And here comes another quick sprint through the albums I didn't remember to write about....


Dead Can Dance- Anastasis.
A beautiful album displaying two distinct types of vocal. For the female led tracks, it's like the high priestess of ancient Sumeria calling you to prayer over swirling middle eastern rhythms. Utterly hypnotic. The male vocals are more Scott Walker and a bit more of an acquired taste.
There are individual tracks but the album lulls you a trance like state so titles are meaningless.
A unique and mesmerising piece of work


Lynyrd Skynyrd - Last Of a Dying Breed
Forget dying, this album suggest dead. After God and Guns (their best album since the 70's) this is a tepid affair lacking ideas and some terrible cliched lyrics.
Poor Man's Dream and Something to Live For are some of the most uninspired Skynyrd I've heard. The title track isn't bad and a couple of bonus live tracks mean it doesn't end on a low.
The Classic Rock magazine the album came with is very good though !


Seth Lakeman  - Tales From The Barrel House.
A return to the folk of Kitty Jay after the more glossy rock sounding Poor Man's Heaven.
Seth plays all the instruments and there's a concept with the tracks all about tradesman. Blacksmiths Prayer and Brothers of Penryn are top notch folk songs but there is a  major problem.....
I actually prefer the glossy rock sound of Poor Man's Heaven


Hussey-Regan- Curios.
A covers album by the lead singers of The Mission and All About Eve respectively. Some covers work and some don't but that's the nature of these albums. Witchita Linesman is lovely and really benefits from the duet format. A speeded up version of Ordinary World from Duran Duran also works but Ashes to Ashes is a bit of a mess. There are a couple of new compositions of which Regan's Dangerous Eyes is the best. 
An intriguing album at best but anything featuring these two vocalists is worth a listen.

So the plan was to review all new albums I bought this year and I've failed that in some style......
Even avoiding the buying of reissues, I'm still a bit behind, so here's a whirlwind review of those I missed:


Enslaved - Riitir.
More brutal Scandinavian metal. Some concessions to melody and the the occasional clean vocal but really just pummelling heaviness to annoy your neighbours with. The lengthy Death in the Eyes Of Dawn is a pretty good summary of the album

Rosa Rebecka - Songs For Mrs Beautiful
Gentle folk with a Scandinavian lilt including some sung in Swedish. Nothing spectacular but if you need a break from making your ears bleed with Slayer then the title track and Heartful of Seaweed make a pleasant distraction

Egbert Derix - Paintings In Minor Lila.
I'm not sure the world was screaming out for a Dutchman to cover lots of Marillion songs on a grand piano and string quartet. Not as odd as it sounds and both Fish and Steve Hogarth lend spoken parts. However, not even a Marillion masochist needs 3 classical variations on Marbles I though.....

Smoken - Spoonful Of Stars.
One of the greatest wasted talents ever. Lauren Smoken has a voice to shame Janis Joplin but insists on singing self penned songs which sound like the wine bar blues Gary Moore was peddling in the 90's. A complete waste of an amazing voice

Lydia Loveless - Indestructible Blues.
Like a runaway female Georgia Satellites, this album is was brought up on banjos, moonshine and rednecks. Some fantastic rollicking country rock such as the tracks Bad Way To Go and Do Right. And it's always a pleasure to hear a woman not afraid to let rip with some industrial language

Insomnium - One For Sorrow.
Probably the best of the five albums here. This time Finnish death metal which makes greater use of melody and clean vocals than Enslaved. The use of more than one vocalist and keyboards makes this a standout record in an already crowded Scandinavian metal market. The opening salvo of the instrumental Inertia followed by Through The Shadow is the highlight of the album

Very rarely do a band release a great album in a year only to top within 12 months but Crippled Black Phoenix are becoming the masters of this trick. Their latest offering No Sadness Or Farewell is a masterpiece.

It starts off with a 12 minute instrumental called How We Rock which is simply the best thing they have ever recorded. Starting off slowly with some oriental theme going on in the background it breaks into a guitar solo Dave Gilmour would be proud of. The song almost stops, and then the guitar picks out a naggingly repetitive motif before the piano and then drums join in and all the while gently building and increasing the tension. It's like Tubular Bells with added balls - cymbals are added, power chords, choral backing and still it builds. Over 4 minutes to go and there are even real bloody tubular bells joining in now. Listening to this through headphones on heavyweight vinyl is just awesome as the whole thing reaches a crescendo before letting you down gently and leaving you with the ringing bells.

There are other tracks but you need to breathe and relax after that opener. Hold On (So Goodbye To All Of That) starts like U2 at their most pretentious before deciding to end the song an an accapella crowd sing along.

Jonestown Martin is just indescribable really - Heavy guitar, synths effects stolen from Hawkwind and according to the sleeve notes 'Monk Voices' !!

It all ends with Long Live Independence a galloping rocker very similar to Laying Traps from the last album (which was good enough to nominated in the Prog Magazine awards recently)

This is a band so full of invention and variety that they deserve so much more than to be adored as cult heroes by those who dare to try. This is the real Prog for the new age and not the tepid outpouring of one Mr S Wilson

How We Rock - indeed......

One of this year's easiest reviews - Doro has released her latest offering and it's called Raise Your Fist

And it sounds EXACTLY like a Doro album..... Grab yourself a studded leather wristband, throw some devil horns and just pretend grunge never happened.

Details are really superfluous but let's see - Track featuring Lemmy? Check. Power Ballad sung in German? Check. Terrible track titles? Check (Little Headbanger and Rock Till Death being great examples)

To be fair the power ballad Engel is fantastic song and the album overall is a big dumb slab of enjoyable metal.

The art work below is just a joy to look at !

two very quick reviews.....

Blueneck have released an instrumental album, Epilogue, as a soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist !
It is exactly that - a backdrop to put your own visuals to.... Lots of piano and shimmering guitar but you do miss the vocals of the earlier albums. Whilst it worth a listen you won't return to it again and again like the Fallen Host album

(and I think it was probably a film like Aliens they had in mind......)

                                                                                                                 

Biggest disappointment of the year so far is the new Placebo EP - 5 tracks and only one is in any way memorable. The lead of song B3 could well be an outtake from the Battle For The Sun album, and the rest appear to be filler with the exception of I.K.W.Y.L. This is the standout track with a nippy little guitar riff and lyrics straight out of the New Model Army songbook of vengeance. One of their best songs since Nancy Boy

I approach the forthcoming album with caution

What is it with French music - You wait ages and suddenly they're producing bands all over the place (Delusion Squared, Gojira) and now Alcest

Apparently they used to be a black metal band but the album Le Voyage de L'ame shows very little of that heritage. By the sound of it they may have travelled a similar path to Opeth. A lot of the track are long with plenty of instrumental passages. Vocals appear to be in both English and French but are part of the sound rather than standing out for you to dissect the lyrics.

Là où naissent les Couleurs Nouvelles is the one track to feature growled vocals in the background and Faiseurs de Mondes includes some brutal drumming to keep the whole thing interesting.

There are also a lot of Pink Floyd influence with some beautiful chiming guitar lines especially on the extended outro of the album closer Summer's Glory.

This is an eclectic album but one of my favourites so far of the year. Music to immerse yourself in

Two of the albums I've most been looking forward to this year and neither disappoints...

Firstly the Smoke Fairies have returned with Blood Speaks, their second album.
This album still retains what the press call a "spook folk" feel but with a harder edge than before. Some tracks such as Awake have that ethereal feel they perfected on the debut album but the more guitar driven Feel It Coming Near show their sound palette is still expanding. The harmonies are reserved more for the choruses and it interesting to hear both girls voices to the fore in different places

The outstanding track is The Three Of Us featuring some raw slide guitar and one of the best lyrics they have yet written. The title track Blood Speaks starts at a much more sedate pace over skittering drums before building to a glorious crescendo showing off the harmony vocals to full effect.

An album that shows no shortage of ideas after a stellar debut and still driving forward to further recognition

                                                                                                   

Secondly Marillion have returned with their 17th (!) studio album, Sounds That Can't be Made and it's a stunning release. Not as sprawling or as unfocused as the last couple of releases, it appears having the stop gap acoustic album was a good idea to allow the creativity more time to flow

I had worries that the band was becoming a vehicle for the singer Steve Hogarth but this is a fully functioning band production. Highlights are many and very few negatives.

The opener Gaza rocks harder than anything since possibly This Strange Engine. It's a complex 17 minutes complete with political lyrics and imagery and some searing guitar soloing from Steve Rothery. It's a bit of a shame that Hogarth feels the need to apologise in the sleevenotes for the lyrics - Stand by your words and defend what you sing
The return of Rothery's guitar is really welcome and can be heard to good effect on the title track and Lucky Man.
The Sky above the Rain is a poignant album closer with soaring peaks of music built around the lyric of a disintegrating relationship.
Album highlight for me is the lengthy Montreal which is just a series of diary entries which somehow ends up as a fascinating set of images of a trip to Canada with the whole band contributing some immense musicianship.

This is simply Marillion's best album since Marbles - a consistent set of brilliant songs