AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST
GRANT MOON has a rummage down the back of the Prog sofa for the ones that nearly got away…
The second album from Connecticut’s Mile Marker Zero justifies the buzz around singer Dave Alley and band in New England. Fitted with serious chops and a solid theme, The Fifth Row (Prog East) deals with the rise of artificial intelligence. It flicks Waters-like through TV news channels to set the mood and period, and it buzzes through dizzying, BerkeleySet prog metal lines to push the message, with Spock’s Beard/Rush/Headspace song smarts in the mix too. It might run out of puff before the end of its 15-tracks, but it’s still a rich and engrossing concept album well worthy of your ears.
Proggers Bram Stoker broke up in 1972 and reformed 30 years later, only to dissolve again like a vampire in sunlight. This left guitarist/songwriter Peter Ballam with a bunch of unrecorded songs, which he has now recorded with guest musicians on Manic Machine (www.bramstokerarchives.com). Suitably supernatural tales – a psychic employed by MI5 during WWII, a little girl unaware she’s a ghost,
Mayan prophecies – are set to burbling Hammonds, driving guitars and spirited vocals. It’s old-fashioned, meaningful material, with Ballam showing the new blood how it’s done.
Keyboardist Stephen Bennett, bassist John Jowitt and drummer Fudge Smith have a combined portfolio featuring – among many others – IQ, Arena, Tim Bowness and Pendragon. Together with guitarist H (not that one) and vocalist Tommy Fox they are Time Collider, whose debut release Travel Conspiracy (www.timecollider.com) is an assured, live-sounding set drawing on neo and modern prog. Given his seasoned backing band, Fox’s relative inexperience can’t help but show, but he’ll develop in time, and these songs, and this band, are well worth bearing with in the meantime.
Dennis Young made his bones with avant-garde New Yorkers Liquid Liquid, and all these decades later he’s still creating quirky synth music pushing boundaries and buttons. Synthesis
(Bureau B) is packed with blips and blops and wibbles and washes you might expect more from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop than a co-writer of the muchsampled Cavern. Amid the digital melee of Teotihuacan and Pulsar, you can sense the pioneering mind of an artist still seeking, still pushing. For that alone, it’s thrilling and admirable.
Dennis Young would get a kick out of the inventive stylings of Us, Today. This trio from Cincinnati make melodic, textured, instrumental music drawing on avant-jazz and post-rock, all with a left-field pop feel. Second album Computant (It.Me.Music) is a treat, with effected vibraphones vying with mathy drums grooves, crunchy guitar motifs and electronic elements. It’s incredibly listenable and thoughtfully composed stuff infused with, ahem, good vibes. Ruth Underwood fronting Tortoise, anyone?
Finally, the reissue of 2016’s Harmony For Elephants (Esoteric Antenna). It’s part of a larger body of work raising awareness of the charity www.elephantsforafrica.org, with Steve Hackett, Nad Sylvan and Anthony Phillips among the artists contributing some truly beautiful, sweeping and often heart-rending pieces, befitting the animals and landscapes that inspired them.