We seem to say it every December, but this year has gone so quickly. We’ve fit a lot into twelve months, of course. Over the last twelve months, Real Gone has picked up a truckload of new followers and regular visitors; we’ve discovered new bands, reconnected with a couple of familiar faces, and given more column inches to old favourites.
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Marillion’s world is a place littered with contradictions. As far as a huge chunk of the mainstream media are concerned, the band split back in the late 80s, and yet they sold out the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2017. In minutes. They spent the second half of the 90s and the early 00’s fighting against the “prog rock” tag, but continued to release albums that featured ten minute epics. As far the general public’s perception is concerned – at least a proportion of the general public that seems aware of Marillion’s existence in the modern day – the band are unfashionable. And yet, their 2022 album ‘An Hour Before It’s Dark’ was a critical and commercial success, hitting #2 on the UK album chart.
When it came to promoting their full length debut ‘White Noise’, Finnish prog metal band were taking no chances. The first digital single appeared almost a full year before the album itself, and they subsequently drip fed their potential fans different tracks over the following months. This was no hit and run PR campaign. What’s more, in an effort to attract a variety of ears, they ensured those early digital singles covered a lot of musical ground. It was a campaign that worked. For those who didn’t enjoy the melodic metal of ‘Drown’ – an In Flames meets progressive metal workout – there would be the epic ‘Inverted’, a tune where the band abandoned their metal stance and embarked upon a very unfashionable 70s sound. Hey, if that were good enough for Opeth, going massively retro could work for others, and in the case of this massively uncommercial single, it proved a master stroke for Darkness. If anything, it was that unexpected shift which genuinely stoked up the excitement for the album itself.
Previously the keyboard player with Shadrane and Hubi Maisel, Vivien Lalu formed his eponymously named band in 2004. The idea was that the band would approach prog in a very unrestrained way, and also add contemporary elements to keep things interesting. Considering a lot of prog metal in the mid noughties seemed to consist of stuck-in-a-rut Dream Theater-isms – especially from DT themselves – and so much prog relied upon obvious influences, Lalu’s desire for a bigger and more interesting musical canvas wasn’t unwarranted. Of course, there were a few freewheeling, pioneering spirits then – not least of all Devin Townsend, always marching to his own drum – but prog metal definitely needed new blood at that time.
Since Pink Floyd’s uneasy reunion at Live 8, Roger Waters has spent far too much time rubbing people up the wrong way. He isn’t shy in spouting angry political opinions via a webcam for the whole internet’s benefit, or offering other pointed opinions, even if they weren’t asked for. Following the release of the rather dull ‘Is This The Life We Really Want?’ – an album where the best arrangements seemed indistinguishable from lazy rehashes from a Waters past – his live shows became increasingly like political rallies with some songs thrown in. He’s spoken publicly many times about the war in Ukraine, siding with the Russians. He’s attacked British politicians, even stooping as low as to use disability hate speech against one MP. He was always a curmudgeon but, in 2023, the 80 year old ex-Pink Floyd bassist finally reached the point of being intolerable.