Illuminae - Blood On Your Hands

These days I am so far behind on my reviews that even if I read the press release at the time the album was made available to me, I have long forgotten who was involved by the time I get around to playing it. Hence this was a wonderful surprise when it finally made it to my ears, and I wondered how such a well-formed band could have come out of nowhere, and in some places there was no doubt whatsoever that they had Troy Donockley (Nightwish, but for me will always be associated with Iona) playing as I recognise his work anywhere, so who was this band and who did they bring in? It transpired that the people behind this are multi-instrumentalist Ian Jones (Karnataka, Chasing The Monsoon) and singer Agnieszka Swita. While I guess Polish singer Agnieszka will normally be linked with Caamora, I have been aware of her other works as well and highly recommend searching out her solo album 'Sleepless'. Then they brought in a few others to assist, such as Steve Hackett (Genesis), John Helliwell (Supertramp), the aforementioned Troy Donockley, Craig Blundell (Steven Wilson), Luke Machin and Gonzalo Carrera while it was mixed by Joe Gibb (Massive Attack, The Cure and Leftfield).
The result is an album which is a delight from start to finish, encompassing a myriad of progressive styles while always steeped in the symphonic. We get Celtic, crossover, pop, and perhaps unsurprisingly some real theatrical. Agnieszka Swita has long been involved with Clive Nolan and the Caamora project, and of course plays the part of Amelia in 'Alchemy', and there are times when that style comes through, especially on "Black Angel". She has a wonderful voice, professionally trained, and her experiences allow her to work in multiple different styles and types of music while always in full control, with clear annunciation and a warmth which invites in the listener. Add to that the sumptuous arrangements and one knows this is a work of some import.
It is so easy to listen to, yet each time it is played it gets even better. Needless to say, everyone involved is a master of their instruments, but Ian has ensured that the guests are used for just that, so while John Helliwell has a huge impact on "Sign of Infinity", that is it. The core of this is a consummate musician and an amazing singer, and together they have delivered a wonderful album which is sure to be a firm favourite of any lovers of melodic crossover symphonic prog with elements of the stage. The next trick will be to form a full band and get this out on tour as music as strong this needs to be in the live environment.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=11713

Psychotica - Ice Planet Hell

LRI (Crash Crafton): For those who are not familiar with your career, can you give them a brief history of who you are and what you do?

Patrick Briggs: I’m Patrick Briggs and I was formerly the singer of Psychotica. Well, actually, I still am. I don’t know why I’m referring to myself as formerly. I’m now launching my first solo record. I’ve been in the music business, this is my 30th year!

LRI: As a child you began in theatre at 8 years old. What drew you to theatre & what memories of your first role do you have?

PB: I was eight when I wandered into a little theater in Burbank that was in our local recreation park. I had no idea that I had wandered into an audition for “The Seven Year Itch” but I had and being that I was the only kid there I won the role of Little Ricky. I remember being like a deer in the headlights and I’m sure I was terrible by all industry standards but I also knew this would get me out of the house that I hated being in so I was totally down with it.

LRI: When did you start playing in bands, it has been rumored that your first band included Tracii Guns of Guns N’ Roses & L.A. Guns fame, any truth to that?

PB: My first band, I was actually the backup singer for and that was this 90 something year old former Penthouse Pet who had been fucking Tommy Lee. So she put together a glam rock band to do a showcase at the Limelight in New York and the band consisted of Tracii Guns, Johnny B. Frank from Kingdom Come and Rikki Rockett on drums, and then me as the backup. I had never sang in a band before that. After the show, their management pulled me aside and asked if they could represent me, and that they were dumping the Penthouse Pet and because of it she never spoke to me again…..oh well!

LRI: What bands or musicians were an influence to you as a vocalist and performer?

PB: Boston’s first album & Parliament Funkadelic’s The Mothership Connection. Parliament was and is highly underrated as one of the leaders of the then glam rock movement but because they were black they were called a funk band. I learned how to do harmonies from George Clinton.

LRI: In the 80’s you moved to New York City and was working at the Cat Club when you were discovered by former KISS Manager, the legendary Bill Aucoin. What year was that and how long did he manage your career? Are there any memories of working with Mr. Aucoin you care to share?

PB: Actually my best friend, Raven-O & I were go-go dancers at the Limelight when Bill and Geoff Grayson approached me and asked if I’d like to join a band. We recently lost Bill unfortunately but he was an amazing human being. As charismatic as any of his acts were. Unfortunately by the time I got him as a manager he was on the decline and I’m not going to divulge in print any specifics but let’s just say he taught the rockstars how to party!

LRI: In 1994, you were managing Don Hill’s in New York City that hosted the legendary Squeezebox. You formed Psychotica to function as the house band of the Squeezebox but things went haywire & the band got signed to a major label after their first rehearsal, were invited to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside David Bowie and Iggy Pop in a exhibit celebrating fashion in music at your first gig and asked to play Lollapalooza at your second gig. What was that time like in your life? Is that exhibit with your costumed mannequin still on display at the R&RHOF?

PB: At that time of my life I would venture to say that I had my head so far up my own ass that I wasn’t even able to enjoy what little success that I had…..unfortunate!

LRI: You recently stated that you were going to release an autobiography soon. Back in 1998 there was news of you releasing an autobiography entitled “The Tom Sawyer Complex”. That never came out. Will this upcoming autobiography be that book plus all that has happened since that time?

PB: The thing about “The Tom Sawyer Complex” is that it got picked up for development by Ted Demme. He optioned it and I don’t know if you know anything about books but it locks it up for a certain amount of time. Then he died. During that time, all this really wild insane shit in my life started happening. I realized where I’d ended on “The Tom Sawyer Complex” that my life hadn’t really begun yet, really. It is all that stuff and a whole lot more.

LRI: When do you think that will be released?

PB: I’m hoping the whole thing will come out in the middle of 2015. I want to package it as a, I don’t know what the term would be but release it as a book, chapter by chapter, with a song and a video. Basically a CD-Rom for every chapter.

From: https://www.legendaryrockinterviews.com/2014/07/02/when-the-laughter-muffles-the-screams-an-interview-with-pyschotica-frontman-patrick-briggs/

Buffalo Daughter - ET (Densha)

Music classified as “experimental” often triggers the same type of response as if you turned a corner and found a gang of possums mid-brawl: back away slowly, then run. The Japanese trio Buffalo Daughter might be relatable to a gang of possums, but instead of brawling they are hunkered around a microphone surrounded by an array of instruments. If you turned a corner to this scene, you may be more intrigued. BD is technically classified as indie rock, but I would venture to call them experimental in every sense of the word: They find a way to kick down boundaries of music without making listeners question, “is this even music?” Each of Buffalo Daughter’s seven albums has one-of-a-kind cover art, a track list filled with their mind-mashing sound and unpredictably clever music videos.
In the same way Gorillaz makes genre-less, aesthetic-less, unboxable artistry through the lens of their unique style, BD fans love them for their pointed ambiguity. In a world where so many musicians, media outlets and companies try to appeal to everyone, Buffalo Daughter leans into their niche and spoon feeds it to the lucky ones who fall hard in love with their music. We Are The Times echoes the patchwork structure of Buffalo Daughter’s past projects while incorporating lyrics that are honest, emotional and relevant.
Over the past year and a half, statements along the lines of “these are dark and uncertain times” rang in every conversation, advertisement and media outlet. Everyone had something to say, and Buffalo Daughter picked up the microphone in their own deconstructed way. There seems to be two sides to this album: the sprinkle, dance cuteness of “Music” and “Everything Valley,” and the dark, insidious, looming danger of “Global Warming Kills Us All” and “ET (Densha).”
“Music is the vitamin to live and die,” Buffalo Daughter prescribes in the opening five seconds of We Are The Times in “Music.” The language is critical here—in a time when health and safety are the world’s obsessions, words like “vitamin,” “live” and “die” stand out. Buffalo Daughter shares the importance of the music presented, giving listeners a deeper understanding of why they should listen to this album.  From: https://www.slugmag.com/music/national-music-reviews/buffalo-daughter-we-are-the-times/

Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot

After spending over three years touring with and lending some recorded guitar parts to Nine Inch Nails, Richard Patrick decided in 1993 that he needed to go out on his own. He has said that he pushed NIN mastermind Trent Reznor to go more guitar-heavy with his pioneering industrial band, something that most certainly happened on the groundbreaking The Downward Spiral album in 1994. It would go on to sell more than 4 million copies in America.
Patrick felt confident with his own artistic vision, and with his band Filter he would eventually follow a similar trajectory to NIN whereby he would pave the way for the music, with band membership shifting over the years. After leaving Cleveland, where he had spent many of his formative years and joined up with Reznor, Patrick journeyed to L.A. with his demo for “Hey Man Nice Shot.” He has claimed he was signed by Warner Bros. within a day of presenting it to them. Eight months later, he returned to Cleveland to work on Filter’s first album, Short Bus, which would be launched by the song that landed him the deal. We explore the meaning behind “Hey Man Nice Shot” below.
Patrick found the lyrical inspiration for “Hey Man Nice Shot” from the January 1987 suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. It occurred on the day Dwyer was to be sentenced for 11 counts of bribery for which he had faced up to 55 years in prison and a $305,000 fine, according to an Associated Press article from the time. No money was said to have exchanged hands. The public official spent 20 minutes on live television proclaiming his innocence, then shot himself to death. The incident shocked family, friends, and political associates, not to mention the viewing audience.
“When I was 24, I didn’t have life experience other than, ‘I’m in a lot of pain,’” Patrick told the Hammer and Nigel radio show in 2013. “And I don’t want to say that, because Trent’s already in pain, and I don’t want to be the guy that’s in pain. So I started to focus on current events, and one of the things that I had seen was this guy R. Budd Dwyer that had shot himself. I thought about the guts [it took] to do that, just either the insanity or the clarity or whatever. It’s very awkward—I actually met one of his relatives. And I was like, ‘It’s an anti-suicide song.’ Of course, if he holds a press conference, it’s going to affect people. I never really admitted to it until the song was already a huge hit, and then the record company started spilling the beans, leaking it a little bit.”  From: https://americansongwriter.com/the-gruesome-truth-behind-the-meaning-of-filters-hey-man-nice-shot/

Janis Joplin - Live in Frankfurt, Germany 1969

Janis Joplin apparently didn’t care much for European audiences. “I’ve been working. We did Europe, I went to Europe, I played over there for about a month. Scared ’em to death I think,” She boldly proclaimed. When asked if she had fun, Joplin responded with, “No, I had a terrible time”.
She thought the problem was that she was tapping into some primordial trance, while those watching on were clutching their pearls. Detailing further, Joplin explained: “Nobody really gets loose, and nobody rocks over there. They’re all so cerebral, they’re really cerebral, do you know what I mean?”. She was up there sloshing Southern Comfort, and they were looking on wondering where she placed in the canon of art. 
Needless to say, a lot of this fear about analysis over appreciation was merely in Joplin’s culture confused eyes. That much is readily apparent in this footage from her first show in Germany. Joplin is a star who could rattle the rafters of an empty airline hangar without a microphone in sight. Her power was unfounded. She was a one-woman riot that even an Oxbridge professor would struggle to intellectualise.
Flashing through a thunderous 33-minute set, she journeys through classic tunes like ‘Raise Your Hand’ and ‘Summertime’ with snippets of interview in between, before the final closing blitzkrieg of ‘Take Another Piece of My Heart’ before the awestruck Frankfurt audience. If they seem stand-off-ish, Joplin, then that is merely because their minds have been walloped.
It’s a performance that also serves as time capsule. After all, Joplin is as much of an icon of the 1960s summer of love era as the Michelin Man is of tires. Tousled locks, tie-dye garments and a freewheeling attitude were all part of her oeuvre, but the thing that made David Crosby crown her the queen of rock is a voice that forever threatened to take sputnik out of orbit and end the space race in an explosion of earthly peace.
Her three-octave range might not be overly remarkable but her strength across it was herculean. And with that voice, she extolled a message of blooming flower power with a few prickly thorns in the bunch.
In fact, one of her shows blossomed so riotously that the brave police officers present – fearing a knees-up en masse and the chaotic smiling hysteria that comes with it – did all they could to restore banal order. They clambered onto the stage and kindly asked the famed rock ‘n’ roll insouciant performer whether she would perhaps reverse her intent and try to assist them in subduing the happy crowd into a more manageable state of ennui. In short, her response was “fuck off”.
That’s Joplin for you! Her tragically short life may have been a complex one, but it is her daring ways, performative bravura, upbeat attitude and rafter rattling voice that sustain in the memory to this day. This performance is glowing testimony to that.  From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/watch-janis-joplins-first-german-concert/ 

 

Genesis - Foxtrot - Side 1

Genesis’ fourth studio album, Foxtrot, mostly follows the general style of the band’s previous album Nursery Cryme. Foxtrot continues to hone the band’s very distinctive vision of symphonic prog, combining pastoral moments of beauty with accomplished ensemble playing and slightly odd, often humorous, details.
The album’s opening ”Watcher Of The Skies” starts with an iconic Mellotron intro (the contraption was bought from King Crimson, who still had two of the pieces left after the sale) and then kicks off in earnest with rhythm section Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins chiming in with their rather intricate playing (the tricky arrangement was inspired by a Yes show the band saw, according to Collins). Collins has always been Genesis’ most skilled instrumentalist, but Rutherford really shines on Foxtrot too. His bass playing throughout the album is really tasty sounding and most importantly he and Collins play fabulously together.
”Timetable”, which follows ”Watcher Of The Skies”, is a somewhat disjointed, romantically and nostalgically tranquil song, dreaming of more chivalrous times. It’s not bad music by any means, and on many other Genesis albums it might show itself in a better light, but in this company it is helplessly relegated to the role of a pleasant filler.
”Get ’em Out By Friday” puts the album back on track in earnest. It’s a nicely rocking piece at times, but also a multi-faceted mini-epic with a lot of different phases (the song is ”only” a little over 8 minutes long).
The lyrics are a fun mix of sci-fi and social criticism, and vocalist Peter Gabriel changes his vocal style on the fly depending on which character in the story he is interpreting. Gabriel also does a great job on the album. His original, somewhat immature, rough voice with a hint of soul, which is quite unusual for prog, is extremely charismatic and fascinating to listen to. While avoiding being as alienatingly strange as, say, the voices of contemporaries Peter Hammill (Van der Graaf Generator) or Roger Chapman (Family) can be at their most extreme. It is no wonder that numerous neo-prog vocalists have taken him as a role model (of course, Gabriel’s theatricality on live stages also contributed to this). It is Peter Gabriel’s vocals that put several of the songs on the album in the classic category with their originality. Not to underestimate the great work of the main composer Tony Banks on the music of the album.  From: https://pienemmatpurot.com/2024/02/29/review-genesis-foxtrot-1972/

 

Geese - 2122

Last week, on a balmy November night in Brooklyn, hundreds of people were queuing up outside the Paramount to see Geese play the last show of their Getting Killed North America tour.
It’s never particularly difficult to identify a fan base on gig night, and Geese’s fans proved no exception. There was a heavy emphasis on band merch, both official and satirical, paired with denim jackets on denim jeans, plaid shirts, and the occasional Afghan coat. It’s exactly the kind of 90s grunge meets 70s bohemia look you’d expect from fans of what the media has declared to be Gen Z’s first great rock band. Not in recent years, decades even, has a rock band commanded this level of fixation among a rapidly growing fanbase. But, for this audience in particular, a scene that ranges from recent graduates to high school seniors whose parents probably think they’re at a sleepover, Geese are speaking directly to their experiences of the present.
I know this because I’m running up and down this queue, speaking to as many of them as possible. Are Geese Gen Z’s first great rock band? It’s a question that speaks to the hype bordering on hysteria around both their latest album, this summer’s ecstatic and sporadically existential Getting Killed, and their frontman, Cameron Winter. But first, a brief history for anyone not familiar with the thrilling crescendo of Geese from a high school rock band to genre-definers: their first album, Projector, was met with buzz when it was released in 2021; their follow-up two years later, 3D Country, which combined sounds of Americana and old-school psychedelia, planted them firmly on America’s underground rock scene.
For many of Geese fans, it was this sophomore album that got them hooked. “When I first got into 3D Country I was like, I’ve never heard anything like this before in my life,” Sarah, 22, tells me in the queue. “And it was the only thing I listened to for six months.” Another 22-year-old named Charlie tells me: “I was obsessed with 3D Country, I saw them live, and it was like going back in time and seeing a proper rock group. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
23-year-old Winter then released the folkier Heavy Metal last year to great acclaim from fans, critics and Nick Cave. Folksy and often melancholic, this is not an album used on Instagram reels, and when I ask fans how they got into the band, “word of mouth” is the recurring answer.
It’s the kind of All-American rock story that invokes memories of great bands gone by. Their Brooklyn upbringing draws natural comparisons to the likes of the Velvet Underground and The Strokes, while their 20th-century school-to-stadium trajectory makes you believe in the virtues of the music industry again. In a discourse peppered with accusations of ‘nepo’, ‘TikTok friendly’, and the dreaded ‘industry plant’, Geese stand out as being wholly genuine. “This is the kind of band you could see at a house party,” says Dan, 22. 
“This is our Nirvana,” a fan named Nate proclaims. But tribute band, they are not – Geese are planted firmly within their generation’s zeitgeist. “They voice a lot of the anxieties of our generation,” adds another fan, who refuses to be named. “They’re young, they’re relatable, and a lot of the rock bands of the past ten years are very derivative. They feel really special in that way.”
It’s also a collaborative effort. “The energy of the fans feels like nothing else,” another fan named Dani explains. “We went to the free gig in Brooklyn and it was the happiest show. It feels like how I imagined some of the bands in the 90s would’ve felt like.” Other fans also brought up ‘Geese-fest’: according to 18-year-olds James, John and Dexter, if you turned up early enough, you could kick it with the band themselves and play video games. “They’re really nice,” John says. “We played [Super Smash Bros.] with [bass player] Dominic. We lost.”
And then, of course, there’s Cameron Winter. Winter, in a vein similar to a young Bob Dylan, toes a line between generational jester and spokesperson. The frontman is spoken about with a warmth by fans that speaks to a successful relay of personality that never feels curated or contrived. In fact, he is spoken about more like a mate. “Cameron’s lyricism has a spirituality that’s been missing among Gen Z-ers. I like that a lot,” Gabe, 20, tells me.
“He is a voice for a lot of like-minded young people that don’t really know how to express themselves,” says Noah, aged 22. “In a thoughtful and direct kind of way. There’s a lot of cultural statements in terms of fashion, but the way [he] puts things into words, poetically, is something I feel like we haven’t really had, in terms of storytelling.”
It’s a noticeable difference from the usual trappings of contemporary stan culture. Geese fans are not hysterical over the topic of Winter and his bandmates; their online social media presence is not obsessive fan wars, but rather, comparing notes on shows in comment sections. When the concert starts, and Winter sporadically speaks to the audience, he does so to a view of swaying bodies and the occasional joint, rather than a sea of raised iPhones.  From: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/69195/1/nirvana-geese-gen-z-first-great-rock-band-brooklyn-cameron-winter

 

Lake Ruth - Under the Waning Moon

Did you folks really meet on Facebook? Do tell.

Allison Brice: Hewson and I first virtually bumped into each other back in the MySpace days. I'm pretty sure that we were switched on to each other's music via Greg Hughes from Still Corners. Greg and I were fellow south Londoners at the time. Sadly, Hewson and I didn't keep in touch after MySpace folded, but in early 2015 found ourselves reunited via our mutual friend Phil Sutton from Pale Lights. On a silly Facebook thread he started about frozen food of all things…

Hewson Chen: The interwebs brought Matt and I together too. I looked him up to hear what he sounded like and one of the first hits on YouTube was a cat car chase video: Holy Fuck's "Red Lights".  I pretty much knew we would work great from there.  I have cats in common with Matt, and TV dinners in common with Allison.

AB: I'm severely allergic to cats and have never been able to set foot in either Hewson or Matt's apartments!

You all have played or currently play in other bands (New Lines, The Silver Abduction). How do you find the time, and is this on top of regular day jobs?

AB: It's a challenge. We all have day jobs and are raising - or soon to be raising - young children. I think that when free time is in short supply, you just have to grab what you can get - focus, and get down to work.

Matthew Schulz: You have to choose between sleep and art. I still choose art.

HC: Time is a tough factor for sure, but the technology helps - like you can sketch in broad strokes with plug-ins before actually hooking up the Farfisa, or what have you...

How does songwriting usually happen? Are all three of you actively involved in writing your tunes?

AB: Yes, we all are. We ping ideas back and forth and constantly share audio via Dropbox. The tunes start with one of us passing around a fragment, adding parts here or there in my home studio in Miami or Hewson and Matt's in Brooklyn. I moved to Miami a few years ago after a decade in London. It's an easy 'commute' up to NYC to join the rest of the band - Hewson & Matt plus Rene, Sohrab and David from our live group - for shows.

MS: Hewson and I often record random drums at the crack of dawn and then he returns with a pile of tracks he made from them. Then we beat them into submission. It's so backwards to me but works well with our geography and time restraints.

HC: Yeah sometimes the song will start with Allison singing a random melody with no words. Sometimes we'll start with a drum track that Matt belted out after me being like, "What's up with the purdie shuffle?" Other times I'll have some little filigree banging around that needs a story, or something to give it direction and Allison will say, "This one is about the Heaven's Gate cult." Those last two examples ended up being the same song.

What informs your songwriting? You include some rather fantastical themes in your storytelling. It is all fascinating, and not your standard fare.

AB: Songwriting is a mysterious process. I'll begin with a melody, and work with that until the vowels and consonants start falling into place. Eventually, some skeletal words will emerge - and I'll begin to get an idea of who is communicating and what they want to say. Every song has its character, its setting, and its story. The common denominator among the characters seems to be their marginality and their need to be heard. Often their stories are distressing and difficult to voice, but no performance is compelling without genuine emotion driving it. 

HC: She's very earnest. You can joke around like, "How about a song about the rise of modern epidemiology?" and voila, Dr. Snow and the Broad Street Pump.  She used to work in a bookstore, that's got to figure in somehow.

How would you self-describe your music if someone asked what you’re about?

HC: An Italian friend once exclaimed "old time music!" after hearing some tracks. I chose to take it as a compliment.

AB: I once read on a guitar forum that we'd sound right at home soundtracking "The Love Witch 2" - that works for me.

From: https://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/interview-lake-ruth.html

Hidden Masters - Into The Night Sky

With the toybox psychedelia of Tame Impala hitting the mainstream and all things “out there” becoming the sound of summer 2013, Hidden Masters have landed at just the right time with an album which is absolutely smothered with heavy psyche. It is so psychedelic in fact, that you could be forgiven for thinking you had woken up in the late '60s and the acid had never worn off. Prepare for the trip of your life!
Blasting off with ‘She Broke The Clock Of The Long Now’, sub-Sabbath riffs are interspersed with frenetic piano and melodic vocals. On top of this harmonies swoop and swoon and guitars make thrilling runs. Forget all music that has happened in the last fifty years as you are placed right in the heart of Carnaby Street once again.
‘Into The Night Sky’ is held up by the piano as everything else clatters around it, Almost telekinetic, there is understanding of how this music should work and the trap off falling into too much going on is tempered by the space between. Music should be able to breathe and Hidden Masters know how to do this perfectly.
‘Perfume’ could have come straight off Nuggets with its urgent vocals and swirling Hammond. It's the closest you get to a possible single but you doubt this is even considered. No, Hidden Masters are more interested in that old fashioned statement...the album. Every song is a trip in itself which as a whole satisfying whole show a relentless talent at work.
Nothing sounds quite the same and by the time you get to ‘Like Candy’, which is possibly one of the greatest songs ever written with its insane sing along section followed by the funky work out on organ, you have lost all grip on reality. ‘Last Days of The Sun’ does this too only this time it transports you with its Arabian flavour. If only The Kinks were this good!
There is nothing like Hidden Masters at the moment, the closest comparison in contemporary circles is Howl Griff who take a much more elegiac road. Hidden Masters are the sound of the best acid trip ever and then some. Lysergic and blistering, the sun will never be the same again.  From: https://echoesanddust.com/2013/06/hidden-masters-of-this-other-worlds/

Lone Justice - I Found Love / Shelter / Beacon

Lone Justice was supposed to be huge. Admittedly, there’s no shortage of bands that fall into that category from the era of burgeoning college radio influence from the mid-eighties to the early-nineties, but Lone Justice has long struck me as one of the more perplexing near-misses. They surely had the industry support with major figures like Tom Petty and Linda Ronstadt extolling their virtues and a major label plucking them from the L.A. club scene to make the band a showcase act on their roster. The press, too, lined up to celebrate the band, reserving special praise for the rich, throaty vocals of lead singer Maria McKee.
Looking a little like the subject Walker Evans might have selected if he’d indulged in a mid-career shift into fashion photography, McKee came across like a lithe, lovely firebrand. She was perhaps perfectly suited to appeal to moody, earnest boys toiling in student-run radio–I think it was almost a prerequisite to getting that FCC Operator’s License to have a little crush on her, at least for those who were so inclined–but perhaps less so for the wider masses who were settling on Madonna as the standard of pop star sex appeal. Similarly the earthiness of their music, merging a polished rock sound with rootsy songcraft, seemed increasingly out of place on commercial radio, which was becoming more preoccupied with bombast than ever before. Lone Justice was very good and resolutely true at a time when those qualities held little interest for those with the strongest influence on which performers broke through.
Arguably, the closest the band came was in 1986 with the title track from their sophomore album, Shelter. The song received decent airplay on rock radio and climbed up to number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart before it ran out of steam. In reality, though, it wasn’t really the band that was reaching those heights. Most of the founding members departed after the debut didn’t live up to expectations, leaving McKee to recruit new musicians. She had sole or shared songwriting credit on all ten tracks of Shelter after contributing to only about half of the songs on the debut. The primacy of her authorship was fully confirmed when she gave up on the pretense of the band altogether, discarding the Lone Justice name and release her very fine self-titled solo debut in 1989. Again, except for a knowledgeable (and fairly small) crowd of devoted fans, no one paid much attention.
Like many songs that were more welcome on our college radio station airwaves than just about anywhere else, “Shelter” still sounds like a hit to me. It evokes the same sensation of broadly shared fondness that I have for actual smashes of the time frame from the likes of U2. I guess, in a way, I still hear what could have been nestled in those notes.  From: https://coffee-for-two.com/2011/08/12/one-for-friday-lone-justice-shelter/

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - A Time and a Place

“We would have had hell’s own job getting that band off the ground,” asserted Greg Lake in Part 1 of our interview last week, after his revelations that at one point — before Carl Palmer had been brought in — there were embryonic plans for a musical aggregation comprising himself, Keith Emerson, Mitch Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix. The interview continues from there:

GL: We had enough of a job with ELP, with the big names bit. Like Keith’s name was known; I was from a known successful group and Carl was from Atomic Rooster, who were in the up and coming vibe. It’s so hard launching a group like that. You have to be super aware all the time. Nothing you do can be at all flash because any hole you leave anywhere, people will be jumping in to tear the heart out of you. When I think of all the good ideas that got thrown out… we were so afraid of being thought flash about it all. The worst thing was the Festival Hall concert. I mean, it was a great concert man. It was good, we knew it was good and we really enjoyed it. But you read the reviews and wonder if it was really the same gig.

NME: I was just coming round to ask you your opinion of the public and critical response to ELP.

Public response has been incredible. All through the last tour it was like a madhouse, the reception we got. It wasn’t just the applause at the end, they were clapping during numbers. Yet the Press, instead of being fair and saying “Okay now what do people feel about this group?”… the don’t report… they express their own opinion.
It was criticism of a very low level. Okay, there were a couple of good criticisms which were founded.

Can you say what they were?

First thing that comes to mind is “Pictures Of An Exhibition,” which was a classical interpretation, very similar to the kind of thing the Nice used to do. You look to anything Keith used to do and it was somebody else’s work he had interpreted.
That was one mistake. It was not wrong for the band in that I personally enjoyed doing it, but it was wrong because it gave the Press, the critics, a lever. It gave them a way to make comparisons. “Pictures” is being dropped now because we are creating material ourselves and there’s no longer room for it. We are doing two hours now. Add this next album and we will be on for four hours. People like to hear the current album so what we’ll probably do is drop “Pictures,” do the first album in the first half and the next in the second.

What was the other fair criticism?

The second mistake was the Isle of Wight. We put on a bad performance and we were setting ourselves up for judgement. That would have been okay if we had played well but we couldn’t because the festival itself was so badly organised… the PA and everything… and we rely so much on the equipment being just right. The criticism there was just, but it was still poor. If they had written in the papers that the band played a bad set because the conditions were not right… but they didn’t. After that we sort of got scrubbed out and nobody took any notice. The good part about the band was just left unnoticed and it is a source of pride to us that the LP sold an incredible amount of records, and we didn’t push it or hype it in there. It was just bought by people who dug us on the tour.

It could have been a lot worse though, couldn’t it? Other groups…

Oh yeah, Blind Faith. They didn’t even get off the ground.

You must have expected a certain amount of criticism?

Sure I had expected criticism, but it is still a hard pill to swallow. It gets through to you. But I think we have now gone through the stage where people are judging us. And really, I don’t hold it against anybody who scratched us.

Can you talk about the theme of the album track you played. (We’d earlier listened to one side, an extended suite, off the next ELP album).

It’s about the futility of conflict, expressed in this context in terms of soldiers and war — but it’s broader than that. The words are about revolution, the revolution that’s gone, that has happened. Where has it got anybody? Nowhere.
It starts off with frustration, with the 5/4 piece, which in itself is a frustrating metre. The natural beat is four, so the extra beat every time is unnatural. Then it builds up towards the first song which asks the question: Why can’t you see how… stupid it is, conflict? The next song is about the hypocrisy of it all and the last song is the aftermath, the conclusion of it. What have we gained? The very last bit, the march, is a joke. It was written in six days and rehearsed in six. It all came very quickly from one idea.

Whose idea?

Keith started the instrumental piece, the 5/4, and I had my song at the very end. We had a beginning and an end. We figured it out on a piece of paper.

Through the whole piece there seems to be a greater balance between the three of you, whereas the first album seemed to break down into individual contributions. Here it is harder to tell where Keith stops and you take over. You must be very pleased with that.

Yeah, the first album was a balance, but it was a balance of individuals. There was Keith and I… but this time it is together. He has written for me and I have written for him. Breaking it down to basics I suppose you could say that the instrumental parts are Keith’s and the songs are mine. The aim is to achieve a working balance where the output of each person is allowed freedom, yet the total gells as one music. In many bands it happens that one person is musically not satisfied. What we’ve achieved is very pleasing, very pleasing indeed. But we have no clue, none whatsoever, of the second side. We are due in the studio on Tuesday and we have nothing at all.

Will “Picture Of An Exhibition” be included?

Well, we have the tape made by the film people at the Lyceum concert, “Pictures” runs for 40 minutes, and it cost us nothing to make. You see, we don’t want to go back on it and re-record it because that’s a phase that has gone. We played it last night, probably for the last time. But there are people who want it, so what we might do is put that in as a separate LP with the new album, and not make any extra charge for it.

How pleased were you with your contribution to the first ELP album?

I was very pleased actually. I had my song on the second side and on the group things I was a third of the music. I also produced the album, which was a lot of fun. I was pleased in so far as my personal output got laid down as I wanted it. I am not pleased with the album now, in that I don’t think it is complete. As I explained earlier, it was down to individuals. But I shall be happy with the new one. Tell me, why is it that bass players go largely unnoticed? I feel sorry for all bass players; there are some good ones around.

It was always hard to tell from the records what exactly your contribution to King Crimson was.

The trouble is I never got credit for what I did in Crimson. Most of the songs on that King Crimson album (the first) I had a large part in creating “Schizoid Man” – I wrote the riff and song: “Epitaph;” I wrote the melody line for “In The Court Of The Crimson King.” The things I do are like parts that make up something but don’t necessarily form a large part of the end product. It comes back to the unnoticed bass player. Take him away and see how he’s noticed. I feel frustrated that my output has to do with the total thing rather than one specific part. I am not really after that sort of superstar recognition. I don’t want to be a solo superstar. I know that sounds corny but the motive I have for being successful is that I want to move people emotionally and I would dig to have enough money to be secure. Yet it is annoying when you don’t get credit for what you do.

From: https://geirmykl.wordpress.com/2020/10/22/article-about-emerson-lake-and-palmer-elp-from-new-musical-express-february-20-1971/

K.D. Lang - Save Me / Season Of Hollow Soul / Constant Craving

k.d. lang’s career started with a round of open-heart surgery. In 1983, the woman born Kathryn Dawn was involved in a 12-hour performance art piece in which she and her peers in Edmonton, Canada, re-enacted the first artificial heart transplant, using pickled carrots and beets for the organ. There are no surviving reports of the audience’s response, but lang recalled that the players came away dazed.
A year later, she took her career in a more conventional direction, albeit marginally. lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star. Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.
That’s a challenge for any artist—how to create an original expression of love or heartbreak when those emotions have been so comprehensively codified by decades of pop music? lang’s circumstances were very particular. She was irrevocably in love with a married woman, and there was nothing she could do, no cooling-off period she could wait out, to get what she desired. The crush was a lost cause, and despite heavy rumors about her sexuality and a much-remarked upon lesbian contingent in her fanbase, lang was also not yet officially out. It was the early 1990s: Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t come out for five years, AIDS-related deaths wouldn’t peak for another four, and President George H. W. Bush was renouncing his earlier support for gay marriage in a shameless attempt to maintain power. And yet, lang wanted to convey the specificity of her pain to as broad an audience as possible.
She was also perturbed by how pop was starting to crowd out the singing parts with the rhythm parts. Seeking a vehicle worthy of her voice, lang decided to hark back to the age of Peggy Lee, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney, the adult contemporary sound of her parents’ generation. The gulf between her artistic whims and mainstream potential could hardly have seemed wider. But lang, who had sewn plastic farm animals to her gingham skirt in her earliest, kitschiest phase as a country star, was skilled at subverting what seemed anachronistic, even if the growing queercore scenes in Olympia and London wrote her off as a mopey blight on their cause. That is the beauty of 1992’s Ingénue, which looks however you want it to look depending on the light—radical queer ur-text or MOR reverie—and lets lang shapeshift accordingly. It was her first all-original album for a reason, allowing her to create modes of tragedy, defeat, and roleplay as she tried to distill the truest essence of her own heartbreak, a state that makes subjugated clichés of us all.
Ingénue is irresistibly seductive, so much so that it drives home just how unavailable lang’s crush was: How could she resist this? lang described the sound of Ingénue as “post-nuclear cabaret” and “nouveau easy listening”: Opener “Save Me” soothes the room like a bath filling up, making the light swim and the temperature rise. From there, lang and stalwart collaborator Ben Mink conjure a sense of intimacy so acute it feels like a confrontation. Their obsessive “sonic cleanliness” heightens the atmosphere to a peak of sensitivity: The tapering bass of “Wash Me Clean,” a song that is otherwise pure, sustained glow, might as well be a finger running down the inside of your wrist. Long before the term ASMR was coined, lang knew how to simulate the sensations of heartbreak: the obsessively lovelorn can trigger the memory (or fantasy) of connection until it’s wrung dry, the spark drained.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kd-lang-ingenue/

The Yardbirds - I'm Not Talking / Mr. You're a Better Man Than I / Over Under Sideways Down / Shapes of Things

Long before Disraeli Gears, Blind Faith, and Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs convinced people that Eric Clapton was some kind of “God.” Before the pub-inspired proto-metal of Beck-Ola, and the avant jazz of Blow By Blow signaled the true genius of Jeff Beck. And before Led Zeppelin I, II, III or IV were ever a glint in Jimmy Page’s eye, there was a band called The Yardbirds and they ruled.
The Yardbirds never came anywhere close to matching the mind-boggling chart dominance of The Beatles. They never were able to adopt the same effortless, sneering cool of Mick and Keith and the Rolling Stones. And they couldn’t physically dominate the stage with the same kind of explosive energy as The Who. They were simply the most talented, envelope-pushing band to emerge from the swinging London scene of the 1960s.
The Yardbirds were born in the smokey jazz clubs that dotted the London Metropolitan area in 1963. Their career was initially shepherded by a Swiss emigre, born in the Soviet Union named Giorgio Gomelsky. Gomelsky ran the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where the Rolling Stones first cut their teeth. When Andrew Loog Oldham showed up one day and swiped the Stones from under his nose, Gomelsky vowed never to let that happen again.
Early on, The Yardbirds honed their blues chops while backing local heroes like Cyril Davies and American legends like Sonny Boy Williamson. Williamson swung through the scene in ‘63 looking to make a paycheck blowing his harp for hordes of young, English blues fans eager to hear the real thing for themselves. Eric Clapton entered the lineup around that time, then split just as soon as the band scored their first Top-5 hit, a bongo-fueled rave-up titled “For Your Love.”
No matter. Enter Jeff Beck, one of the most supremely talented musicians to ever pick up a Telecaster. That’s when things got really interesting. With Beck on board, the Blues was sacrificed at the alter of psychedelia as the Yardbirds twisted their sound in new and unique ways on songs like, “Heart Full of Soul,” “Shapes of Things,” “Over Under Sideways Down,” and “Train Kept A Rollin’.” Fuzz pedals, sitar, and enough feedback to pin your eyes to the back of your brain. This became their hallmark.
The group’s bassist, Paul Samwell Smith quit sometime in 1966. Again, no matter. Jeff Beck simply phoned up his old mate, and one of the best session players in London, Jimmy Page, to fill in. It didn’t take long before Page swapped out four strings for six — Chris Dreja took over on bass — and for a supremely brief moment in time, the Yardbirds could rightly boast the greatest two-guitar lineup ever conceived.
This version of the band only recorded a few songs together before Beck himself departed. The best is called “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” The unrealized potential that lives in the grooves of that single, galloping 45 remains one of the greatest “What-if’s” of that entire era.
When Beck left in 1967, Page naturally took the reins. Or he tried to anyway. The band’s management called in a ringer, a renowned pop producer named Mickie Most, to help pilot The Yardbirds back to chart dominance. But when the time came to record, Most’s instincts ultimately failed him. Page could see the future and wanted to record heavier, twisted material; songs like “Dazed and Confused.” Most forced them to lay down treacly pop compositions like “Ha Ha! Said The Clown” instead. The results were obvious.
The final epitaph for the Yardbirds was best summarized in a 1970 essay written by one of their most ardent acolytes, rock critic Lester Bangs. “The Yardbirds for all their greatness would finally fizzle out in an eclectic morass of confused experiments and bad judgments,” he wrote. “Because the musicians in the Yardbirds were just too good, too accomplished and cocky to do anything but fuck up in the aftermath of an experiment that none of them seemed to understand anyway.”  From: https://sonicbreadcrumbs.substack.com/p/yardbirds-jim-mccarty-interview

Fern Knight - From Zero To Infinity

Fern Knight is an American psychedelic folk band currently based in Washington, D.C. Formed in 1999 by Margaret Ayre (née Wienk), the group performs music inspired by the spooky, pastoral sounds of classic British acts like Pentangle and Steeleye Span.
The band is the primary vehicle for Margie Wienk's singing and songwriting. Since 1999, Fern Knight has been a part of the burgeoning folk underground from annual tours of North America, mainland Europe and Scandinavia to lending her cello/double bass/vocals to many recordings, shows and tours of Alec K. Redfearn, Espers, Greg Weeks, Birch Book/In Gowan Ring, Damon and Naomi, Ex Reverie, Mountain Home, Orion Rigel Dommisse and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Her other musical endeavors include co-writing and co-directing the alternate score to Czech new wave film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with cohorts Greg Weeks and Brooke Sietinsons in The Valerie Project (Drag City, 2007).
With its fourth album Castings (vhf records), Fern Knight weaves an uncommon sound from far-flung musical roots. Under classically trained cellist/guitarist/vocalist Margaret Ayre's unwavering direction, this DC / Philadelphia quartet continues to gracefully color her tightly arranged, smartly produced songs with echos of British folk leanings in the manner of The Strawbs, Sourdeline's ancient trad-folk and old-school riffage in the vein of English progressive cult-rockers Asgard.  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Fern+Knight/+wiki

Bigelf - Gravest Show On Earth

On this third album (from 2008) by the exciting USA progrock formation Bigelf I notice more variety and less emphasis on a bombastic vintage keyboard sound than on their previous two albums. Just take a look at the huge amount of guest musicians, especially the The Gallows Orchestra, The Section Quartet and The Kung-Pao Horns. Due to their contributions Bigelf sounds like The Brian Setzer Orchestra (brass in Blackball) and ELO (omnipresent violin sound in Gravest Show On Earth and The Game). And often Cheat The Gallows sounds like a tribute to many sixties and seventies Classic Rock Bands, I notice hints of Marc Bolan (Superstar), Black Sabbath (Blackball, Race With Time and Hydra), The Beatles (Money, It's Pure Evil), The Doors (Blackball) and Pink Floyd (Race With Time).
But Bigelf succeeds to sound like Bigelf because of the way they blend their distinctive elements like the compelling atmospheres featuring strong vocals (with that cynical undertone), heavy guitarwork (I love those fat Black Sabbath inspired riffs) and a lush Mellotron sound, especially on The Evils of Rock & Roll (fiery guitar solo), The Game, the dynamic and alternating Race With Time (delicate Floydian slide-guitar and sensational interplay between powerful guitar and intense violin-Mellotron) and Hydra (great break with synthesizer flights and heavy guitar riffs). The two dreamy tracks are very tastefully arranged: flute-Mellotron, fiery guitar and an orchestra in Money, It's Pure Evil and acoustic rhythm-guitar with choir-Mellotron a long a wonderful, very moving guitar solo in the emotional No Parachute. The long final composition entitle Counting Sheep is their most ambitious work, it sounds like a mini rock-opera with lots of shifting moods, multiple breaks and captivating musical ideas, Bigelf in its full splendor as a progressive rock band and for sure Bigelf has progressed on Cheat The Gallows.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=849

Jefferson Airplane - Blues From An Airplane / Runnin' 'Round This World / J.P.P. McStep B. Blues / Go To Her

The musical revolution ignited by the Beatles in the '60s exploded in many directions. Coast to coast, bands were forming. From the most earnest teenagers to the more savvy young adults, music was a unifying force. New York City had its own flavor, as did Los Angeles, but the city that would ultimately transform the landscape more than any other was San Francisco, with Jefferson Airplane leading the way.
Formed in 1965 by singer Marty Balin and guitarist Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane took the fire of the British Invasion and the Byrds' folk-rock jangle, and created their own style. With the addition of lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, bassist Jack Casady, singer Signe Toly Anderson and drummer Skip Spence, the Airplane were ready to take flight.
After building a rep in San Francisco throughout the year, the band signed with RCA Records in late 1965 and began work on their debut LP. Though RCA had Elvis Presley at the top of their roster, they had yet to sign a full-fledged rock 'n' roll band. Sessions began on Dec. 16 in Los Angeles with the songs "Runnin' Round This World" and "It's No Secret," both of which would comprise the band's debut single.
Released in August 1966, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off traces the line from the Beatles to the Byrds to the new sound the Airplane were making. The album opens with the haunting "Blues From an Airplane," which sets the tone for the trip. The vocal blend of Balin, Anderson and Kanter was strikingly original, as was the instrumental interplay between Kantner and Kaukonen.
The LP didn't arrive without some controversy: Their label decided some of the lyrics were too much for the public to handle and requested changes to three tracks, "Let Me In," "Run Around" and "Runnin' Round This World," which was relegated to a B-side and contained the phrase "fantastic trips."
"They'd find all this meaning and give it a great deal of importance," Balin said in the book Got a Revolution. "Trips was just a slang word to us, part of the language. They'd sit down with their censors and talk to us and we'd say, 'You guys are crazy!'"
The album spanned the sunshine glow of "Come Up the Years" to the grit and dirt of "Tobacco Road," and the haunting waltz of album closer "And I Like It." Their version of folk rock was a lot different than the L.A. or New York acts who walked similar ground. This was the birth of the San Francisco sound that would captivate so many bands over the next couple years.
A January 1967 cover story on the band in Crawdaddy called Jefferson Airplane Takes Off "the most important album of American rock issued this year." The band was gaining momentum, but within its ranks significant changes were on the horizon. Spence quit the band in March 1966 to form Moby Grape, opening the door for Spencer Dryden. And Anderson gave birth to her first child in May, and left the band in October. Her replacement, Grace Slick, joined the group the night after Anderson's final gig, cementing Jefferson Airplane's definitive lineup.  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/jefferson-airplane-takes-off/

The Smithereens - Behind The Wall Of Sleep / Blood And Roses

New Jersey’s The Smithereens had been around since 1980, releasing a couple of independent EP’s, but their first full-length album is where the story officially began for anyone beyond their local scene. When the bass-driven single “Blood And Roses” hit the airwaves, it fit in perfectly with both classic rock & current music. Here was a band steeped in ‘60s British Invasion groups like The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Hollies, but in lead vocalist/songwriter Pat DiNizio they had a unique talent who used those artists as inspiration for songs that sounded like no one other than The Smithereens. His bandmates (lead guitarist Jim Babjak, bassist Mike Mesaros and drummer Dennis Diken) were deceptively sophisticated, providing clever arrangements to seemingly straight-ahead songs like “Time And Time Again,” “Strangers When We Meet” and “Behind The Wall Of Sleep.” As good as their rockers are, it’s the subtler tracks that make Especially For You so special. Suzanne Vega adds sweet harmonies to the lovely “In A Lonely Place,” and the acoustic break-up song “Cigarette” is an accordion-accented delight. My college cover band played a few Smithereens songs which were always well-received, and since I went to school in New Jersey I’ve always felt a close connection to their music. They went on to release more great records but Especially For You is probably their most diverse collection of songs and it holds up extremely well nearly 3 decades later.  From: https://kamertunesblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/thirty-year-thursday-the-smithereens-especially-for-you/ 

Castle Rat - Sun Song

When Castle Rat take to the stage, you’re met with a fever dream’s assortment of a D&D party: a plague doctor, a vampiric count and a woodland druid. Up top, singer Riley Pinkerton – in the guise of “The Rat Queen” – leads this merry band into fabled adventure, each show climaxing with her solo sword duel with the rodent-masked, stockings-wearing, scythe-wielding Rat Reaperess. But despite having become a successful global festival act off the back of their 2024 debut album Into The Realm, their odds-and-ends fantasy appearance born in the clubs of Brooklyn came about by accident.
“When I started the band it was just a name and we all wore black, but then we got booked on a Halloween show so I very last minute crudely put together the characters and the costumes out of cardboard boxes and paper mâché,” Riley reveals. “It was so fun we just thought, ‘What if we do this every time?’ Now I needed a reason as to why I am the Rat Queen and there’s a plague doctor and a vampire, so I retroactively wrote the lore and it tumbled into what it is.”
With bluesy yet battle-ready classic doom metal underpinnings like Sabbath riffs plunged deep into the dreams of Robert E. Howard, everything about Castle Rat’s presentation, from their look to the vintage production of their albums, creates the impression of a lost band from 80s fantasy movie Deathstalker. It’s 1985 all day here, their deliberately analogue aesthetic showcasing the handmade costumes over elaborate digital artwork.
“For me it was important for both records to be photographed covers,” says Riley. “A lot of metal bands will get fantasy art of a warrior chick, but that’s not representative of what you get on stage. Doing a high fantasy metal band but rooting it in a homespun DIY foundation is what makes it believable and something that people want to be a part of.
"They can see that I’ve sewn my own costume, and there’s threads hanging off of it because it’s something I just did in the pandemic when I had a lot of time, and I made my own chainmail that’s falling apart tied together with shoelace from the dollar store. Down to the name, a castle is grand and it’s royal, but we’re the rat!"
This bespoke approach to the weird and wonderful conjuring images of teenage tabletop campaigns carries over to Castle Rat’s output. Their second album The Bestiary came hot on the heels of Into The Realm. Where Realm…struck a real balance in tone between scuzzy and heightened, capturing exactly the feel of discovering a secret doom act from the genre’s primordial years in the back of a dusty record bin, The Bestiary sees them set their sights on grander things, incorporating orchestration and more progressive terrain whilst retaining that core swords-and-sorcery sound.
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“I’m still using stuff from my personal life to flesh out the songs,” Riley divulges of the album’s titular theme, a term any fantasy nerd will be familiar with as a catalogue of mythical fuzzy fellas manifesting here in simple punchy titles like Wizard and Unicorn. “Each of the creatures represents either a person in my life or an experience, and that keeps it real.”
As Castle Rat’s central focal point, despite her equally outlandish companions, Riley is also sensitive to the perception that her role in the band is a visual gimmick and not a creative force to be taken seriously. “In my late teens if I was walking through a train station with a guitar bag on my back, a number of men that would come up to me and ask, ‘You actually know how to play that thing?’, which I think is an experience unique to being a younger woman in music,” she says. “Sure, like I just like carrying a guitar-shaped backpack!
"There’s the insecurity, like people will think, ‘Oh she looks the part and she sings, so the guys in the band must write all the music’. But I take a lot of pride in starting this band and creating this universe. At this point, if someone says I can’t play guitar, then why is everything going so well?”
With Castle Rat pretty much not acknowledging any trends or developments in the zeitgeist past the high fantasy metal of yore, they may seem at odds with the genre-mashing and digitalisation that makes up much contemporary metal. Yet their swift burst in popularity suggests a healthy appetite for a band who can tap into worlds of myth and escapism as vividly as they can. “At the end of the day I just wanna play the music that I love,” Riley sums up. “I feel like trying really hard to keep up with the times is a great way to fall into a trap of immediately sounding really dated. Where, if you go far enough back it’ll just be classic.
"Sometimes I look at how I did my eyebrows two years ago and cringe, so trying really hard to stay modern just doesn’t speak to me. I just want to live in this world, where I’m surrounded by Frank Frazetta paintings and the soundtrack is Black Sabbath.”
Beginning contributing to Metal Hammer in 2023, Perran has been a regular writer for Knotfest since 2020 interviewing icons like King Diamond, Winston McCall, and K.K. Downing, but specialising in the dark, doomed, and dingy. After joining the show in 2018, he took over the running of the That’s Not Metal podcast in 2020 bringing open, anti-gatekeeping coverage of the best heavy bands to as many who will listen, and as the natural bedfellow of extreme and dark music devotes most remaining brain-space to gothic and splatter horror and the places where those things entwine.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/bands-artists/i-take-a-lot-of-pride-in-starting-this-band-and-creating-this-universe-black-sabbath-homemade-chainmail-and-frank-frazetta-getting-to-know-castle-rat-the-fantasy-metal-sensations-everyones-talking-about 

Fever Ray - Live In Berlin 2018

As Fever Ray and in The Knife, Karin Dreijer has embodied many characters, but she’s never looked like she’s had this much fun doing it. When Fever Ray’s Plunge crash-landed last year, its gleefully shocking antics left us gasping for air. A world away from the steely presence of her Fever Ray debut, a series of videos saw Dreijer inhabit a wide-eyed, genderless body to flesh out the album’s anarcho-queer vision, and employed a cast of characters to toy with its BDSM basement aesthetics. These characters appeared again in the visuals for the Plunge tour, introduced to us in a series of Top Trump cards, looking like Mortal Kombat fighters from an alien planet ruled by women.
These characters comprise Fever Ray’s band, and they appear tonight at the sold out Berlin show. Seems like someone’s been watching Glow – a purple hue descends on the stage and the band members arrive one by one with all the camp ferocity of a wrestler entering the ring. As they stomp to the front of the stage they each work a kind of Street Fighter goes to Berghain look: sporting whips, lycra, body paint, head-to-toe PVC and – a personal favourite – a body builder muscle suit, bright orange and cinched at the waist by pink glitter pants. Karin Dreijer follows, sporting the demonic baby look from her videos, the light reflecting off her bald head and Vaseline-smeared make-up. Her t-shirt, which says ‘I love Swedish Girls’ (with ‘Swedish’ crossed out in black tape), is a not-so-subtle reminder of the themes fizzing through the album.
Indeed, the whole show drips with lust. While The Knife’s farewell tour had an element of stage school theatrics, tonight is pure joy. The women take their places – two on percussion, one on synths and two singers joining Dreijer at the front – as they rattle into new material, embellishing tracks like An Itch and A Part of Us with earthy live percussion, thick bass and choreographed dance moves. In between bounding round the stage, the three singers move in unison, with armpit whiffs, finger sniffs, and fists up for This Country’s rally cry: “This country makes it hard to fuck”. This biggest reaction of the night is, unsurprisingly, to their quite literal illustration of the album’s lyrical trigger switch: “I want to run my fingers up your pussy”. It’s a punishing -10 degrees outside tonight but it’s pretty steamy in here. One demonstration of Plunge’s carnal pulse sees the three act out a ménage à trois, taking it in turns to sub and dom – hair is pulled, legs are hoisted over bodies, faces pushed toward the floor.
These intoxicating moments are harshly contrasted with material from Fever Ray. Pivoting between extroversion and introversion, the suffocating domesticity of the debut is reflected in stark, low-lit performances. The singers huddle motionless in a corner of the stage, singing about TV and concrete walls. For Red Trails, one singer twirls with silver wings billowing around her, like a phoenix rising from an oil spill, and we are brought back up to the heavens again. The pink and purple haze of the strip lights turns into rainbows for the encore of If I Had a Heart and Mama’s Hand – one song about lovelessness and one about longing – before the band gather at the front, resembling a depraved Spice Girls. In a show packed with joy and strength and pride, their collective presence feels truly nourishing. More than anything, tonight traced the scale of Fever Ray’s journey – stepping out from claustrophobia into the wild unknown; from domesticity to a new kind of family.  From: https://crackmagazine.net/article/live-reviews/fever-rays-lust-fuelled-live-show-brings-plunge-to-shocking-vivid-life/

Galley Beggar - Live at the Moira Furnace Folk Festival 2011

Galley Beggar are part of a new wave of British acid folk bands alongside Trembling Bells etc, and although they have had several releases before their new album, Silence and Tears is their first on Rise Above, hence their inclusion on the bill tonight. I have been looking forward to seeing them play live after playing their album to death over the previous weeks. Their melodies are beautiful and somewhat melancholic (reminding me in mood of the two COB albums), and they set a different tone to the evening.
It’s one where darkened trees hang heavy in autumnal skies, and crows gather on freshly harvested fields. Maria O’Donnell’s vocals are beautiful and have a sense of wild wood magic as she sings songs like “Empty Sky” and “Geordie” in a crisp, clear tone that clings to winter trees. Celine Marshall’s violin adds an extra element of sadness to the some of the songs, while David Ellis and Mat Fowler’s guitars have a touch of Richard Thompson’s psychedelic folk style about them. The worst thing is that their set seems painfully short as it would have been fantastic to bask in their song’s atmospheres for a while longer.  From: https://freq.org.uk/reviews/lucifer-galley-beggar-saturn-live-at-the-borderline/ 

The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin / Tuesday Afternoon - Bouton Rouge 1968

 The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin - Bouton Rouge 1968

 

 

The Moody Blues - Tuesday Afternoon - Bouton Rouge 1968

 

The Moody Blues secured their place in prog history as Days of Future Passed shot up the U.K. rock charts. But the project, released on Nov. 10, 1967, was fraught with deep uncertainty, weird happenstance and then – at least in the U.S. – initial lack of interest.
The Moody Blues had started out as a rootsy band, as far removed from symphonic rock as they could be. "We were originally a rhythm-and-blues band, wearing blue suits and singing about people and problems in the Deep South," frontman Justin Hayward told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "It was okay, but it was incongruous, getting us nowhere, and in the end we had no money, no nothing."
Then came what Hayward says was "a series of wonderful accidents." Their label, Decca Records, was looking to recoup money it had advanced the Moody Blues, while promoting then-new stereo recording equipment that produced the so-called Deramic Sound. Already a hit with classical listeners, Decca was hoping stereo would take off with the rock crowd, as well.
"Up until that time, most albums, of course, were only in glorious mono," bassist John Lodge told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000. "Later, we had to actually go back into the studio and remix it into mono, because so many people wanted it in mono. They didn't have stereo players." Decca suggested blending classical and rock ideas, in the hopes of speaking to both audiences.
"They wanted us, as a way to pay off that debt, to do a demonstration record of a rock version of Dvorak with [conductor] Peter Knight playing the real Dvorak between our pieces and an engineer mixing them together so people would say, 'Oh, that sounds wonderful in stereo,'" Hayward noted on the Moody Blues' official site in 2012. Producer “Michael Barclay, whose project it was to get these demonstration records together, suggested we do it the other way around: We do our songs and then Peter Knight would orchestrate pieces in between our songs, and so that's what we did."
It was a stroke of genius – or, more correctly, a stroke of accidental genius. Through sheer force of will, the Moody Blues created the perfect vehicle for a groundbreaking combination. "We said, yeah, sure we'd do it," Hayward told the Los Angeles Times, "and then, after we said yes, we went down to the pub and decided to do our own songs instead."
The Moody Blues had been developing an album-length theme that used the elements of a passing day as a metaphor for phases of life. They'd build off a track already written by keyboardist John Pinder titled "Dawn of a Feeling," leveraging the entire project – eventually, that is – on "Nights in White Satin."
Hayward used the song to explore the ending of one love affair and the beginning of another, keying on the image of a set of new sheets he'd just been given. "I just sat down at the edge of the bed with my big 12-string and wrote the song in like four minutes," Hayward told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1999. "I think there's a lot of truth in it."
He took the same 12-string into rehearsal the next day to play "Nights in White Satin" for his bandmates. "They sort of went 'Oh, yeah, it's alright,'" Hayward added, laughing. But then Pinder said, "Play it again, Justin," and began to add Mellotron accompaniment. Once he created the now-familiar harmony line on the keyboard, they knew they'd hit upon something magical. "Fairy dust. The invisible, unknowable thing," drummer Graeme Edge told the Naples Daily News in 2012. "It's just one of those songs where everything came together correctly."
That was true for the entire project, as these new tracks alternated with interludes from the London Festival Orchestra. The two groups' peak collaboration arrived during the soaring conclusion of "Nights in White Satin."
"It took us five days to finish, and, after each day we'd send them down to Peter Knight, and he'd write these orchestral arrangements," Hayward told the Los Angeles Times. "We'd edited all the tapes to be the right length, and [the orchestra] just played live in the gaps."
By the end, they'd taken the then-nascent idea of rock concept albums to an entirely new level. "It was revolutionary," Lodge told the St. Petersburg Times. "Usually an album was six hit singles and six B-sides of songs that people didn't particularly want to listen to. We put it together as an album, 40 minutes of real music. That's why there's no stops, no scrolls, in Days of Future Passed. One song goes into the next song. It goes through as a complete work of art."
Thing is, Decca didn't know about any of it. The Moody Blues didn't present Days of Future Passed until the entire recording was complete. "It was a conspiracy among all us musicians who were present," Hayward admitted in his talk with the Los Angeles Times.
The label executives were, by and large, nonplussed. "When we played the finished product to all these old directors at Decca – which is a fine, upstanding old English music firm – they said, 'This isn't Dvorak,'" Hayward added, "and we said, 'No, but this is what it is.'"
In another happy twist, it turned out that the Moody Blues had a lone ally. "Fortunately, a guy from the States was there, called Walt Maguire," flautist Ray Thomas told the Hit Channel in 2016. "He was the head of London Records, which was Decca America, and he said, 'If they don’t want it, I certainly do. This is going to blow up our sales in the States.' So, that’s how it got released."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/moody-blues-days-of-future-passed-album/