Autosport From 4 August 2016

On Saturday 16th August 1980 Rainbow took to the stage to headline the first rock festival to be staged at Castle Donington. It was the culmination of the band s tour in support of the hugely successful Down To Earth album, released in 1979, and would prove to be the last live show featuring this particular line-up of the band: Ritchie Blackmore (guitars), Don Airey (keyboards), Graham Bonnet (vocals), Roger Glover (bass) and Cozy Powell (drums). The set featured tracks from the new album alongside classics from earlier in their career. There are virtuoso solo spots for Blackmore, Airey and Powell which serve to highlight the sheer musical prowess in the band. The show climaxes with Ritchie Blackmore destroying his guitar and thrusting it into an amp which promptly bursts into flames before fireworks burst overhead at the conclusion of an explosive show.

Hailing from Genova, Italy, Garybaldi were, in the seventies, the outlet for Pier Niccolò "Bambi" Fossati's guitar wanking. A devout disciple of Hendrix, Bambi Fossati had enough sense to employ creative and intelligent musicians who helped balance Fossat's psych hard leanings with sensitive Italian melodicity and good technique, ensuring that their "Nuda" LP from 1972 was a minor classic of early spaghetti prog…

Peter Hammill is one of the formative characters of the progressive rock scene to date. In the beginning of the 1970's he recorded four cumbersome mysterious albums with his band Van der Graaf Generator which never could reach the commercial heights of cognate bands like Genesis or Yes due to their musical intransigence. After several visionary but difficult to access albums, Hammill reformed the quartet for another four albums which introduced a more earthy but not less complex sound. After the band's second end in 1978, on solo albums like "The Future Now", "ph7" or "A Black Box" Hammill experimented extensively in the studio and acquired the latest techniques like i.e. early forms of sampling; one of the most breath-taking results being the 20 minute long soundscape 'Flight'…

Latvia's Progressive rock band Holy Lamb tells a slightly unconventional story about music. The musicians chose to integrate various shades of rock n' roll into their music. The result is as adventurous as it could possibly get. Released in the year 2016, "Gyrosophy" is the fourth studio album by Holy Lamb, the perfect way to celebrate the band's twenty-fifth anniversary. This record contains four songs and four instrumental tracks with a lot of emphasis on melodies, arrangements and musicianship. Great combination of Organ, Piano and guitar in instrumental parts. The album was devised, recorded and produced by the group itself, mixed at the Mars Yapim Studios in Ankara (Turkey), mastered by Jon Astley in the United Kingdom, and eventually published by the French label Musea Parallèle.

On the new album: A fantastic new album from one of the best German Bands. Fire From The Soul combines all elements you can expect from a new Epitaph album in 2016: singing twin-guitars and sparkling rock songs with choral singing for several voices. This album is surprising all along the line through the steady quality from first to last song…