Monthly Recommendations: July 2016

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July was a great month full of good music so here’s the best of the best!
“Thank You Scientist are finally releasing their long-awaited third album, Stranger Heads Prevail, and it more than meets the expectations! I’ve been a fan of the band for a while, but their sound always begun to annoy me after a while, but this hasn’t happened yet with their new record! “Maps of Non-Existent Places” was a stellar album, but I think “Stranger Heads Prevail” surpasses it in every way. The songs seem more cautiously constructed, and all the elements of the band work together … Read more

Mini-Reviews VI

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It’s summer, okay? And I’ll do as many mini reviews as I want! ?
First up is Dutch band Adeia‘s new album, Serenity, coming out on September second. It’s a true hybrid between progressive death and black metal, with an abundance of strings, played by the singer and the keyboardist on violin and cello. Their emphasis on long songs – over half of the tracks on the album are above ten minutes -, allow them to really showcase that “progressive death metal” sound, a bit like earlier Opeth, with odd-time signature riffs and ever-changing song structure. It’s a … Read more

Karmakanic – Dot

Karmakanic’s fifth studio album, Dot, is a progressive rock album inspired by recent writings by Carl Sagan. Frontman Jonas Reingold stated that this inspiration stemmed from Sagan’s quote about the picture of the earth that Voyager 1 took in 1990 from the outer areas of our solar system. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter Read more

Mini-Reviews V

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There’s a lot of good stuff, so let’s dive right in!

Mike Oldfield‘s Incantations, 1978. I actually got the 1985 CD version for fifty cents, so I couldn’t let it go by. It’s a great, four-part, seventy-two-minute new age progressive rock song with touches of minimalism and world music. Here, we’re really in the golden age of prog, and it really shows in this mesmerizing composition and recording. If you don’t know the name, I highly suggest you find it on cassette, vinyl, CD, digital, hell I’m sure they did a Betamax tape version of it. It’s great!… Read more

Mini-Reviews IV

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Adolyne‘s Of Ash / of Shit / of Shame is what I’d call a post-mathcore (post-hardcore with mathcore elements to it) album from 2015. It’s a really gnarly bunch of tracks with heavy riffs taking a tangent on the math side of things, which reminds me a bit of Amia Venera Landscape, but more aggressive and less atmospheric.
Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger finally releases his new album, Reverse Engineering, on August first. It’s very different from his debut, “Fear Is the Enemy”. While FItE was almost like classical music with masterpieces such as Hithérto and I Do … Read more