Never ones to attempt things in any logical order or sequence, our third review of a Beggars Opera album, following on from Act One and Pathfinder, is of 1971′s Waters of Change, the second album from these high profile entrants on the keyboard offenders list.

One may remember, if memory is your thing, how I effused praise upon 1970′s Act One, as though it were quickly going out of fashion, and, indeed, stated it would chart exceptionally high if I ever got around to knocking out an HFoS Prog Top 10. When things are looking anyplace other than up, the shit-off-a-shovel speed with which Alan Park attacks the organ on ‘Raymond’s Road‘ can prove powerfully efficient in bettering a miserable bastard’s frame of mind.

Such unbridled exaltation may not have stretched to the third album, 1972′s Pathfinder, but what could one expect when the first offering was so damn good? It’s the same old story, same old song, as far as Waters of Change is concerned, with this second crack of the whip sort of bridging the gap between the other two.

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album reviews, prog rock

Tangerine Dream, as I believe I’ve said before, is a band capable of polarising opinion. I don’t think it’s possible to just “dip into” a TD album, in as much as it’s possible to punch one’s self into a state of unconsciousness.

For those who sit in the “hate” camp so far as Tangerine Dream is concerned, the latter might be a preferable alternative to listening to Zeit, the 1972 offering from the Krautrock trio; their third album and the first to feature Klaus Schulze’s replacement, Peter Baumann.

Of course, for every force there is a counter force; every action, a reaction; and every negative, a positive. So popular thinking would have we idiots believe. Therefore, for every man that has listened to a Tangerine Dream… movement(?) and decided the fabric of their fibre is incompatible with his own rigorous standards, there is one that has declared his undying devotion to the synthesiser abusing godfathers of ambient/electronic music.

If one was to attempt the construction of some form of rod, with the express intention of shoving it down the back of their shirt to correct a somewhat unsightly stoop, they would also be making a rather clunky metaphor that could be applied to anybody attempting to describe the music on Zeit. Never has the quote: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (attributed to Martin Mull, Elvis Costello, Steve Martin and just about anybody else who has ever said anything remotely amusing) seemed more apt.

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album reviews, krautrock, prog rock

Acqua Fragile was an Italian progressive rock band who recorded their albums in English. Nothing unusual in this, you might say. After all, the likes of Banco, Le Orme and Osanna all recorded English-language albums. The difference here is that Acqua Fragile recorded exclusively in English, a point that is leant an almost tragic air of irony by the fact their brace of 70′s albums failed to secure a release outside Italy.

Until now, that is. For the end of this month (June 2011) sees the first UK release of both 1973′s Acqua Fragile and 1974′s Mass-Media Stars.

Cue some heavily accented vocals from none other than future PFM singer, Bernardo Lanzetti, who is often likened to Peter Gabriel following a dose of helium. He is in this review, anyway. The eponymous debut draws in all manner of influences; such is to be expected from a band who’d gigged extensively prior to entering the recording studio, supporting such acts as Soft Machine, Curved Air and Gentle Giant.

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album reviews, prog rock

The decision by prog’s own shrinking violets, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, to foray into the corporate aspect of the music biz, bore fruit as the Manticore record label. From the off, they brought a rum assortment of characters to the stable, from Italian proggers such as PFM, to American hard rockers like Stray Dog, via English singer-songwriters… well, Keith Christmas anyway.

The numbered days of the label, beyond the collective wombs of the ELP ideas machine, is reflected in the title of this new compilation, Envelopes of Yesterday – The Manticore Records Anthology 1973-1976, brought to us by the good people at Esoteric.

It’s a two-disc box-set, resplendent in a lavish booklet and 26 tracks harvested from the albums released during the label’s modest existence. As such, it is a real mish-mash in both musical style and quality.

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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock

Little known fact: Barclay James Harvest had a profitable sideline in providing treatment to sufferers of chronic insomnia. Such was the effect of listening to one of their albums. These ventures into alternative therapy found their nadir on yawn-inducing delights such as Once Again, Time Honoured Ghosts and Gone To Earth before they gave up this remedial pursuit and began releasing any old crap.

Nevertheless, this ability to reduce grown men to leaden slabs of semi-comatose apathy wasn’t uniform across the entire backcatalog. For a start, there was the quite sublime debut album, Barclay James Harvest, which hinted at a glittering future in the psychedelic, prog-folk arena. And then, six years later, came another blot on an, otherwise, near-spotless copybook in their pursuit of the “UK’s Blandest Prog Band” title. Octoberon, released in 1976 and sporting a Roger Dean-esque cover.

Octoberon takes every uncharacteristic spark of life that presented itself along this smooth path of rock monotony and condenses it into one agreeable volume. It may not match their self-titled debut for sheer excellence, but it is easily the second best thing Barclay James Harvest released and their most committed foray into the realms of progressive rock, prior to becoming just another band trying to keep up with the dramatic changes required to survive the unemotional, synthetic obsessions of the forthcoming decade.

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album reviews, prog rock

Skin Alley existed in the category vacuum that formed between the death of psychedelia and the dawn of what would become labelled as prog rock.

As with the likes of Clark-Hutchinson and assorted members of their Ladbroke Grove brethren, Skin Alley inhabited the underground rock cadre specifically tuned to blasting out driving jams from a field of hair, while all around lost their heads to a concoction of Extra Strong Mints and herbal tea.

Big Brother is Watching You – The CBS Recordings Anthology brings together the first two albums from Skin Alley – their 1970 eponymous debut and it’s follow up (also 1970) To Pagham and Beyond – along with a single ‘Better Be Blind’ and the unreleased soundtrack album to the equally unreleased film, Stop Veruschka. A rare old package and no mistaking, Guvnor.

Skin Alley blended a formidable sonic stew, flavouring their musical melting pot with elements of psychedelia, folk and the occasional dash of jazz horns, played out against a snarling undercurrent of bluesy riffage. This was served to an eager audience of free-festival-dwelling counter culturites, on a sizeable platter of proto-progressive rock. Close your eyes for a second, while listening to Big Brother is Watching You, and witness the seething mass of barnets that their particular brand of underground stylings sailed across, undulating as a single consciousness on a summer’s afternoon in Dorset, 1969.

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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock, progressive folk

Hell’s teeth! It would seem Head Full of Snow has become a magnet for jazz-rock fusion of late, what with Pierre Moerlen’s Gong and various late-Soft Machine releases arriving on the HFoS doormat. The reviews of the Soft Machine releases are currently on hold, while work is carried out on a “Which is better?” Soft Machine feature, similar, but grander in scope, to the Pink Floyd one from a couple of years back. Coming soon, to a screen near you.

The soon-to-be reissued Isotope albums from the 1970s are the latest to arrive. The fact they successfully bypassed the jazz filter that hums like an electric fence around the letterbox of HFoS Towers, means they’ve won, by nothing other than the Darwinian theory of natural selection, a reprieve and a window to prove their worth on the HFoS stereo system.

Now, you only have to read back through the archives to catch the drift of my fairly well documented feelings towards jazz in all its manifold forms. Nevertheless, perhaps I’ve undergone a sort of jazz epiphany in the last few months, as my previous hostility has thawed a little, allowing me to find enjoyment in some of the post-Third Soft Machine releases, where enjoyment shouldn’t really exist. Likewise, the last few days spent in the company of Isotope’s self-titled 1974 debut, its follow up Illusion, released in the same year, and 1976′s Deep End, has seen my tolerance of jazz rock shift further afield than the latter-day musings of the Softs, for, and I don’t say such things lightly, I quite enjoyed them.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Arthur Brown, crazy by name, extremely strange by nature. A man known to strap a cake tin to his head and set it alight, while gyrating like an escaped loon to the frantic, yet pleasingly Hammond organ-heavy blasts of psychedelic showmanship that emanated from the band’s self-titled debut. A recommended listen for anybody who enjoys that type of thing.

Strangelands is that album’s follow-up, recorded in 1969 but lost in the wilderness for a further two decades, before earning a 1988 release on the little known label, Reckless Records.

Without wishing to sound too harsh on old Arthur – whose original outing and the later Kingdom Come albums all make the HFoS approved list – it’s not difficult to see (or hear) why this didn’t find favour with Polydor when first hurled in their direction.

You want tunes, lyrics and some notion that there’s a point to all this? No dice! You want Arthur to sing and establish a logical progression between this and the previous album? Still no dice! You want an incoherent jumble presided over by a ranting lunatic? Be my guest.

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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock

Two items of Pink Floyd news hit the headlines last week… Yes, two! Quite remarkable for a band whose ability to entertain all but ran dry following the departure of Syd Barrett and the release of their second album,  1968′s A Saucerful of Secrets – though 1970′s Atom Heart Mother and 1975′s Wish You Were Here do have their moments.

In the first bit of news, Roger Waters’ current 2011 touring of his criminally overrated snorefest The Wall, threw out a surprise for those fans who’d paid to see it at the O2 arena on Thursday night and somehow managed to stay awake. For only the second time in 30 years, he was joined on stage by the surviving members of Pink Floyd. Former adversaries, Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason.

Now, thankfully, I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it to have been a smug burying-of-the-hatchet type moment, accompanied by the musical equivalent of an overdose of Mogadon. Apparently, Nick Mason played a tambourine.

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feature, news, occasional musings, prog rock, psychedelic rock

Gryphon must’ve sat somewhere near the front of the class, when their BTEC National course in progressive rock came to cover artwork. Take Red Queen to Gryphon Three, for instance, and witness the beast presented below.

It ticks all the necessary boxes when creating the right impression for its intended audience: A sage old man contemplating his next move in a game of chess; the pieces all in the shape of the mythical Griffin from which the band take their name. A landscape from the pages of Le Morte d’Arthur stretching out beyond the stone arch windows at which he sits, complete with riverside citadel, woodland fauna and imposing mountain ranges. A feudal world of the fantastical in the finest tradition of Roger Dean and countless other artists who’ve brought their imaginative prowess to the kingdom of 1970s prog and heavy rock. Hark at me; I’ve turned into posh art-botherer and professional prole-baiter, Brian-bleeding-Sewell.

But the fact remains, in 1974, when Red Queen to Gryphon Three was released, there was no call for an awkward band-shot; just straightforward fantasy daftness, as was to be expected. One must remember these hairy types could get away with such folly back then, without the slightest worry of a visit from Special Branch and their truncheon-wielding grunts.

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album reviews, prog rock, progressive folk

Tricky German buggers that they are, Tangerine Dream is possibly one of those rarest of breeds, the review-proof band. It would make no odds what I, or anybody else, had to say regarding them, their albums, or the new Sunrise in the Third System anthology, as truth be told, either you like Tangerine Dream or you don’t.

Like Marmite, there’s no middle ground here. At least, that’s how I see it. The lack of melodies and anything approaching an approximation of a “tune” would send the casual listener running a mile; as would the fact it’s not unusual for a Tangerine Dream track to stretch past the 20 minute mark without anything as cumbersome as lyrics getting in the way.

Strictly instrumental, Tangerine Dream’s music is not about catchy hooks or hummable ditties. Like many of their Krautrock waffenbruder, when it came to using the recording studio as a canvas upon which to create their complex, sometimes impenetrable soundscapes, there was to be no compromise.

It’s true that Tangerine Dream shared their name with the title of the debut album from psych-folkies Kaleidoscope, but if you were expecting anything sailing close to that particular shoreline, then you’d be in for a huge disappointment. This is psychedelic voyaging of a different variety; pensive, labyrinthine, menacing. Space rock from the deepest, blackest depths of space; stretching further into the sparse, icy extremes of the outer realms than Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ ever dared imagine.

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album reviews, krautrock, prog rock, psychedelic rock

Renaissance was a fine band. They were also fully paid up members of that most exclusive of cliques – the one inhabited by stout fellows such as Soft Machine, Gong and Bucks Fizz – whose clientele completely changed their line up at some point during their career.

For me, the original incarnation of this band of symphonic prog folkies was better than the Annie Haslam-fronted one, and as such, when the original five members reformed in 1976 under the moniker of Illusion (the title of Renaissance’s second album), there was much rejoicing at HFoS Towers.

… That’s to say, there would’ve been, had I not existed only as a mardy one year old, surviving on a musical diet of Elvis, Queen and Jim-bloody-Reeves. Nonetheless, the celebrations would’ve been cut short, when, not long after, vocalist and guitarist Keith Relf electrocuted himself and died. Merriment would’ve recommenced though, albeit with a heavy heart, when Illusion announced that, following a cabinet reshuffle and the addition of Eddie McNeil on drums and John Knightsbridge on lead guitar, they would carry on.

Of course, none of this happened – aside from the reformation, the electrocution and the reshuffle – but had I been capable of anything other than lounging around in a nappy, waiting for another turn at the trough, I’m certain it would have.

Released in 1977, Out of the Mist is a fine comeback and a marked improvement on Renaissance’s second and last album as the original unit – the still tasty, but occasionally watery, Illusion. Hope we didn’t lose anybody there.

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album reviews, prog rock, progressive folk

Four bank holidays in the space of 11 days? HFoS cannot pass up on such an audacious challenge to one’s liver as this. Therefore, we will be back next week or possibly the week after, dependent, of course, on whether:

A)    I am still alive

B)    I am still alive

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music vid, prog rock, psychedelic rock

It being Easter, the time is surely ripe for a wee gander at Jethro Tull’s audacious follow up to Thick as a Brick, the bone of contention that is A Passion Play.

Born of fire, following the abandonment of what was originally intended as Tull’s next album – the unfinished tracks of which are available on Nightcap, offering a window into the early creative process that would coagulate further down the line, here – A Passion Play caused its fair share of, how shall we say, “discussion” upon its original 1973 release. Critically panned and dismissed by some as a prime example of how the excesses of progressive rock would see the music disappear up its own arse, Ian Anderson’s second stab at a “mother of all concept albums” may lack the mischievous sense of fun that permeates every single bar of its somewhat glorious predecessor, but it’s certainly not the foul residue wrung from Satan’s purple loon pants that certain quarters would have you believe.

In fact, it’s nothing short of the truth when we at HFoS say that, along with Benefit from 1970, A Passion Play narrowly missed out on a much coveted spot in our Five Must-hear Jethro Tull Albums, featured here last year. It was pretty much a toss-up between those two and Minstrel in the Gallery; evidently, the coin fell in favour of the latter. If you don’t believe me, take a look for yourself.

But what I’m trying to say is that A Passion Play is, to a certain extent, a royal pleasure, preferable to anything that emerged post-Heavy Horses, and, when it all comes down to it, one hundred times better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

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album reviews, prog rock, progressive folk

One of the great unanswered questions that immediately springs to mind when considering the career of Keef Hartley, is thus: During the 1970s, was there a Cheyenne Indian wandering the rugged plains of South Dakota, dressed as a drummer from Preston?

We may never know. If any of the Native American fraternity happen to be reading this and can shed some light on the matter, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. It has been known to keep me awake at night.

Which brings us to Dog Soldier, the short-lived outfit formed in the wake of the Keef Hartley Band’s collapse, and their 1975 self-titled album. The artwork maintains the American Indian look that Hartley sported in previous incarnations and during live performances, albeit with a futuristic slant, as was the vogue for album covers in the mid-70s, particularly among prog and some AOR acts.

Dog Soldier largely falls under the spell of the second of those musical pigeonholes, which, in my laziness, I am wont to crowbar in at every given opportunity. Those that stay the course, however, through this journey into the innocuous reaches of 1970’s American FM radio, are in for a reet royal treat at its close. One that rewards the perseverance of the less-than-inclined with 11 minutes of loveliness.

Prior to that it’s a festival of mid-Atlantic country/blues rock, occasionally rugged around the edges, whose sun-kissed Californian complexion revisits the likes of Steely Dan, The Eagles and The Band, courtesy of a bloke from the murkier climes of Lancashire.

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album reviews, blues rock, classic rock, country rock, prog rock

During the early 1970s, when other bands were following the lead of Traffic and “getting it together in the country”, Groundhog Tony McPhee was holed up in his own pastoral setting, licking his wounds following a particularly bitter divorce.

Bad news for McPhee, good news for us. For it explicitly informs at least one track on his 1973 solo effort, The Two Sides of Tony (T.S.) McPhee, as well as dictating the prevalent mood of the remainder.

Taking its title at face value, The Two Sides… offers just that. Two wildly differing styles, separated by the flip of a platter.

Side 1, as it would’ve been in the days of vinyl, shoots from the hip, with a collection of extremely raw, largely acoustic blues numbers that hark back to McPhee’s salad days as a blues guitarist in the earlier part of the 1960s. It also delivers the musical equivalent of a bloody nose to his ex-wife. Side 2 is given over to a single, nineteen minute progressive piece entitled ‘The Hunt’. More of which, in a moment.

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album reviews, blues rock, prog rock

Like a comfortable pair of slippers, a favourite pipe, or that faithful old dressing gown – the one with the paisley print and frayed tassels on the cord – you know where you stand with a Roger Dean album cover.

The chances are it’ll be somewhere in the 1970s; there’ll be a faint whiff of something illegal in the air and clutched in your sweaty paw will be 12 inches of progressive/heavy rock, or, at a push, some progressive jazz/fusion. Extra points, of course, if it’s a gatefold sleeve. The wonderful sci-fi/fantasy etchings of this prolific artist pretty much sum up the more grandiose reaches of the progressive rock era, with his outlandish paintings of organic, alien landscapes and paraphernalia gracing many a cover. Yes, in particular, have had a long association with Roger Dean, through album artwork and stage design, and when it comes to epitomising the spacier excesses of prog, they don’t come much more spacier than that (up until Going For the One, at least).

But we seem to be digressing once again. Where were we? Roger Dean album covers: like a Val Doonican sweater.

Which brings us (somewhat belatedly) to Greenslade, who also enjoyed a brief dalliance with the artist on their eponymous 1972 debut and the 1973 follow up, Bedside Manners are Extra. Once again, the Dean seal of approval, a multi-armed warlock-type set against the silhouette of a ye olde town, alerts the tentative listener to the content hereon: progressive rock, rich in lashings of keyboard noodling.

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album reviews, prog rock

Gong! One million hippies can’t be wrong!

There, that’s the marketing slogan for any future release from the band of onetime chemically-enhanced space troubadours, well and truly sorted.

To a generation of hippy folk, wilfully indulging in the pleasures of hair-growth, displays of public nudity, daubing one’s body with arcane psychedelic symbols and smoking enough of the planet’s naturally grown herbal “remedies” to floor an equally hirsute Woolly Mammoth, the name Gong will conjure up memories of free music festivals in the deepest, darkest regions of the West Country; LSD-fuelled voyages into the regions beyond our own galaxy; and, of course, 33 minute guitar solos, courtesy of a cerebrally-expanded Steve Hillage.

The late 60s and early 70s provided a particularly memorable period of creativity for the intergalactic doyens that inhabited planet Gong and even when the flying teapot eventually grounded and the founder members had departed, there was Pip Pyle’s replacement, drummer Pierre Moerlin, to take up the mantle and continue the brand.

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album reviews, jazz rock, prog rock

Those crazy Dutch! What with their pancakes, pornography and “specialist” coffee shops; they are a nation whose very fabric is cut from the most permissive of cloths. It pervades the culinary, the literary and what gets sprinkled on the Old Holborn. Let it be a lesson to us all: part a man from his bicycle and he’ll cock the proverbial snook at your fascist agenda ten millionfold.

This liberal mindset made the Dutch music scene of the late 60s and early 70s a hotbed of psychedelic and progressive experimentation, and Fantasio Daze is a fruity selection of some of the rarest English language singles to hit the Netherlands during this era.

It’s safe to say that every artist appearing on Fantasio Daze is new to HFoS and, as is the case with the majority of compilations, the spectrum of ‘fro-frazzlingly good, to knee-shreddingly awful is enthusiastically covered.

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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock

Krautrock reissue label, Reactive, continue their unearthing of some of the lesser known lights of the German progressive music scene with the release of Berlin’s own Murphy Blend and their lone album from 1971, First Loss.

A decidedly heavier brew than previous output, this time around Reactive have plundered the German Kuckuck label and recovered a band similar in sound to the underground stylings of Ladbroke Grove’s High Tide, such is the considerable density of their musical etchings.

Whereas High Tide would tear their songs asunder with the hacking riffs of Simon House’s violin, Murphy Blend employ a more conventional Hammond organ, wielded with significant finesse by the album’s chief composer Wolf-Rodiger Uhlig. It’s the organ’s unmistakeable resonance that fires this blend forwards, accompanied, as it is, by a crunching combination of corpulent guitar and bass work, underpinned by some energetically sweaty drumming.

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album reviews, krautrock, prog rock

Long mooted, though seemingly reluctant to leave its orbit, the Fruits de Mer space rock compilation has finally dropped from the darkest edge of the galaxy and landed, still smoking from atmospheric re-entry, on the doormat of HFoS Towers.

Yes, Roqueting Through Space is finally here and the question on the lips of all those discerning followers of FdM Records will be the one that lies behind 99.9% of what’s etched here on a weekly basis: Is it any ruddy good?

Well hold back one second and give yourself time to ruminate on such a query, while HFoS provides the all important specs regarding the inter-planetary vessel known as FdM 18.

Following on from the first commercially available Fruits de Mer album, A Phase We’re Going Through, the label has once again fulfilled its unwritten remit to provide some of the finest tunes of yesteryear, re-imagined and laced with a little of what you fancy from some of the most esoteric bands doing the rounds today.

Through a fuzz of galactic debris, Roqueting Through Space soars across the celestial plains, harvesting tracks originally recorded by the likes of Neu!, Pink Floyd, Can and Brainticket. Liberties have been taken with the “traditional” definition of what constitutes space rock, with the inclusion of versions of The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ and Julian Cope’s ‘I Come From Another Planet, Baby’. Neither artist immediately lends themselves to the image of excessively hairy, chemically enhanced voyagers, embarking on a psychedelic trip to the furthest reaches of their mind, but as the FdM press release says, “… it [space rock] means different things to different people – spacey, spaced-out, sci-fi, electronic rock … We decided to drop the pretence of defining the genre, and instead allowed our chosen bands to decide for themselves what ‘space rock’ meant …”

Capital idea! And the end result is a suitably transcendental testament to all things beyond the reach of man and his rubbish inability to fly. Or something like that.

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album reviews, krautrock, prog rock, psychedelic rock

In the quieter moments that occasionally arise, here at HFoS Towers, I often find myself wondering what it is the Belgians have ever done for us. Chocolates, you say? Continental lagers? Sprouts? A handy catchphrase for Stuart Hall? Maybe, but what else? The aqueducts?!?

Of course, in the realms of 70’s progressive rock, Belgium surrendered the likes of Univers Zero, Present and today’s treat, Machiavel.

Cannibalising the name of the famous Italian philosopher, Machiavel was, if the liner notes of this reissue of 1977′s Jester are to be believed, “one of the most important progressive rock groups to emerge from mainland Europe in the late seventies.”

A bold claim indeed, and who are we at HFoS to dispute it? What is certain is that this bevy of bristling Belgian barnets is partial to the occasional Moog.

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album reviews, prog rock