Jan Wouter Oostenrijk – We Are Connected
[Listen to audio previews here.]
Dutch electric quartertone guitarist Jan Wouter Oostenrijk comes back with his fourth album, We Are Connected. This album is a bridge between Maghrebi jazz, rock music, and desert blues. It’s full of really interesting ideas, and the odd grooves – especially in 9/8 – are more than noteworthy; I can’t get the bass and drums line of “Hurriya” out of my head! Moreover, all songs are in different maqamat, which is really the centrepiece of the album.
Dios Trio – II
Dios Trio is an instrumental band … Read more
The Italian progressive technical death metal crew known as Unreal Overflows soon will release their third full-length, Latent. Often compared to Death, Cynic, Atheist, and other early tech-death entities, Unreal Overflows embed some jazz music theory knowledge into a melodic, technical, and progressive form of death metal that totally warrants the aforementioned comparisons. More up to date, they sound a lot like Contrarian, who recently released a very good retro-tech-death album with To Perceive Is to Suffer. Latent is definitely in that vein, too, somewhat paying homage to the pioneers of the genre while bringing something new to … 
Camembert – Negative Toe (progressive rock)
The experimental surf rock duo Crno dete, from Serbia, just released their latest opus: the massive Neponovljivo album. This set is an improvised performance that goes on for about forty minutes; uncut, unedited, and unrepeatable. It has been divided into eight tracks, but the truly uncut version is available as a forty-three-minute single track. The music resembles experimental math rock and post-rock, but the utter flood of reverb on the guitars make me think of surf rock more than anything else, really. From the moment you press play, the guitars and the drums catawompously barge in and don’t stop … 
More than two years after the release of the original Silly String, drummer and composer Travis Orbin comes back with its sequel to close off 2017. On Ⅱ, Travis inflates the concept of the twenty-minute predecessor threefold to a staggering sixty minutes. This expansion has it benefits – for one, there is more material to listen and enjoy –, but it also has its shortcomings. While the first of its name was concise and to the point, keeping only the absolute most mind-boggling tracks on record, the second one seems more spread out, less focused, and filled with …