Frost* - Milliontown
Came out last year and was on my to-buy list until then. I'm pleased I did, I play it a lot, it simply rocks. The story behind it: pop composer Jem Godfrey (he did stuff for Atomic Kitten a.o.) decided he needed to do some progressive stuff for a change because he got too bored with writing simple pop songs. You can really hear this background in the songs, especially in the vocals, but it's still ... gorgeous. A very modern approach to prog.
Vitalij Kuprij - Glacial Inferno & Revenge (Limited Special Edition)
Glacial Inferno being the main album and Revenge being a re-issue added as a bonus to the limited edition. Genres never fit but just so you get an idea: symphonic/progressive rock/metal, somewhere inbetween there. Vitalij is a keyboard virtuoso who plays both classical and rock music. Glacial Inferno is all instrumental, Revenge with vocals. At times it sounds a lot like Symphony X - actually Michael Romeo of Symphony X featured on one of his earlier albums. So if you like their stuff, check him out.
Sylvan - Presets
This one has an interesting story, too. Two years ago the band decided to write two albums, one to show their more progressive side and one with short intuitive rock songs to hopefully get some airplay. This step in general I welcomed, on the previous album X-Rayed they had already shown a bit of their "popular" side so it seemed like a nice experiment to split this into two albums. Anyway, the two albums were recorded and were both planned for 2006. The concept album Posthumous Silence came in early 2006 and really rocked the scene, gave them popularity and respect. Presets needed some more recordings and so it finally came out in the beginning of 2007.
Do I like it? Well, yes. After some disappointment (ok, what did I expect?) in the beginning and some more listening it really is catchy. Just, it's far away from Posthumous Silence so the question is if they really needed to go one step back just to get more airplay in the popular stations. Or perhaps it's just that I like this approach to music less - really hard to talk about this album, you see. ;)
Spock's Beard - Spock's Beard
A self-titled album, that was still missing in the discography of the proggers from Los Angeles. In late 2007 it was released. Short retrospect: the brothers Neal and Alan Morse form this band, whose name originates in a Star Trek episode, in 1992. On a jam session they meet drummer Nick D'Virgilio, Dave Meros takes the position of the bass player and after the first album keyboard-virtuoso Ryo Okumoto joins to complete the team. Since then the line-up stayed surprisingly stable, even constant. If.. if only the head of the group didn't undergo a change. Neal Morse, still regarded as a genius in the prog scene, turned from a believer into a reborn Christian and decided he only wants to make Christian rock music in the future, so he left the band and the supergroup Transatlantic in 2002 and started a solo career - perhaps this was a positive step as he would've dragged the bands too much to his preferred direction.
"History repeating", Nick D'Virgilio may have thought. And so he, who actually had drummed for Genesis before, did as their drummer Phil Collins did back then and took the position of the frontman of Spock's Beard. Now we have the third studio album in this formation and you can still hear people say "Back then everything was better!"
Yes, they can't reach a masterpiece like V, yes, Neal Morse was the lyrical genius behind the music. But apart from him it's still the same musicians we're hearing here! You can still recognise the typical bass - and even if the music became more intuitive, parts of them clearly remind you of older songs. And seriously, I don't think it would be much different with Neal Morse, he would have to re-invent himself completely - and if you listen to his current albums, he didn't, partly it's just as intuitive. The new CD is a bit different than predecessor Octane again but I think it simply rocks. :)
There's one more album I could talk about but I have to listen to it some more. And there's a lot of stuff coming out soon!
