Album Review: Glaswegians – Severance

Independent Bandcamp artists – they can be quite the unassuming species, can’t they? Amongst the layers of aspiring lo-fi bedroom artists; waves of opportunists jumping on the vaporwave memewagon and a scattering of experimental oddities, there is gold to be panned.

Vancouver-based artist Glaswegians is one of those rarities, with 2017’s Severance being better than an underground independent release has any right to be. Severance is 65 minutes of progressive, folk and post-rock excellence that puts most professional artists’ work from this year to shame.

The Astonishing Prog Opera That Could Have Been

On January 29th, Dream Theater released their thirteenth studio album: a two-disc “rock opera” simply named The Astonishing. Amongst a mixed reception at first, the band’s second ever concept album received generally favourable reviews, but nowhere near their more acclaimed releases, such as Metropolis, Part 2: Scenes from a Memory, Images and Words, and Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. Recently, the band shared an updated version of the song “Our New World”, with Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale. Now, why would Dream Theater create a new version of their song more than seven months after its release, and what does it say about The Astonishing?

Listen to Victor Wooten’s Prog Metal Band, Octavision

Octavision just shared their first single, Three Lives, on Youtube. Octavision is the band in which the acclaimed and legendary funk and jazz bassist Victor Wooten takes part. Besides him are Steve Weingard, a jazz keyboard player known for his time with Dave Weckl, Roman Lomtadze, a progressive rock and metal drummer, Ara Torosyan, a keyboardist and music producer, and Hovak Alaverdyan, guitarist and main writer for the band.

Mike Portnoy to Perform the Twelve-Step Suite Live

As headliner for ProgPower USA XVIII, on Friday, September 8, 2017, the event announced Mike Portnoy will play live, for the first time, his famous twelve-step suite. See the video announcement below.

The Neal Morse Band Releases a Lyric Video for Their Upcoming Album

Mike Portnoy often said, on social media, that what we now know as The Similitude of a Dream – The Neal Morse Band‘s next double concept album -, is the best thing he’s ever played on, and is unlike anything they have ever done before. I’m paraphrasing, but he did succeed in raising the expectations of a lot of people, myself included. We all know Neal Morse to be a stellar composer, and a great multi-instrumentalist and singer, but his compositions can feel a bit formulaic at times. The most striking example might be the twin sisters on Transatlantic’s Bridge across Forever, namely “Duel with the Devil” and “Stranger in Your Soul”. The two songs share the same length, and go through similar phases in their development. Now, maybe that was the whole concept behind the album, but you can definitely see strong similarities in other works, such as Sola Scriptura and The Whirlwind. Once again, all these albums and songs I mentioned are some of my favourites, but you just know they came from the same guy.

Length Matters: The Peter Snell Experience – Life in the Controposhere

Welcome to another segment of Length Matters, a sort of prog dick measuring contest where we showcase the longest prog songs that come across our ears. This time, it’s from a band called The Peter Snell Experience, all the way from New-Zealand, and the piece of interest is called ‘Life in the Controposphere’, which was released in 2014.