For most people, British progressive rock band Curved Air are known for two things: being the first band to ever issue a picture disc and for the having the legendary Stewart Copeland having occupy their drum stool in the mid 70s. Considering that vocalist Sonja Kristina had previously been an important part of the London theatre scene in the late sixties – appearing in Hair – and Curved Air actually scored a UK top five hit single in 1971, you’d expect them to be more widely celebrated. Perhaps the reason they aren’t is due to lots of their classically- and jazz-derived music being very hard going. Their earlier work often values complexity over obvious hooks – something that makes the funky ‘Back Street Luv’ single seem like something of an anomaly – and the way they switch between different moods from track to track can, at first, be disorienting. They are very much a band that requires a lot of time and patience before most of the listening rewards become obvious.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
JASON BIELER AND THE BARON VON BIELSKI ORCHESTRA – Songs For The Apocalypse
Jason Bieler is a vocalist that’ll be best known to many rock fans for being the frontman with Saigon Kick back in the 90s. Never the most consistent of acts, Saigon Kick experimented with various different rock and metal styles over the course of three or four albums, but managed to attract a core of very vocal fans. That love of not being pigeonholed very much informs the material on Bieler’s ‘Songs for The Apocalypse’. In the lead up to release, he likened the record to “Neurosis meets Supertramp” and “Jellyfish playing Barry Manilow covers in the style of Meshuggah”. It sounds like none of those things, and the artist is very obviously trying too hard to be smart, but it’s an impressive work, nonetheless – a record that fuses dark psychedelia with classic hard rock, melodic metal and even a pinch of a nu metal groove. It should appeal to rock fans with broad tastes – and specifically lovers of King’s X, Devin Townsend and bands like Karnivool. What it isn’t is an album that panders to most of the stuck in a rut melodic rock die-hards, despite gaining a release on the Frontiers label.
THE SHANG HI-LOS – Kick It Like A Wicked Bad Habit EP
The Shang Hi Los is a band that brings together the talents of various musical stalwarts of the Boston music scene. Formed in 2019 by Dan Kopko from Watts and Jen D’Angora (The Downbeat 5) to expressly record poppier material, they later enlisted Lee Harrington from The Neighborhoods on bass and Lost Cowboys drummer Chuck Ferreira. With the ultimate team of friends in place, the quartet set about raising the bar for good old fashioned power pop.
EWIGKEIT – Depopulate EP
2020 was a busy year for progressive/melodic death metal act Ewigkeit. Their critically acclaimed 2019 album ‘Disclose’ basically set multi-instrumentalist James Fogarty on a roll of creativity and he filled the following year with a wide array of works. The follow up album ‘Scarscape 2.019’ fused Ewigkeit’s distinctive progressive death traits with a science fiction concept that was far less uptight than Arjen Lucassen’s works, before a follow up EP (‘XXIII’) flipped all expectations by dumping the aggression and indulging more of Fogerty’s classic metal influences on a far more melodic disc. He then closed the year by recording some of his angriest sounds to date – material scheduled for release in January ’21 as the ‘Depopulate’ EP.
CLASSICS OF LOVE – World Of Burning Hate EP
By the summer of 2020, the year had totally gone off the rails. The world had been almost blindsided by a global pandemic; cases of the bubonic plague were being reported in the far east; Australia had already been ravaged by bushfires; a strain of killer hornets had been discovered in the US and, by the end of July, Donald Trump was spoiling for a war with China. He’d already failed to have one with various other countries under dictatorships and – still running the country as if he were a sheriff in a TV western and the planet were his plaything – was obviously getting desperate. 2020 was dogged by so many disasters that it seemed nothing could actually surprise us any more.