My Year on The Farm: Memories of Grandma Isabella

Warm Winter is an epic Art Rock album by Tim Bowness (No-Man) and Giancarlo Erra (Nosound). While occasionally drawing on the atmospheric nature of their main bands, MoM carves out a unique space for itself with an emphasis placed on direct songwriting and powerful instrumental arrangements as much as on mood.
Warm Winter includes stellar guest contributions from the likes of Peter Hammill (Van Der Graaf Generator), Colin Edwin (Porcupine Tree), Robert Fripp (King Crimson), Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), Julianne Regan (All About Eve), Jim Matheos (OSI/Fates Warning) and Ricard Huxflux Nettermalm (Paatos)…

Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music—particularly the worlds of opera and choral music—significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess.

Writing on the Wall's only album was theatrical heavy blues-psychedelic-rock that, despite its power and menace, was too obviously derivative of better and more original artists to qualify as a notable work. The organ-guitar blends owe much to the Doors, Procol Harum, and Traffic, though the attitude is somehow more sour and ominous than any of those groups. The vocals are sometimes pretty blatant in their homages to Arthur Brown, particularly when Linnie Paterson climbs to a histrionic scream; Jim Morrison, Gary Brooker, and Stevie Winwood obviously left their imprints on him too. Throw in some of the portentous drama from the narrations to the Elektra astrological concept album The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (particularly on "Aries") as well…