Album Review: PoiL Ueda – Yoshitsune

Band: PoiL Ueda | Album: Yoshitsune | Genre: Progressive rock, RIO, Japanese folk | Year: 2023

From: Lyon, France & Tokyo Japan | Label: Dur et Doux

For fans of: Osamu Kitajima, Frank Zappa, Mike Oldfield

PoiL is back for a second round of collaboration with Japanese musician Junko Ueda. I thought their last album–PoiL Ueda, from March of this year–would simply be a quirky, one-off thing. I was certainly hoping for more, as my one real gripe about PoiL Ueda was that, at only 31 minutes, it felt kind of short. I really liked the madcap fusion of PoiL’s avant-garde RIO stylings with Ueda’s singular vocal style and sharply-plucked biwa.

Yoshitsune picks up where PoiL Ueda ended, both lyrically and musically. Taking place after the naval battle described on their last album in “Dan-no-Ura”, this album tells the story of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a military commander forced into exile.

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Odds & Ends: September 4, 2023

Band: Grant the Sun | Album: Voyage | Genre: Post-metal | Bandcamp

I liked this band’s 2019 EP, Sylvain, so when I saw they were putting out a full-length release, I made sure to put it on my docket. The music here is heavy and moody, occasionally with vocals. Guitar lines are both gritty and expansive, and there are a lot of wonderful textural contrasts. I’m not sure there are enough ideas here to warrant a full album, but this would have made a pretty decent long EP if they trimmed off a couple songs. The playing is great, and I’m especially fond of the guitar tones they chose. But post-metal is simply a genre where songs can quite easily start sounding too similar to one another for me.

Score: 73/100

Artist: Bobby Lee | Album: Endless Skyways | Genre: Krautrock, Americana | Bandcamp

This record is full of dreamy, floating guitar lines and airy, otherworldly atmospheres. The influences of acts like Neu! and Hawkwind are evident, but the occasional twang of slide guitar or folky acoustic strum helps keep this album in fairly unique territory. The blend of country, psychedelia, and krautrock is pulled off very well here.

Score: 77/100

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Album Review: Rhùn – Tozïh

Band: Rhùn | Album: Tozïh | Genre: Zeuhl | Year: 2023

From: Ernée, France | Label: Baboon Fish

For fans of: Magma, Guapo, Mahavishnu Orchestra

Bandcamp

Magma casts a very long shadow over the zeuhl scene, especially for bands hailing from their native France. And it’d be weird if they didn’t; they invented the damn micro-genre, after all. But that means a lot of bands seem to be almost pigeonholed into being Magma clones (or near-clones, at least). It can be a difficult balancing act to prominently display the influence of such a singular, idiosyncratic band as Magma without just sounding like you’re recording Attahk, Pt. 2.

Rhùn manages to thread that needle pretty well. Their 2013 debut, Fanfare du chaos, is a decent zeuhl record. It is very Magmatic, sometimes too much so. The band shows a lot of creativity on it, even if they do occasionally wander into some overly-well-trod zeuhl tropes. Tozïh, their ten-years-in-the-making sophomore release, shows some clear improvement over its predecessor. The astral, jazzy weirdness of Magma is still front-and-center, but they’ve managed to make this record sound more their own.

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Odds & Ends: July 3, 2023

Band: Chafouin | Album: Trois, quatre | Genre: Math rock, Progressive rock | Bandcamp

I liked this band’s 2021 album Toufoulcan, so I was excited when I saw they had something new coming out. Where Toufoulcan had a sense of sonic continuity between the tracks, this release feels more like a collection of unrelated (or barely-related) songs. The music itself is good, and none of the songs overstay their welcome. When taken as a whole, though, Trois, quatre feels a bit unfocused.

Score: 74/100

Band: Numidia | Album: South of the Bridge | Genre: Hard rock, Progressive rock | Bandcamp

This album was a huge disappointment. I loved this band’s Middle Eastern-tinged debut record, which expertly blended Near-Eastern flavors with prog and psych in very satisfying ways. Here though, the band has stripped away anything that makes them unique and put out a bland, bluesy hard-ish, vaguely-prog-adjacent record that often reminds me of ‘90s Pink Floyd (and not in a good way). The music isn’t bad, per se, especially if you’re looking for something evocative of certain 1970s blues rock acts, but it’s a major step down from their self-titled, in terms of both creativity and impact.

Score: 52/100

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Album Review: Missing Jack & The Kameleons

Band: Missing Jack & The Kameleons | Album: Human Cycle | Genre: Psychedelic rock | Year: 2023

From: Toulouse, France | Label: Six Tonnes de Chair

For fans of: Slift, Hawkwind, Neu!

Bandcamp

Six Tonnes de Chair is a small French record label that specializes in garage rock, often with psychedelic and kraut-y flairs. I’ve covered acts from this label before (Perilymph, WEEED, Slift), and Missing Jack & The Kameleons fit into this general mold quite neatly. Their style draws a lot from late ‘60s garage rock, albeit often sounding a bit cleaner. Krautrock and surf influences are commonplace here, and they’ve got an overall fun feel.

“You Don’t Think” opens up with a buzzy, jumpy, krautrock-tinged riff. Flavors of surf rock are evident, too, especially in the airy backing vocals. There’s a bit too much going on with the drums for this to have a truly motorik beat, but the spirit is there. The rhythm is insistent and infectious, and it really complements the hazy atmosphere.

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Odds & Ends: April 3, 2023

Band: Enslaved | Album: Heimdal | Genre: Progressive metal | Bandcamp

If nothing else, Enslaved is a very consistent band. They’ve got a sound they stick to pretty well, and they release albums reasonably often. However, this can also lead to a number of their albums bleeding together into a vague mush of proggy, blackish metal. Heimdal is certainly better than Utgard, but it still doesn’t do much to stand out in their discography. Maybe it’ll grow on me; Enslaved’s best albums have always taken a few listens to sink in. But as it stands, after a couple listens, this is a perfectly fine–though inessential–release.

Score: 74/100

Band: Fistfights with Wolves | Album: The Sheep That Eats The Wolf | Genre: RIO, Zeuhl, Progressive rock | Bandcamp

This short release has some good ideas on it, but the problem is there aren’t quite enough of them to justify the 28-minute runtime. This band is clearly heavily influenced by Magma, especially in their vocal arrangements, but they feel like a bit of a one-trick pony. None of the songs stood out that much, and the 12-part mini-suite “RMFP” is scattershot and unfocused. The opening “Skeletons” is pretty good, so maybe this should have just been a single with one other tightened-up song.

Score: 61/100

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Album Review: PoiL Ueda – Poil Ueda

Band: PoiL Ueda | Album: PoiL Ueda | Genre: Progressive rock, RIO, Japanese folk | Year: 2023

From: Lyon, France & Tokyo, Japan | Label: Dur et Doux

For fans of: Osamu Kitajima, Magma, Frank Zappa, Ni

Bandcamp

After four years, PoiL returns with another daring, angular, madcap album. 2019’s Sus was a fantastic release, and it saw the band both focus its songwriting after the sprawling Brossaklitt and stretch out with a pair of 20-minute suites. On this release, the band has teamed up with biwa player and singer Junko Ueda.

I’m hardly an expert in traditional Japanese music. I knew what a biwa was before writing this review, so I’m probably ahead of most Americans, but not by much. According to Ueda’s website, she specializes in “biwa storytelling” and shomyo, a type of Buddhist chant. My primary source of knowledge of Japanese folk music prior to this was Osamu Kitajima’s seminal Benzaiten, a sublime synthesis of progressive rock and an array of Japonic styles.

Much like Sus, PoiL Ueda is made up of a pair of large suites, each of which typifies one of Ueda’s professed specialities.

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Album Review: Light – The Path

Band: Light | Album: The Path | Genre: Progressive rock, RIO, Chamber music | Year: 2023

From: Toulouse, France | Label: Independent

For fans of: iamthemorning, Van der Graaf Generator, Univers Zero

Bandcamp

Years ago, I ran across a poll on the ProgArchives forums asking what the most important instrument in a (progressive) rock band is. It’s obviously not guitars or keys, as ELP and mid-career King Crimson demonstrate, respectively. Neither Van der Graaf Generator nor Atomic Rooster had a bassist in their classic lineups. So that’s why I ultimately chose “drums” in that poll. What makes rock music rock music is its rhythm. Ditch the percussion, and it’s difficult to make something feel like rock music.

I bring this anecdote up because for about the first twenty-ish minutes of Light’s debut album, The Path, there is almost no percussion. (Side note, the generic nature of the names of both the band and the album made this a bit of a challenge to find.) This album opens in a manner which feels more like classical or chamber music. As the record progresses, though, more traditional prog influences are brought in.

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Top 50 Prog Albums of 2022, Part 1: 50-26

Welcome to the first half of The Elite Extremophile’s Top 50 Prog Albums of 2022. This article covers spots 50-26, and the top 25 can be found here!

Full disclosure: the label of “2022” is not entirely accurate. The music featured here covers December 2021 through November 2022. Trying to find new music in the month of December is a fool’s errand, as much of my time during that month is occupied with writing and editing this list.

As I always say, I’m sure there are some excellent albums not included in my list. This site is a one-man operation (in relation to reviewing, that is; my editors, Kelci and Dan, have been tremendously helpful), and I simply cannot listen to everything that gets released. I also have my personal biases against some rather popular trends in prog, which affects the composition of this list. But if you’ve got recommendations, do not hesitate to shoot them my way.

2022 wound up being a decent overall year for prog. It felt as if the year started off slowly, and there definitely were fewer albums that truly knocked my socks off, as compared to other years. However, there was still a lot of super-solid prog, psych, and otherwise-weird and experimental music to be heard. And I listened to more albums than ever before, which allowed me to draw from a larger pool. That meant I had to make some tough decisions about the final composition of this list, and deciding on the final order was challenging. Outside of the top 7 or 8, most of these albums could have easily been placed several spots higher or lower, depending on my mood.

Now, let’s get to it!

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Odds & Ends: December 14, 2022

Band: Ahleuchatistas | Album: Expansion | Genre: Math rock, RIO | Bandcamp

Ahleuchatistas are something of an outlier when it comes to bands I like. I’m often not a fan of improv-heavy acts that sound like they’re constantly on the verge of falling apart, but this trio always manages to thread the needle of tight, complex riffs and wonky, off-kilter meters with loose improv. Expansion feels a bit more composed than some of their past work, and that pays dividends here. The riffs are weird and wild and wiry, and the songs have an odd, shambolic energy to them. This is a bizarre and rewarding album.

Score: 81/100

Band: Fren | Album: All the Pretty Days | Genre: Progressive rock | Bandcamp

Had I known Wiosna was a single off an upcoming album and not an EP, I wouldn’t have reviewed it. But alas! All the Pretty Days is Fren’s second full-length album. Much like their debut, it’s melodic and dramatic instrumental prog. The songs are engaging and attention grabbing, and despite their length, there is very little bloat here. This reminds me of Änglagård’s best work while also being distinct. Hints of jazz pop in from certain piano lines, giving flashes of Magma’s lighter moments.

Score: 78/100

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