard them until getting attached to similar groups like Protest The Hero, The Human Abstract, and Animals As Leaders. While they aren’t the forefathers of djent, that title could go to Meshuggah or Fredrick Thordendal’s ... read more

With Motorpsycho’s 13th studio album, and to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary, the group would make an album that’d be a lot more celebratory for their psych and alt rock roots of Timothy’s Monster through It’s A Love Cult. This resulted in the creation of Child Of The Future.

If there is one thing that stands out from this album, it is the highly appealing psychedelic and space rock structure that the band has mastered through their 20 years of rocking out. ... read more

There are some records out there that surprise me with how they can capture a specific feeling. Some of my favorite albums can do this very well, whether it is expressions of happiness, or sadness. Sometimes the feeling is a bit too specific that, at first, you are in awe at how an artist can somehow perfectly encapsulate into a few songs. I find that Cosmos by Yuji Ohno is such a record that can capture a very specific city edge into my ears.

If there is one mood that I’d say can really ... read more

After the highly ambitious album of Black Hole / Blank Canvas, Motorpsycho, 2 years later, would do hard work on their next outing, that being a highly prog rock sounding record that allowed to not only embrace their more progressive sentimentalities thoroughly, but also change entirely for the next half of their discography, and for the better, as for this record, Little Lucid Moments, they decided to go really big for what they wanted to do.

This album is composed of 4 really long songs, ... read more

After the release of The Faust Tapes, and a new English audience for Faust to show their music off too, the band would go into a more mature mindset for their next, and last outing in their current line-up before the release of Rien in 1994. Faust, as a result, would loosen up on their avant-garde mentalities, and go to more toothsome elements. This would, in-turn, create Faust IV, which is some to be the band’s best and most iconic record to date, and those claims I find to be most ... read more

I think in many music discussions, Bjork is brought up quite a lot, and for a lot of great reasons. Her unique sound that fuses pop with chamber music, IDM, ambient, and many more atmospheric genres give her a unique avant-garde twist. At first I never really got her, but now I am a very big fan of her work. I do not think she has released any bad albums. My only issue with them is that they kinda take a while to set in, but after you sit down in Bjork’s wild train of mysteries then any ... read more

After the impressive jazz and country efforts of In The Fishtank 10 and The International Tussler Society, Motorpsycho would have an unsuspected turn of events as the band’s longtime drummer, Håkon Gebhardt, left the band. The rest of the group, Hans and Bent decided to continue on as a duo. Not only that but the two decided to try something new, still continuing the psychedelic rock sounds, but with more of an edge that could be found on their earliest releases of Lobotimizer and ... read more

I always find ambient music to be one of the hardest genres to write for. Due to the lack of any really noticeable musical structure, most of it boils down to how the music feels, more than how it feels. It is a more textural genre. That being said, I think Steve Roach does a fine job in conveying a more textural experience. Sorry for my digression, but I have always been fascinated by Steve Roach, but never got around to actually listening to them. That has been changed.

If there is one mood ... read more

I feel like every decade has that one that was a product of the times. 60s pop rock, 70s hard rock, 80s new wave, 90s teen pop, etc and etc. These genres aren’t bad by any means, in fact I quite like a few of them, they were just kind of the habitual genres that sort of shaped the radios of the commercial areas around the world. They were quite the products of their times, but some utilized these products more effectively than others. Sad to say that Bob James was not one of those lucky ... read more

By technicality, this is not a Motorpsycho album but rather The International Tussler Society album, but make no mistake, this album is 100% the same Motorpsycho that created Timothy’s Monster or Phanerothyme. This album came about as a sequel to their original soundtrack for the 1994 film of The Tussler. Unlike their first strokes in the whole country genre, this album would turn out a lot more baked in the oven prior, and thus after 10 years later, the band managed to not only refine ... read more

Neo-prog, for me, is never a complex genre that defies expectations, nay ‘less we talk about Marillion or IQ. Among the vast but seemingly dim stars of the 90s Neo Prog scene, with groups like Arena, Collage, Abraxas, and Pallas, one, I think stands at the most mysterious, and the most introspective of which, has to go to Pendragon. While they existed during the hay-day of Neo Prog in the 80s, they really got on their own track in the 90s, specifically with the release of ‘The ... read more

Massive Attack’s 100th Window is one of those surprising albums that I never thought I’d really get into. As someone who isn’t a big fanatic over this style of electronic music, it was surprising that Massive Attack could win me over with a series of ambient and quiet, but nevertheless catchy music.

Each song on this record contains a melancholic sentimentality that warps you around the bends in a series of low-down beats, that, for one, creates an airy and foreboding ... read more

In the early 2000s, an indie music distributor from the Netherlands, Konkurrent, decided to start a project called ‘In The Fishtank’ where they invite one or two bands to record for only two days. Music from this series ranged from punk rock with Nomeanson and Snuff, to more experimental post rock like Tortoise and Isis (the band). For the double digiter of In The Fishtank 10, Konkurrent invited the darlings over at Motorpsycho, and the Norwegian experimental jazz group Jaga Jazzist ... read more