White Noise

Bardo Pond are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1991, and who are currently signed to London based label Fire Records. Bardo Pond's drug-inspired music is often classified as space rock, acid rock, post-rock, shoegazing, noise or psychedelic rock. Many Bardo Pond album titles have been derived from the names of esoteric psychedelic substances. Their sound has been likened to Pink Floyd, Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine amongst others.

The world of pop music was hardly ready for the Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety…

Marilyn Manson was really up to something, concocting a formula that combined the sounds of Kurt Cobain with the Love It to Death/Killer phase of Alice Cooper. God Lives Underwater understand that and work the concept to good effect though they don't take many of the interesting ideas presented on Up off the Floor as far as the potential demands.

Soul Coughing's second album, Irresistible Bliss, finds the band cutting away some of their eccentricities, leaving behind the bare basics of their pseudo-bohemian fusion of jazz, hip-hop, performance art, and alternative rock. Theoretically, the album should be more accessible; in practice, it is simply less involving. Though some engagingly quirky, off-center avant-pop remains, there are no jarring juxtapositions as satisfying as those that dominated Ruby Vroom, with its melded samples of Howlin' Wolf and the Andrews Sisters. There's enough strong music on Irresistible Bliss to suggest that the album is merely a slight sophomore slump, but that still doesn't make the long stretches of tediousness on the album any more forgivable.

White Willow are the leading Norwegian band, mixing elements of orchestral pop, 1970s progressive rock, jazz-rock, and even electronica. The band were begun in 1992 by guitarist Jacob Holm-Lupo. Over a period of 2 years from December '92 to September '94 the band recorded a number of songs that would form their fist album, Ignis Fatuus, released in '95 by The Lasers Edge, the start of a long partnership with the American label, and signalling them as one of the leading groups in the revival of Progressive Rock along with bands like Anglagard and Anekdoten. The sound of this first album is largely characterised by mid paced, acoustic guitar and mellotron led Folk Prog, bringing to mind Gryphon but with a touch of the more acoustic nature of early Genesis and King Crimson's first line-up. However, the two "epic" songs that close out the album showed a full electric band with a much more staunchly Symphonic approach…