Category Archives: Review

Seven Impale – Contrapasso, Review and Interview

by Matt Matheson

Seven Impale Front promo highest res RGB 3000x3000“What is the next step?”

This question is the first thing crooned by vocalist-and-guitarist Stian Økland on Seven Impale‘s sophomore album, Contrapasso. It was also the question burning in my mind after several months of listening to their debut album, City of the Sun, which was my favorite record of 2014. I’ve heard plenty of bands with elements of both jazz and prog rock, but never one that truly synthesizes those styles in perfect balance. Typically you can feel whether a band is rooted in jazz and incorporating some elements of prog or vice versa. With this … Read more

Devin Townsend Project – Transcendence

by Jeff Nixon

transcendenceDevin 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

Shamblemaths – Shamblemaths

by Matt Matheson

shamblemaths
In a remote cabin, at the base of some foggy mountain, lived a hermit, who knew only two things in life: survival, and progressive rock. One morning, he looked through his collection, in reverse chronology – Spock’s Beard, Dream Theater, Marillion, Van der Graaf Generator – and settled on a record by Egg, which he dusted off and began to place on his turntable. Just then, a quite unexpected knock came at the door. Answering it, he saw a man much younger than himself, panting breathlessly from his journey.

“Are you the prog guy? You’re him, right?!”

Silently, the man … Read more

Fountainhead – Reverse Engineering

by Ignacio De Vincenzi

fhcover350It’s been a while since I listened to a solo album by a member of a known band (a.k.a. Jeff Loomis, Christian Münzner, Mark Tremonti, etc); even if they’re a nice showcase of their musical prowess and are guaranteed to a give you a lot of fun, in most cases they don’t stick enough with me to repeat them after a few spins. Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger, new member from tech-death overlords Obscura, is a refresh to my ears with his second official release “Reverse Engineering”. This is the third album I listen to this year that contains his … Read more

Karmakanic – Dot

by Jeff Nixon

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