-
Review – Glass Hammer – Black Light
It’s good to be back, I’ve spent nearly eighteen months in the wilderness, unable to focus on anything to do with music, apart from listening to it. The previous Progradar site was no more and I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it! Thankfully, music saved the day. New albums from The Tangent…
-
John Wenlock-Smith Interviews Magic Pie
-
Review – Red Bazar – Blood Moon – by John Wenlock-Smith
Red Bazar are the band that Peter Jones uses when playing band shows as Tiger Moth Tales, in return for which he adds keyboards and vocals to their songs and elevating them in the process with his excellent voice and his deft keyboards. It’s a symbiotic relationship as both parties gain significantly from it’s existence.…
-
Review – Solstice – Clann – by John Wenlock-Smith
Solstice are currently on a noticeably upward trajectory and this new album from the veteran proggers certainly agrees with that statement as it isa most uplifting and positive album of some very fine music indeed. The album has a mere six tracks (if you include the bonus), all around the 5 or 6 minute duration,…
-
Review – Oak – The Third Sleep
With their highly anticipated fourth album, ‘The Third Sleep’, Norwegian progressive rock band OAK delivers a striking exploration of societal complacency and the struggle of the individual. The album contrasts light and darkness, both thematically and musically, seamlessly blending folk-inspired acoustic passages with the raw intensity of progressive metal, evoking echoes of Opeth and beyond.…
-
Review – Pattern Seeking Animals – Friend Of All Creatures – by John Wenlock-Smith
Pattern Seeking Animals have recently released ‘Friend of All Creatures’, their fifth album in five years. They have also changed the label from InsideOut to G.E.P but, otherwise, it’s pretty much the same as earlier releases, i.e. this is a band that, in tandem with excellent writer John Boegehold, take the core of Spock’s Beard…
-
Review – Nicholas de Renty – Retour Au Bercail – by John Wenlock-Smith
Progressive music certainly has the ability to throw you some strange or odd musical curves, take this album from French solo musician Nicholas de Renty entitled ‘Retour Au Bercail’ which translates as meaning ‘Return to The Fold’ . Nicholas performs the majority of the instruments apart from on the track Traquenard where he is joined…
-
Review – Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate – The Uncertainty Principle – by Roger Trenwith
Learn to live with uncertainty, learn to cope with reality? so begins the last stanza of the last track on this, the eighth album by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate. That’s a line that applies more than ever in these unsettling times we live in, as much as it applies to front man Malcolm Galloway’s…
-
Review – Sharks: Car Crash Supergroup – The Island Years 1973-1974, 3CD Box Set – by John Wenlock-Smith
It almost seems that in the 1970’s you couldn’t move for supergroups, that strange scenario where bands split, only to re-emerge in a new combination of musicians. Some of these were very successful, like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, others less so, where the combination was just to volatile to exist peacefully enough to make their…
-
Anthony Phillips – Sail The World – New 2CD Remastered & Expanded edition
Released 25th April, 2025. Esoteric Recordings is proud to announce the release of a newly remastered and expanded 2CD edition of Sail The World, the evocative 1994 album by celebrated composer and guitarist Anthony Phillips. Originally composed and recorded for the UK television coverage of the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race, Sail The World became a…