The usual perception of early Deep Purple is that it was a band with a lot of potential in search of a direction. And that might be true of their debut LP, put together in three days of sessions in May of 1968, but it's still a hell of an album. From the opening bars of "And the Address," it's clear that they'd gotten down the fundamentals of heavy metal from day one, and at various points the electricity and the beat just surge forth in ways that were startlingly new in the summer of 1968…
Bigelf have been through tough times during the past years including the tragic death of former guitarist A.H.M. Butler-Jones resulting in a "spontaneous hiatus" in 2011 as mastermind Damon Fox calls it. Marking the Bigelf debut of drum god Mike Portnoy (ex-Dream Theater) the Californian band’s fourth album "Into The Maelstrom" is also the first for new label home InsideOut Music.
This album contains twelve new tracks (plus bonus CD) and almost all the songs are founded around the explosive and gripping guitar riffs by Fox. Bigelf's sound is drawn from seventies bands and is heavy, psychedelic and dark.
One of the original protest folk singers of our time Pete Segger sadly died on 28th Jan 2014 (just before this release). Pete Seeger was an American folk singer and a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940's, he also had a string of hits during the 1950's as a member of The Weavers. In the 1960's, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture and environmental causes.
When one thinks about progressive rock, it's easy to imagine it as an almost academic pursuit with groups of men, armed with degrees in composition and Chapman sticks, trying to convert the secret math that rules the universe into musical notation. Playing against this seeming lack of approachability, Cynic deliver Kindly Bent to Free Us, an album that, while most definitely in the realm of prog rock, has the kind of open, unpretentious air that makes Rush such an easy-to-love band. Though Cynic continue to stray further from their heavy metal beginnings, they still haven't abandoned them, fusing layers of melody and jazzy chord progressions with searing, distorted guitar work, perfectly combining both sounds without letting one distract from the other…