French TV’s latest CD, The Spanish Caper, is the 16th in their long history and their 2nd for Cuneiform.
Disc One is new songs recorded in Spain featuring charter member bassist/composer Mike Sary, guitarist Kasumi Yoneda (also from the Japanese band TEE), long-time drummer Jeff Gard, plus members of the French band Mentat Routage (who also make up French TV’s line-up when touring Europe).
The second disc is a collection of somewhat-obscure rock covers from the late 60s-early 70s. Songs featured include deep tracks from Iron Butterfly, Kinks, Mountain, Spirit, Procol Harum, Traffic, Steppenwolf, The Guess Who, James Gang and more The line-up…
Category: prog-rock
YES revisit their 2019 4 song mini-album From A Page with this expanded 15-track double album, featuring the original 4 songs alongside alternate takes & demos of songs written during these sessions, many of which would appear on the band’s subsequent album Fly From Here.
In 2010, after a last-minute show in Zacatecas, Mexico, the band (Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White, Benoit David & Oliver Wakeman) met up in Phoenix, Arizona to begin writing for the next YES album. This two week session would bear fruit to the 4 released songs in addition to “Into the Storm”, “Hour of Need” & “The Man You Always Wanted Me To Be”, all of which would appear on the Fly From Here album featuring Geoff Downes after Wakeman departed during the recording sessions.
Official 5CD box set featuring all of the surviving British radio and television appearances by the legendary Strawbs between 1966 and 1984.
The roots of Strawbs go back to 1963 when Dave Cousins and Tony Hooper founded the bluegrass duo The Strawberry Hill Boys. The first Strawbs’ album was issued in May 1969 and saw the band embark on a wonderful career which produced a series of classic albums. Dave Cousins was the visionary, gifted musician and songwriter at the helm of many line-ups of the band which at various times featured such notable members as Ron Chesterman, Tony Hooper, Rick Wakeman, Richard Hudson, John Ford, Blue Weaver, Dave Lambert, Chas Cronk, Rod Coombes, and John Hawken. Cousins’ musical vision…
Newly remastered 4CD box set by Peter Hammill featuring his first four studio albums issued on his own label, Fie! Records, between 1992 and 1996. Peter Hammill first came to prominence as the founding member and voice of the legendary progressive rock group Van der Graaf Generator.
Alongside his work with Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill has enjoyed a long career as an innovative and ground-breaking solo artist. In 1992 he established his own label, Fie!, to handle his solo work, beginning with the release of the acclaimed ‘Fireships’ that year. A more introspective work, the album was labelled in the original liner notes as “Number 1 in the BeCalm series” and received much critical praise thanks to songs such as ‘I Will Find You’, ‘Curtains’ and ‘Gaia’.
The remarkable output of Ekseption, is compiled in this 13-part CD box set, Planet Ekseption.
Their real breakthrough came in 1969, when their first album Ekseption was released. With their unique combination of classical music and pop, they achieved international success and released 6 popular albums in 3 years. Keyboardist Rick van der Linden gave the band its recognisable sound during that period, until he left in 1973. After his departure, their success slowly declined, even though there were reunions later on.
Planet Ekseption brings together their musical legacy with remastered albums and rare bonus material.The first 9 albums have been remastered from the original master tapes. The remaining 3 albums have been mastered…
Blues? Maybe, in atmospheric terms. But not in the 12-bar, blues-rock or Delta blues sense. Or most other senses. The album title is a play on Miles Davis’ end-of-’60s LP Bitches Brew which, at that point, was his most overt nod to the dynamics of rock music. Nonetheless, Bitches Blues doesn’t obviously use the 1969 set as a point from which to jump. But the reference sets up the first studio album from Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns – the latter word a slang reference to the trio’s Norwegian identity – as non-conformist, carving-out their own musical character; albeit just within the limits of the outer edges of jazz.
Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns are guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, whose other band Hedvig Mollestad Trio distorts the boundaries…
Featuring new member Simon House on synths and violin, and following the departure of Robert Calvert and electronic effects man Dik Mik, Hall of the Mountain Grill feels like something of an interim album for Hawkwind. Despite their cosmic pretensions, they were wary of the commercial success they had enjoyed with 1973’s Space Ritual and pondering which direction to go in next.
The album was named after a restaurant in London’s Portabello Road in which the group used to convene, a self-effacing title at odds with the grandeur of the cover, depicting a derelict spaceship in the mists of an alien lagoon; in 1974 we were two years into the post-space age. Tracks like The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke) are quintessential Hawkwind space…
Clearlight was formed in 1973 and was the vision of gifted pianist and composer Cyrille Verdeaux. The first work to appear under the Clearlight name was ‘Clearlight Symphony’, recorded in 1973 and 1974 and first issued by Virgin Records in early 1975. The album was notable for featuring Gong members Steve Hillage, Tim Blake and Didier Malherbe. The follow-up album, ‘Forever Blowing Bubbles’ was recorded in the summer of 1975 and featured a full band formed by Verdeaux and former King Crimson violinist David Cross guesting among others.
1977’s ‘Les Contes du Singe Fou’ was recorded with a full band who now included former Magma violinist Didier Lockwood and was a fine fusion of jazz, psychedelic…
This is a huge undertaking, an eight-CD set comprising all the band’s official studio albums released between 2006 and 2014, with a few added extras. It features not just the original albums, remixed and remastered (and notably not by Steven Wilson, prog’s ‘go-to’ man for this task), but also rarities, bonus tracks and acoustic reinterpretations, as well as new stereo and immersive mixes. Together, these highlight the journey The Pineapple Thief has been on since taking their early formative steps.
Retracing Our Steps is the second such release commemorating the legacy of The Pineapple Thief, following on from 2023’s How Did We Find Our Way, 1999–2006, which serves as almost the definitive guide to the band and their early…
While this is technically a Jon Anderson solo album, it’s actually a collaborative effort, with Anderson working alongside several other musicians who’ve collectively put together the songs on Survival & Other Stories.
The album came about after Anderson placed an ad on his website inviting other musicians to get involved, and ultimately eight different musicians from across the globe contributed, done by file sharing across the net, sending MP3 samples while Anderson performed the songs.
Whether this was because Anderson had been running on empty after coming through a debilitating illness, which saw him come close to checking out, or because he felt the need for fresh inspiration is unknown.
Magma’s Cosmic Masterpiece: The Absolute Classic Live Album That Redefined Progressive Music Magma’s mythic 1975 live set, captured in full fire at Paris’ Taverne de l’Olympia, returns to mark its 50th anniversary with a stunning new edition. Presented as an exclusive 2LP pressing on translucent blue vinyl and housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve, this release honors one of the most powerful live documents in progressive music history. Widely hailed as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, Live captures the band at their most transcendent, delivering a performance that shattered genre boundaries and redefined the possibilities of rock. The recording radiates raw intensity, precision, and an otherworldly vision that remains unmatched decades later.
Continuing the sonic universe they first unveiled on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, drawing as heavily from jazz and funk as from progressive rock.
Clarion Call Media sent over these details: Moving further into the world they began shaping on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, pulling from jazz and funk as much as progressive rock. The scope is still ambitious, but the lens has shifted.
Where Antimai spoke from the collective voice of a city, Sunya is personal. The songs follow a single perspective stepping beyond the walls for the first time, confronting both the physical…
For more than 30 years, cult British collective Archive have been ploughing their own furrow – joining the dots between ’90s trip-hop, various shades of alt rock and electronica. With Glass Minds, their 13th studio effort, the band continues to break new ground.
…A stark contrast exists between Glass Minds and its brooding and intense predecessor Call to Arms & Angels. For guitarist and co-vocalist Dave Pen, this originates from the differing circumstances in which the two projects were conceived. “Call To Arms & Angels was written and recorded during COVID. It was very heavy and you know, quite a tense album. It was trying to express what a lot of people were feeling at the time, I think. It was very conceptual because of the way…
Asia are back and roaring in their new, exhilarating line-up! Recorded live on the first of three unforgettable nights at Trading Boundaries in Sussex, in April 2025, this release captures the band performing their iconic 1982 debut album “ASIA” in full, along with a selection of their greatest hits.
Featuring Geoff Downes (keys), Virgil Donati (drums – ex-Planet X), John Mitchell (guitars – Arena, It Bites etc.) and the astonishing Harry Whitley (on bass and vocals), this fresh incarnation of Asia brings both reverence for the classics and a thrilling new energy to the stage. The setlist includes fan favourites like “Heat Of The Moment”, “Only Time Will Tell”, “Sole Survivor”, “One Step Closer” and “Time Again”, alongside video-era…
Bright Spirit marks the third instalment in a trilogy that began with The Universe Also Collapses (2019) and continued with Unending Ascending (2023). Recorded with long-time collaborator Frank Byng in his South London studio, Bright Spirit sees Gong at their experimental best, more adventurous and more open to the dream than ever.
And dreams are central here. Not just as lyrical imagery, but as a way of thinking – where psychedelia, love, and the thin membrane between worlds feed into the music. The opener, ‘Dream Of Mine’, unfurls like a transmission from the in-between, its mid-section blooming into harmonies and an angular melody that feels like a key turning in a long-awaited lock. Frontman Kavus Torabi describes it as a moment everything…
A band founded sixty years ago during the same emergent British psychedelic art-rock scene that brought the world Pink Floyd is still putting out new music. Soft Machine’s Thirteen refers to this being their 13th studio release, the third since they resumed making records under the Soft Machine moniker after a thirty-seven year lull.
Soft Machine’s last new release arrived three years earlier; the Other Doors quartet still boasted two members from the mid-70s lineup and a third from that era appearing on two tracks. In the interim, long-time drummer John Marshall passed and bassist Roy Babbington’s phase-out became complete. Guitarist John Etheridge remains the last link to the classic era while keyboardist/saxophonist/flautist Theo Travis…
Uzed is the fourth album by Belgian band Univers Zero. It was released three years after ‘Ceux du Dehors’, due to a change in line-up and a new repertoire, although the EP ‘Crawling Wind’ had been released in the meantime. The album marked a turning point for the band. Univers Zero explored new electric colors, giving it a more rock feel with the addition of new musicians such as Jean-Luc Plouvier, who introduced the synthesizer, guitarist Michel Delory, who played a memorable solo in ‘Célesta (For Chantal)’, and André Mergen on electric cello and alto saxophone, who enriched the orchestral texture. Dirk Descheemaeker on clarinet and soprano saxophone, the return of Christian Genet on bass, this evolution can also be explained by the arrival of new musicians.
The Neal Morse Band’s fifth studio album L.I.F.T. is nilled as a record that “stands toe to toe” with the group’s rated 2016 LP The Similitude Of A Dream. It’s another virtuosic concept album that continues the NMB’s tradition of spiritually-themed storytelling.
“There’s an arc to it, but I suppose it’s really about belonging,” Morse tells Prog of the follow-up to 2021’s Innocence & Danger. “You start out feeling like you belong with your parents, then you break from them and you might not feel like you really belong in the world. It talks about reaching for God or a higher power or however you want to put it, and God bringing us back to wholeness.”
Asked what the letters in the new album’s title stand for, Morse says it’s open…
First released in October 1974, the album was a conceptual piece based upon the theme of a travelling circus and was recorded at Chipping Norton Studios in England. The studio had been the location of the recording of the band’s previous album ‘Remember The Future’, issued in 1973. For Down to Earth the band opted for a more direct approach to their music and sessions saw contributions from a horn section and legendary vocalist P.P. Arnold.
By the time ‘Down to Earth’ was released in Europe, ‘Remember The Future’ had become a top twenty US hit and the band travelled to the States to embark on a successful tour. A second US visit followed in the spring of 1975 to promote ‘Down to Earth’. The band enjoyed huge success…
Formed in the 1980s, IQ is comprised of Martin Orford, Paul Cook, Mike Holmes, Peter Nicholls, and John Jowitt. This prolific band has released 14 albums, beginning with 1983’s Tales From the Lush Attic. They followed two years later with The Wake and Living Proof was also released in 1995. The next year saw the group release Nine in a Pond Is Here and Nomzamo came out in 1987. It was two years before they would release another disc, Are You Sitting Comfortably? and after another two years, IQ released J’ai Pollette D’arnu. 1993 saw the release of Ever and it would be three years this time until the world would see another album by IQ, Forever Live, released both in standard form and as a box set. The following year the group released Subterranea and Seven Stories Into ’98…