Most of my exposure to Japanese rock (j-rock) has been through Anime theme songs, but it’s a genre I’ve dipped further into from time to time when an Anime theme has really grabbed me, especially with bands like The Pillows, Flow, Nico Touches The Walls, Veltpunch, and Maximum The Hormone. So when I saw this promo for fulusu’s debut American release Old House 1, it totally piqued my interest. This album starts out with some ambient noise on ‘Ra’ that continues into second track ‘Consideration: Rain’ and abruptly ends to reveal the melodic j-rock … Read more
Author Archives: Jeff Nixon
The Tangent – The Slow Rust of Forgotten Machinery
Mammoth – Deviations
In the world of progressive rock and metal, instrumental albums are pretty common so it’s a bit hard to stand out. Mammoth absolutely manage to do this with their new album Deviations. Impressive playing paired with amazing production quality and beautiful tones prove that these guys are at the top of their class.
The first song, ‘Entanglements’ sounds like an entanglement of instruments weaving wonderfully through each other. Impressive guitar arpeggios and solos are complemented by ambient keyboards and intense drums. The middle section of the song calms down with a bright clean section that builds back up into … Read more
Devin Townsend Project – Transcendence
Devin Townsend has gone many different musical places in his career, frequently doing something drastically different that what he’s done before, most notably on his first four albums in the Devin Townsend Project with Ki, Addicted, Deconstruction, and Ghost. Transcendence is no exception, as it takes his sound to a new level. On this album, Devin took input from the rest of the band, musicians he’s been working with for 10+ years, and relinquished some control to them. Because of this, the band sounds more united than on other recent DTP albums, like Epicloud and Sky Blue.
This was brought … 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