In Beyond

The German symphonic metal band Beyond the Black return with their fifth full length record, the self-titled Beyond the Black. German Symphonic Metal shooting stars Beyond the Black look back on a stratospheric success story. Already their 2015 debut album hit like a bomb in their home country. Songs Of Love And Death besieged the German Top 15 for weeks and lead up to the band being awarded the Metal Hammer Award 2015 for "Best Debut". It's successor Lost In Forever (2016) entered the German charts on #4 right away and paved ways for a huge tour from Germany over countries like UK, Russia or Japan. Since the band's live debut in 2014 they have played the world's biggest Metal festival Wacken Open Air several times and toured as a support act for heavyweights such as Aerosmith, Korn, Scorpions, Saxon or Within Temptation.

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

San Francisco's Beyond-O-Matic plays a dreamy, sometimes quirky, electronically psychedelic brand of space music that has just enough freakiness, and even a fair dose of dissonance, to put it firmly in the space realm, but is somewhat undefinable in it's interpretation. The band consists of Kurt Stenzel (aka Stenzo) on vocals, keyboards, guitar, and delay loops, Franktus Evictus on drums and voices, David Gresalfi on linndrum, samples, and vocals, and the Reverend Peter Fuhry on vocals, cross5 guitar, thebeatles, acoustic bariguitar, long stiff finger off doom, toy piano, accordion, flute, metal clarinet, and delay loop effects. What's that? You've never heard of a thebeatles? Or a long stiff finger of doom?

Captain Beyond is a one-of-a-kind progressive album with rock, heavy metal, and jazz influences with a "space rock" lyrical bend. Formed by former members of Deep Purple (Rod Evans, vocals), Iron Butterfly (Rhino, lead guitar, and Lee Dorman, bass), and Johnny Winter (Bobby Caldwell, drums) Captain Beyond is an album that flows from riff to riff, drumbeat to drumbeat, often with various time signatures within the same song. Taking a tip from the Moody Blues, songs flow directly into each other without benefit of any lag time between selections. Taken as a whole, the album is kind of a rush, as quick, riff-laden guitar lines predominate for a few songs before slowing down temporarily into a lull until the next takeoff.

Captain Beyond's second album must have confused the diehards. Where their self-titled debut had upheld the basic progressive heavy rock blueprint of lengthy instrumental explorations, constant tempo changes, and opaque, yet cinematic lyrics, Sufficiently Breathless downplays them for a subtler, song-oriented production. The predominant mood is snappy and businesslike; no track runs over five and a half minutes. This newfound conciseness certainly benefited such heavy-rocking efforts as "Distant Sun," even as the band stuck to their diverse guns on the moody, acoustic title track and the sleek Latin funk rock of "Bright Blue Eyes" and "Everything's a Circle." The results were intelligent and self-assured, yet the band's never-ending bad luck again intervened when vocalist Rod Evans quit in late 1973, leaving the album adrift. The band would proffer a markedly different style on their return four years later, but anyone dismissing progressive heavy rock as an oxymoron should definitely check out this album first.

San Francisco's Beyond-O-Matic plays a dreamy, sometimes quirky, electronically psychedelic brand of space music that has just enough freakiness, and even a fair dose of dissonance, to put it firmly in the space realm, but is somewhat undefinable in it's interpretation. The band consists of Kurt Stenzel (aka Stenzo) on vocals, keyboards, guitar, and delay loops, Franktus Evictus on drums and voices, David Gresalfi on linndrum, samples, and vocals, and the Reverend Peter Fuhry on vocals, cross5 guitar, thebeatles, acoustic bariguitar, long stiff finger off doom, toy piano, accordion, flute, metal clarinet, and delay loop effects. What's that? You've never heard of a thebeatles? Or a long stiff finger of doom?

Beyond the Ghost presents his third album in the Europa Series, a futuristic, bleak and moving sound voyage that merges electronics and acoustics.
Rome, the year is 2062. The whole of Europe has been falling apart for 2 years now. No one is quite sure what war even means at this point. In Rome, a few dozen soldiers of The Alliance fight against small groups of citizens who joined the resistance. Those who are too scared just hide away in bombed-out houses, starving to death, losing their mind. A city that was once beautiful has become the stage for an absurd tragedy of power struggles gone awry. As the sun sets over the Colosseum, a few gunshots and screams echo in the dead of night, the final tremors of a derelict world crumbling to nothingness.

Captain Beyond has a rather legendary status in the ranks of heavy prog '70s rock. Their fame is actually in the "cult status" category. Dawn Explosion, their third album, was a good disc, but really did not live up to the greatness of the first two releases. Still, in showcasing the group's unique blend of hard rock, psychedelia, and progressive-type arrangements, there is definitely some strong material present. The hard-edged and frantic "Icarus" and the nearly ethereal, building mini-epic "Breath of Fire (Part 1 and Part 2)" can arguably stand up to most of the material on the other releases. Where they falter here is on such songs as "If You Please" and "Midnight Memories," which seem to be trying to reach toward accessibility, but come much closer to banality and mediocrity. This disc cannot take away from the tremendous glory of the other albums, though, and several of the tracks certainly still hold up well.