Portis Head

"Do You Want Head? Blow Your Mind with the Head Shop Album!" screams a commercial add in New York's Screw magazine in 1969. The band had garagy roots and evolved from Household Sponge to The Head Shop. Based in NYC, this psychedelic underground project had a unique sound, charcterized by soulful vocals, flying Hammond organ, fuzzy bass, distorted lead guitars, lots of percussive and weird rhythm instruments, plus several unexpected stereo experiments. A highlight for sure is their haunted interpretation of Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny'! Conceptional, but also musically there are some parallels to Joe Meek. Another major influence is The Beatles' experimental period, not just because of the cover version of 'Revolution.' Larry Coryell features as "wailing" guest musician on the track, 'I Feel Love Comin' On'…

Album recorded by psychedelic rockers the Gods (as Head Machine) at the tail-end of 1969, shortly before they morphed into Toe Fat and then Uriah Heep, this British underground rock classic features plenty of wailing guitar from Ken Hensley, and powerful drumming from Lee Kerslake.

Limited Card Wallet CD Edition featuring 6 extra live tracks. 62 years of music, loves, losses, long summer days and longer, darker nights are vividly recalled by ‘our greatest living songwriter’, Michael Head and The Red Elastic Band as he plays out flickering scenes from his life on new album, Loophole, set for release on 17th May 2024 on Modern Sky. 12 evocative and autobiographical songs to be accompanied by the written word as Michael Head prepares his memoirs for release with an autobiography with Nine Eight Books. UK Tour dates announced for May and December, ending the year with a career-spanning, home city set at Liverpool Philharmonic.

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of our seminal debut album, we have scoured the vaults to unearth some absolute gold for the legions of die-hard Head Cases out there. We have found the original unmastered demo cassette of the 1993 demo that got the band signed, and had it remastered Sterling Sound. But the jewel in the crown; a never-before-released 4-track cassette rehearsal demo with our original drummer Tony Costanza, painstakingly remixed from the original 4-track cassette bounces and also mastered at Sterling Sound. Only for the most hard-core Head Cases!

Everybody loves a good ol’ dumping on bedroom projects. Ain’t nuthin like tearin’ instrudjental solo guitarists a new one for how generic their riffs are, and repeating for the thousandth time that soloing dost not the songwriting maketh (think, djenter, think!). On the flipside though, whenever a solo artist does come out with something worthwhile, it becomes all the more impressive. Enter The Vicious Head Society, a solo project by Graham Keane. Now to call this an actual solo project may be a bit of a stretch given the plethora of session musicians featured on this, but all the writing and composing is done by Keane. This band has been on my radar for a while since they were featured on a Reddit series for underrated prog metal artists, so I was excited to finally have an excuse to listen to them as I saw that they had a new one coming up. So the perennial question is of course, does it live up to my own personal hype?

Combination Head's leader/keyboardist Paul Birchall has collaborated with Cher, Geri Halliwell and M People among others,but surprisingly his influences come from 70's progressive rock keyboardists: Keith Emerson, Eddie Jobson, Peter Bardens, etc. For this project he is accompanied by guitarist/bassist Keith Ashcroft and drummer Paul Burgess,who has worked with 10CC, Jethro Tull and Camel. Their first album carried the name of the trio as a title, released on S.A.M. Records in 2006. This is 100% melodic instrumental progressive rock with symphonic and Fusion touches with influences coming from the afore-mentioned keyboardists as well as Camel, U.K., The Flower Kings, Spock's Beard and Genesis, while adding some strong Niacin echoes here and there won't be far from reality.

Flamborough Head has been working intensively since the 1990s, recording successive albums. Very importantly, the band is still in very high form. For those unfamiliar with the group's work, you could stylistically compare their music to such bands as Camel, Marillion, Arena and Jethro Tull. You can still hear the harmony between melodic and warm playing under the sign of neoprogressive rock, and elements sounding more classical and at times even folk. Thus, the album "Jumping The Milestone" should easily satisfy the expectations of a wide variety of prog-rock music fans.
The material, which lasts almost an hour, brings a real charge of warm and melodic emotions, for which the Dutch group has been famous for years…