For many a season, progressive metal bands sprouted and attempted to take root under the penumbral gloom of Dream Theater, with band after band mimicking DT’s approach: Long form songs, extended instrumental passages, technical expertise, shifting time signatures and sometimes uninspired vocal lines. The Dream Theater approach seems to have perhaps shifted to a back-seat … Continue reading
A good deal of ink has already been spilt over Steven Wilson’s new album, To The Bone. In blogs, online magazines and social media forums, a fair amount of alternating hand-wringing and canonization has been going on. Some have voiced despair that Wilson has, in some manner, jumped the shark, and abandoned the trajectory of … Continue reading
Big Big Train does things in threes, apparently. In September 2012, the band released English Electric Part One, followed six months later by English Electric Part Two. These two albums were then combined, shuffled and joined by four new tracks six months later in English Electric, Full Power. This makes for two and a half … Continue reading
Album Reclamation Project Welcome to the fifth installment of the Album Reclamation Project at Proglodytes! Again, we will revisit a maligned Album of the Past and discuss whether it’s really as bad as all that. As a reminder, we will be utilizing the soon to be copyrighted Official Proglodyte Dumpster Fire Scale. In this episode … Continue reading
This is the third installment of the Album Reclamation Project, in which a Proglodyte listens to an album that is either universally panned or highly controversial. To evaluate JUST how bad an album is, we use the Not Quite Trademarked™ Official Proglodyte Dumpster Fire Scale. In this installment, we are reminded that punk didn’t “kill” prog … Continue reading
As a regular reader of music reviews, I sometimes grow concerned that we who write them are sometimes too loose with our praise, too effusive in our speech. In a world where every new album is an artist’s ‘best yet’ and every new single is a “modern prog masterpiece”, praise begins to lose its value. … Continue reading
Big Big Train was founded around 1990 and existed primarily as the studio project of Greg Spawton and Andy Pool until 2009, at which point they largely stabilized a band lineup (‘stabilize’ being a relative term). Starting with their sixth album, The Underfall Yard, they began to enjoy some acclaim in the progressive rock community. … Continue reading
Kristoffer Gildenlow’s sophomore effort as a solo artist, The Rain, is a melancholic and emotional journey that touches on a variety of themes, among them aging, loss, depression, and dementia. Kristoffer is perhaps best known for his exceptional bass work with his brother, Daniel Gildenlow, on several of Pain Of Salvation’s best albums (Entropia through BE), but … Continue reading
