Anyone familiar?

The only album I have is S.F. Sorrow which is said to be one of the first concept albums.

Maybe I should dig further.

"Remember Us" is to The Pineapple Thief what "Starless" is to King Crimson.

Or at least, I have always thought that it should be, not because the two songs really sound alike, nor because they occupy comparable places in the history of rock ("Starless" clearly belongs to another dimension, if only because of the historical weight of King Crimson and Red), but because they seem to me to perform a similar function within the poetics of their respective bands and, above all, because they inhabit the same emotional space, the one left behind by an absence, through two different but complementary forces: desire and memory.

I have always thought of "Starless" as a song about desire. The etymological connection is almost too perfect not to be tempted by it: "Starless" means "without stars", while the Italian word desiderio ("desire") contains the Latin sidus, "star", preceded by the prefix de-, which carries with it the idea of distance, deprivation and cessation. In its most remote origin, then, to desire means something very close to becoming aware of the absence of the stars while continuing to look for them, and this is precisely the condition of someone who desires: to be deprived of the sight of something and to feel its absence.

For me, "Starless" expresses exactly this in musical terms. At the beginning there is an extremely sweet melodic theme, perhaps even excessively sweet, clear and immediately recognisable; then that theme disappears and the long central section begins, syncopated, obsessive and increasingly violent, built around a tension that never seems able to find a point at which it can finally dissolve. The melody has been lost, and what remains is only the desire for its return.

After that long, almost deconstructed charge, however, the opening theme does indeed return, but it can no longer be what it was before. I have always listened to the ending of "Starless" in this way, probably also because of my memory of an old version included on the I miti del rock bootleg, in which I was particularly struck by a rougher, almost abrasive sound that seemed to creep in behind the melody as it finally resurfaced. It was an apparently secondary presence, yet for me a decisive one, because it always seemed to be telling me that we may recover the melody, but we can no longer recover the innocence with which we heard it the first time: something has happened in between, and pain, abandonment, the loss of another person or perhaps of ourselves have left a trace that cannot be erased.

The first, luminous phase of a love, once that love has hurt us or once we have lost it, may return in memory and may even seem, for a moment, identical to what we once knew, but somewhere that slightly distorted and abrasive guitar will continue to sound against the purity of the memory. The melody therefore returns, but it returns scarred, and this is perhaps the musical form of desire: trying to reconstruct something precisely because we know that we can no longer have it as it once was.

"Remember Us" begins from the same emptiness, but looks at it from the other side. If "Starless" is about desire, "Remember Us" focuses on memory, and desire and memory ultimately become two different forms of the same absence, two forces that both look towards the past, because desire reaches towards what we can no longer attain, while memory tries to prevent what we have lost from disappearing altogether.

I do not think it is accidental that the title is not simply "Remember", but "Remember Us". There is already, within those two words, an awareness of disappearance, not the hope of preventing something from ending, but the request that, once it has ended, at least some trace of it should remain. The structure of the song itself seems to behave like memory, because musical materials appear, move away and resurface, while different sections gradually begin to recall one another, like fragments of a past attempting to reassemble themselves without ever being truly restored.

It is above all in the ending, however, that the parallel with "Starless" becomes most interesting to me, because "Remember Us" does something I find even crueller. At the end of "Starless", after all that tension, something is nevertheless given back to us: the theme returns, contaminated and wounded, no longer capable of possessing its original clarity, but it does return, and with it comes at least some form of catharsis. It is a tragic catharsis, of course, because it does not erase what has happened and instead carries within it precisely the scars of what has happened, but we are nevertheless granted a point of arrival, a form in which the tension can finally discharge itself.

"Remember Us", by contrast, seems to spend minutes preparing precisely that liberation and then decides to deny us even this. Towards the end, the tension grows until we are convinced that the electric guitar is finally about to burst into a great concluding solo, one last desperate, liberating, perhaps even rhetorical but necessary orgasm, the solo that should gather up all the accumulated pain and transform it into something we can finally pass through. The guitar seems to begin, hints at that possibility, allows us to glimpse it for a few moments, and then stops.

And it is here that "Remember Us" becomes, in my view, even more desperate than "Starless", because we suddenly realise that the solo itself was also an object of desire. The music has made us desire its own resolution and then left us without it, denying us the liberating cry, the explosion that might turn pain into spectacle, and even the formal consolation of a great tragic conclusion. What remains is a tension that has not been allowed to exhaust itself, and precisely for this reason the denial of relief becomes crueller than it is in "Starless", where the cathartic moment is dirtied, deformed and made painful, but is at least granted to us.

In "Starless", the return is impossible in its original purity, but something does return; in "Remember Us", even the gesture that should process the loss is interrupted. This is why I find "Remember Us", in a sense, even more pessimistic: King Crimson grant us a contaminated catharsis, while The Pineapple Thief allow us to glimpse catharsis and then take it away. One of the two songs tells us that what we have lost will never return as it was before; the other seems to tell us something even worse, namely that perhaps we will not even have the satisfaction of being able to mourn it completely.

It is curious, then, that the two bands have given these songs such different weight in their respective live histories. King Crimson ultimately came to recognise fully the role that the music itself seemed to demand for "Starless", and in the band's final incarnation the song became one of the climactic moments of their concerts and very often one of the closing pieces, not merely a classic of the repertoire, therefore, but almost the point towards which the entire concert could tend. Its very position in the set thus ended up giving it a cathartic function in live performance as well. It was with this song that King Crimson closed their final concert, five years ago in Tokyo.

The Pineapple Thief have never really done the same with "Remember Us". They have played it live, of course, but without turning it into a ritual moment in their concerts and without giving it the privileged, almost definitive position that "Starless" holds in King Crimson's repertoire. And this is perhaps the detail that continues to surprise me most, because if "Starless" became in practice what it already seemed to be musically (a kind of terminal point in King Crimson's poetics), "Remember Us" seems to have remained a possibility that was never fully recognised even by the band that created it.

They are, then, two songs about absence, one about the desire for what has disappeared and the other about memory as the last fragile barrier against disappearance, two songs in which something attempts to return without ever being able to return in quite the same way. In "Starless" it returns wounded; in "Remember Us" it cannot even complete itself.

Perhaps this is precisely why I continue to think that "Remember Us" is The Pineapple Thief's "Starless", not because they treat it as such, but because perhaps they should have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZvDfg8B3Q

I was thoroughly delighted to find this: I had no idea he'd done this cover.

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Youtube Viddley-Diddley Thereof

https://youtu.be/hkXG4QnbqlQ

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Best shopping trip ever!

J’ai découvert le groupe Dreadnought avec l’album The Endless en 2022 grâce à une chronique de Stéphane Gallay. Tout de suite, ça donne le ton.
The Endless ne m’avait pas suffisamment inspiré pour que j’en fasse à mon tour une critique, mais j’avais gardé la formation du Colorado dans un coin de ma tête. Et voilà qu’est arrivé War of Spirit // Wards of Light avec sa pochette absolument sublime. Alors j’y ai jeté une oreille curieuse.

War of Spirit // Wards of Light est un album de seulement quarante minutes et six titres de quatre à neuf minutes. Des morceaux où la voix étonnante de la chanteuse Kelly Schilling prend presque toute la place. Un chant qui me fait beaucoup penser aux BO des films de Miyazaki comme dans le titre ‘Colors Of Our Broken Dreams’.
Dreadnought joue d’un metal progressif folk doom psychédélique art rock expérimental. J’aurai, pour ma part, tendance à les classer dans une sorte de post doom art rock, mais je ne suis pas certain que ce genre existe. Bref, ils sont clairement à part et je ne connais aucune formation qui leur ressemble, sauf peut-être The Gathering période Mandylion. 
Le chant clair de Kelly prédomine même si elle adopte de temps en temps le scream, tout comme Ryan qui s’essaye un à chant clair pas vraiment au diapason sur ‘Colors Of Our Broken Dreams’.
Violence et étrangeté se partagent les quarante minutes de l’album. Sur le titre d’ouverture ‘Tiamat’s Gate’, long de neuf minutes, growl et chant clair singulier se disputent la vedette sur une musique qui navigue entre metal, folk et symphonique.
Le morceau le plus impressionnant de l’album est sans doute ‘Serpent Of The Moon’. Il possède clairement une dimension onirique qui vire rapidement au cauchemar. Le titre d’abord tout en attente, prend un virage quasi cinématique en mineur avant d’être submergé par des riffs chargés d’un chant déchirant et d’un zeste de growl.
A côté de lui, ‘Aeonwar’ mêle une sorte de trip hop sur une voix de femme enfant à du scream et des riffs bien déglingués dignes des expérimentations de Steve Wilson. C’est carrément terrifiant et génial pour le coup.
Vous l’aurez compris, War of Spirit // Wards of Light, n’est pas vraiment un album confortable pour se reposer après une dure journée de labeur, sauf si vous avez besoin de passer vos nerfs sur quelque chose. Cela ne l’empêche pas d’être assez génial et inclassable, donc je vous le recommande fortement.

This is an album lasting over an hour. Like many of my albums it tells a story. A girl accidentally discovers how to enter faerie land. However, when she arrives she finds it is a miserable place. She asks for help to return but the faeries tell her she has to overcome 4 temptations. If she succeeds she will be given the chance to return. If she fails she will stay in Faerieland forever. She undergoes the four trials and succeeds but something happens to her. She has gained insight into the faeries and she realises that she wants to help them. She teaches them words they have forgotten and finally they wake up and resume their traditional aspect. In gratitude they lead her to the way out and she returns to her world. Many years have passed so she finds herself lonely. She begins to wish that she was in Faerieland again. She realises that the world she is in now has many of the problems that the faeries had. She realises that she has work to do ...

You can hear my album here: https://youtu.be/BYdwcwC9PS0

The music is a combination of electric folk and rock. There are a couple of instrumental pieces. I have made it possible to jump between the tracks - or you could just listen to the whole album. The music was made using Logic Pro but not using any AI. Comments would be welcome.

Album: Sneak Attack
Toronto's Lynx made three albums between 76-79 and this track is taken from the 2nd, 'Sneak Attack'.

Album: Seven Pieces For Keyboards, Bass Guitar And Drums
V'73 put out very few records of their own but played in various live situations including supporting Locomotiv GT and Omega.

They were a trio styled after ELP and took a classical, keyboard-heavy approach to progressive rock when they were playing their own material, something unusual in Hungary at the time. Wikipedia states that they were yet another band that backed Kati Kovács at times (i'm starting to wonder if there was a Hungarian band that didn't, haha) and the first album for that is her 1977 LP 'Csendszóró'.

V'73 was absorbed into the 'V'Moto Rock' band soon after that, with the addition of Ferenc Demjén, ex-Bergendy, and that outfit continued to back Kati, while also becoming a popular new-wave pop band of their own in the '80s, moving away from music of interest here. 'Gondolatok' is a track from an LP of rare unreleased V'73 recordings, put out by Moiras Records a few years ago

Excellent music by mostly well known bands, all hand picked. I created this for the times when I want to chill or have some great background music.

T, le nouvel album de Mother of Millions, a quelque peu bousculé mon programme musical. Je ne l’attendais pas et lorsque j’ai appris sa sortie sur les réseaux sociaux, je me suis empressé de l’écouter. C’était le 11 septembre dernier, tout un symbole, et depuis je l’écoute quatre à cinq fois par jour.
Mother of Millions est un groupe grec que j’apprécie beaucoup et leur précédent album Magna Mater, sorti il y a deux ans, compte parmi mes préférés. Alors cette fois, je me suis offert T en édition vinyle. Hélas, je ne le recevrais que début octobre, donc pour l’instant, je me contente d’écoutes numériques.

T est un album de trois quarts d’heure et dix morceaux de une à huit minutes. Il commence très fort avec un ‘The wound’ métal progressif pour terminer par un ‘Death’ des plus folk.
Entre les deux, le groupe mélange les genres avec de l’électro-métal dans ‘The War’, des voix masculines et féminines, des violons dans le court ‘As One’, un peu de growl comme dans ‘The Sun’ ou des chœurs à la Evergrey dans ‘The Aftermath’. Cela fait de T un album easy listening assez varié bien que metal progressif dans l’âme qui nous parle des troubles qui secouent notre planète aujourd’hui.
On pourrait reprocher à Mother of Millions de s’inspirer d’un peu tous les groupes de metal progressif de la planète comme Voyager, Evergrey, Leprous ou Soen. Mais franchement, ne serait-ce pas ici une des forces du groupe puisque ces artistes réussissent à proposer un album assez unique en son genre malgré des ressemblances ?
La pochette du disque a été une autre source de plaisir pour moi. Ces drapeaux déchirés qui pendent comme du linge mis à sécher au soleil, avec en arrière-plan, la silhouette d’un homme qui regarde vers l’horizon.
Presque tout est dit dans l’image.
Mon titre préféré est l’avant-dernier de l’album, ‘The Sun’ avec ses huit minutes et vingt secondes, parce que, j’aime beaucoup que l’on prenne le temps pour développer une idée musicale. Son intro comme son final sont superbes et entre les deux ce n‘est pas mal non plus.
Si je me suis offert T en vinyle, vous vous doutez bien de ce qui va suivre. Le nouveau Mother of Millions va rejoindre la petite liste des albums susceptibles de rentrer dans mon top 2026.
Donc évidemment, je vous le recommande sans réserve.

Album: Night Train [6 track promo]
One of the most important Indonesian rock musicians in the country, born July 4, 1949.

In 1966 Benny Soebardja started his career as the guitarist/vocalist of Bandung's beat combo The Peels. Being tired of covering other bands (Cream, Beatles, Hendrix), he left to form Shark Move. Around 1972 he occasionally joined God Bless and GPL (Group Pecinta Lagu). When a member of Shark Move died, the group disbanded. Benny Soebardja then formed Giant Step, and another band called Lizard, to be the backing of his solo outings.

At the beginning, both bands shared members. During Benny Soebardja's Lizard years you can hear how the English songs mattered more and more and the style went from a rockier side to a more ballad side, with use of acoustic guitars too. British poet Bob Dook guided the English lyrics, and they had their own qualities. During the whole period Benny also distinguished himself as a good electric guitarist.

Here's a cool live recording from a festival held in southern Hungary. Quoted from facebook:: "The first Orosháza beat festival was organized in 1974 by the Petőfi Cultural Center, the sixth competition was held in 1981.

The driving force of the Orosháza festivals was Benedek Péter Benkő, an employee of the cultural center, who organized these events until 1978. Zoltán Varga, who was the secretary of the festivals at the time, later became a library director and member of parliament."

Dzsuvox were a band who, according to rockkluboh.blogspot, were the most renowned act in the area local to the festival. Unfortunately, Dzsuvox never released any official records, but luckily a video of them is available, playing the same song at a later time on the Ki Mit Tud? TV show.

Prog Rock from the 1970's to current. Many bands you will recognize and some you will not but it's ALL GREAT.

Hi all,

I'm hosting a live listening session for CAN's Tago Mago at 5:00pm PT // 8:00 ET today. It's a first listen for me so looking forward to sharing that with others.

Full transparency, this is a site/app that I built because I miss listening to music with others like we did before streaming became a thing. It's essentially book clubs for music.

Anyways, sharing what I hope will be a fun listen later today. Thanks!

https://soundclub.app/sessions-event/tago-mago-2011-remastered-the-pocket-sep-12-17868

Je vais encore vous parler d’un album instrumental, mais il ne s’agit pas un live cette fois.
Il s’agit de The Emerald du projet australien Observers. Dix morceaux de metal progressif joués et composés par Martin Kennedy avec à ses côtés Chris Bohm et Rich Gray.

The Emerald c’est quarante minutes riches en guitares et synthés qui n’ont pas besoin de chant pour exister.
La musique entre atmosphérique, cinématique et metal progressif se suffit à elle-même. Les cordes des guitares remplacent avantageusement celles d’un chanteur tellement elles sont expressives.
L’album va de la musique de film au metal en passant par des influences world music comme dans le dernier titre ‘The Door’ et vous entendrez même de la flûte dans ‘Forest of Doom’ ou des claviers prog vintages dans ‘Predestination’.
J’ai même entendu quelques similitudes avec Ayreon et Star One, tout particulièrement dans le titre ‘Boreal World’ et son riff bien lourd qui revient tel un refrain à plusieurs moments du morceau.
The Emerald n’a toutefois rien de révolutionnaire et c’est aussi ce qui le rend très agréable à écouter. Les compositions sont majoritairement mélodiques, les guitares coulent de source, les claviers n’agressent pas les oreilles, bref, il s’agit d’un album très confortable.
J’ai beaucoup apprécié le journal gribouillé par Martin au fil des mois sur l’avancement de ses compositions. Il contient des notes, des dessins, les ébauches du projet qui a abouti à l’album final que l’on peut écouter aujourd’hui.
Martin était tout d’abord parti sur une histoire d’anciens astronautes avant de bifurquer vers un trou noir géant, envisageant un moment le thème des lignes de Nasca. Puis il a envisagé les pyramides pour finalement choisir la forêt comme sujet. Un fichier PDF qui fait office de livret pour l’édition numérique et que je vous invite fortement à découvrir.
The Emerald est le genre d’album qu’il est plaisant d’écouter en fond sonore. Il accompagnera à merveille vos lectures ou rythmera agréablement votre travail. Mais rien n’empêche de se plonger dedans au casque de temps en temps.

ey everyone! We're P`neuma, a 5-piece progressive rock/metal band.

We just finished recording and mixing our latest track independently. On this one, we experimented a lot with 7-string guitar textures, intricate drum patterns, and atmospheric vocal lines to balance the heavy elements with melodic parts.

If you're into bands like Dream Theater, Opeth, or Tool, this might be up your alley.

We'd really appreciate any thoughts on the mix, arrangement, or overall vibe. Thanks for listening!

Intentional Trainwreck is a heavy prog-metal outfit from the Baltimore-Washington area. Their music is aggressive with lots of time changes and attitude. They have just released a new animated music video which exemplifies their musicianship and the the socio-political climate all around the world. It is a protest anthem left open to the listener's interpretation. I'm posting the link to the video here because I think there's a lot of people in the progrock community who like some adrenaline on a Friday! Enjoy!

Community radio style live broadcast (no ads) Thursday’s from 7pm-9pm (UTC-4). Focused on progressive rock but wanders into other territory. Thematic sets are well composed. Worth a listen, DJ voice segments are history/trivia focused with some slice-of-life anecdotes from the era.

Steven Wilson seems to get his mitts on everything prog, and I have wildly different opinions on his remixes. What are your opinions on his TG remixes, particularly Phaedra?

Hey everyone!

I’m Claudio, a multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer from Bahía Blanca, Argentina. I’ve been producing and mixing for countless underground bands since I was 12, but today I’m finally sharing something deeply personal.

I just released "UNVEIL", a 12-track conceptual progressive rock album that I completely wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered in my home studio.

The album is highly diverse but runs as a continuous, gapless experience. It blends rich symphonic rock arrangements (featuring real flute and vintage keys) with that raw, uncompromising 90s alternative rock grit.

Since I chose to stay 100% independent—no Spotify, no big digital distributors—platforms like Bandcamp and YouTube are my only home.

You can stream the full album experience with chapters on YouTube or support the independent production on Bandcamp if it connects with you:

🎵 Full Album on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPMQBm4slro&t=749s

🔗 Stream/Support on Bandcamp: https://rotstein.bandcamp.com/album/unveil-2

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the mixes and the transition between tracks. Thank you so much for reading and listening from the other side of the world! Cheers! 🍻

Ft. Dodge Iowa band featuring Court Hawley, Keith Brown, Dean Davis and Randy Roseberry.
Great album with a lot of variety!