AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST
RGRANT MOON has a rummage down the back of the Prog sofa for the ones that nearly got away…
egal Worm’s Jarrod Gosling can do little wrong in these parts. Variants (Klove) is a companion piece to the 2017 debut from Cobalt Chapel, his folkpsych pairing with the sensational Cecilia Fage. In full tinkering mode, Gosling revisits that album and peels away the instrumentation, reimagining the material through electronic ambient layers. It’s a liquid light show for the ears – woozy, mindaltering, soporific, pagan rite-scary in parts.
Mark Rowen played guitar in Breathing Space with Mostly Autumn’s Olivia Sparnenn and Iain Jennings, and his self-released debut album Radiance takes you to that comforting, 80s netherworld prog does so well. Catchy, retro power-rockers like Feel Like Letting Go and Trick Of The Light are brought home by Lisa Box’s committed performance, and there are proggy twists aplenty on acoustic ballads and full-on 10-minute workouts. It may be a selfprofessed ‘amateur’ project, but Rowen and band offer much for fans of the Autumn, Touchstone and the like.
East and West meet once again on IV, the fourth, self-released album from Boston’s Esthema. Exotic instrumentation and scales take us across Eastern Europe and into the Middle East, and the band’s challenging, jazzy time signatures keep their globalista aesthetic well grounded. Theirs are languorous, meditative and courageous explorations that cross boundaries and stretch the imagination. Last year Damian Wilson and Adam Wakeman embarked on an acoustic tour, and their self-released studio recording Stripped brings together 11 songs from the setlist. Highlights include their own The Sun Will Dance In Its Twilight Hour, Headspace’s Soldier and Bowie’s Life On Mars. It sounds exactly as you’d imagine: two committed artists paring things right back and letting their talents shine.
Leeds’ Envizible Orkestra mark their 30th anniversary this year, and while A Catharsis Of Science (Maysonic) is screaming out for a better mastering job, it still demonstrates the heart and neo/ fusion smarts that have kept them keepin’ on all these years. The likes of 15-minuters Constant And Everchanging and Live A Little Longer (Suite) show them at full tilt, axes and keyboards tastefully blazing.
Finally, it’s hard to overstate the sheer natural musical gift of vocalist, instrumentalist and composer Jacob Collier. A YouTube sensation deserving of the name, the 24-year-old has been championed by Quincy Jones, ears pricked up at his 2016 debut In My Room, but Djesse Volume 1 (Hajanga) is on another level. Featuring Amsterdam’s Metropole Orkest, vocal group Voces8 and Laura Mvula, it’s a dizzying, modern mash-up of progressive jazz, classical, pop and funk, broaching everyone from Glass to Gershwin, Prince to Parliament, Jellyfish to Thundercat, with a bit of The Manhattan Transfer thrown in. Collier’s prodigious understanding of vocal harmony is scary, and with three more volumes in the pipeline, 2019 could be a big year for him.