People make fun of Ohio a lot (especially online), but it’s not without its contributions. They gave us Devo and, uh, chili on spaghetti and…multiple mediocre presidents. But Perfect! Now there’s something Ohio can hold its head high about! Perfect is an Akron-based quintet that plays a daring, experimental variety of jazz-inflected rock. Monkey Jockey Man and the Safari Tick Sugar is their sophomore album. Since their debut, they’ve ditched brass instruments in favor of some intriguing noise influences, and the results are quite strong.
Eunuchs are an Australian quartet who employ a whole host of assisting musicians to construct dense, symphonic soundscapes. At the heart of things, they are a rock band, but traditional rock instrumentation is often minimized or buried beneath dense layers of strings, woodwinds, and reeds. Bubbling up amidst all that is a chaotic, angry energy that provides for unique contrasting effects.
In many ways, these Aussies remind me of black midi, the foremost band in the current avant-prog scene (insofar as there even is such a scene). These guys lean even harder into non-traditional instrumentation, though. Large swathes of this album push the very definition of “rock.”
Rock in Opposition (usually shortened to RIO) is a movement I’ve referred to a few times, but I’ve never really delved into it too deeply. Narrowly speaking, it refers to a specific group of five (initially, later expanded to eight) experimental rock bands who toured and played together in 1978 and 1979. These oddball bands (including Univers Zero, Henry Cow, and Samla Mammas Manna) were opposed to the music industry’s “refusal” to promote them. This stance, to me, comes off as a bit petty and self-centered. These bands played weird, aggressively un-commercial music. At a certain point, one needs to be realistic about their target audience. A major label isn’t going to promote an album like Hérésie. More broadly speaking, though, RIO now refers to the bands which are stylistically descended from these initial bands. I’ve used that label to refer to acts like PoiL, Cratophane, and Ahleuchatistas.
Though not a member of the eight “official” RIO bands, Present appeared not long after. It was founded in 1979 by Roger Trigaux, a founding member of Univers Zero, which is a band I respect more than I enjoy (and that sentiment can largely be applied to the original RIO movement as a whole). They’re often minimal and moody and influenced by chamber music. I can appreciate it on a certain artistic level, but I don’t really like it that much.
This Is NOT the End was my first exposure to Present, and I like it a lot. It has a lot less of the chamber music-influenced stuff I associate with Univers Zero, but it has plenty of exciting, experimental, and overall-weird passages. This release is the band’s first since 2009, but it is, despite its title, the band’s final release. Trigaux, the band’s driving force, passed away in March of 2021, in the midst of recording.
Chief Bromden is a Czech post-punk act that integrates a lot of progressive rock into their music. They’ve got inventive, unorthodox structures, and their instrumental passages are exciting and masterfully played. I liked their debut album Slunovrat a lot, so I was excited to hear their follow-up. In/tense Logic comes about four years after their debut (and two years after their Noise Forever EP, which I simply just never got around to).
Scottish one-man experimental act Caverns Measureless plays a creepy, unsettling, and adventurous variety of folk-rock on their self-titled sophomore album. Acoustic guitar and mandolin plink alongside violin and flutes, while the occasional brash stab of electric guitar sends the atmosphere careening in another direction. The compositions are wiry and fluid, often changing path suddenly. All the songs here are complex, creative, and moody.
Hizbut Jámm is an interesting quartet. It consists of two Poles on guitar and drums, a Senegalese musician on guitar and vocals, and a Burkinabe musician playing the kora–a type of lute from West Africa. The lyrics are sung in Wolof and French, and West African melodies and scales are woven into the music. But this fusion also draws heavily from the tradition of Euro-American psychedelia. Textures are lush and dreamy, and the overall mood is hypnotic. Hizbut Jámm is an entrancing listen, and it’s a rewarding experience both as passive background music and as the subject of more active listening.
Poetry isn’t really my thing, and that is borne out in my usual disinterest in lyrics. Obviously, though, poetry and lyrics speak strongly to some folks, and one of those folks is Kentuckian singer-songwriter Stuart Wicke. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is Wicke’s eighth full-length release, coming just four months after his last effort. Consisting of just two long songs, each of them draws their lyrics from poetry.
Opening the album is “Song on the End of the World”, a three-part, 15-minute epic. Part two draws its inspiration from the poem of the same by Czesław Miłosz, and parts one and three are based on “America: A Prophecy” by poet William Blake.
Welcome again to Deep Dive, the roughly-yearly column exploring the extended studio discographies of the giants of progressive rock and metal. It’s here that I delve into releases beyond an act’s best-known albums.
For those who don’t feel like reading this massive entry, I’ve included a TL;DR and ranking of albums at the end. I choose to explore albums chronologically, as opposed to a ranked-list format. The context in which albums were made is important, and this is an element often missed in a ranked-list.
Prior to writing this column, I posted a poll asking for reader input for the act I should cover next. Had the results been more ambiguous, I probably would have covered Emerson, Lake & Palmer; but King Crimson was the runaway winner. They garnered roughly one-third of the vote, with the second-place finishers taking only about ten percent.
King Crimson was one of the earliest progressive rock bands, and no one man has done more to cement the image of progressive rock musicians as joyless and self-serious than guitarist and bandleader Robert Fripp. They’ve got some absolutely stellar albums under their belt, but there’s also plenty to criticize. A lot of my critiques of this band come from the fact that I’m simply not a big fan of improvised music. (That’s not to say improvised music can’t be fun or enjoyable, but it’s usually best enjoyed in a live setting. The magic is largely lost when it’s recorded, at least for me.)
There are also a few side-projects I’ve opted to include in this entry. Much in the way I included Univeria Zekt in the Magma entry and Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe in the Yes entry, there have been a few releases that are King Crimson albums in all but name. Many of these are the “ProjeKcts” from the 1990s. Though ProjeKcts were primarily live endeavors, three of them did record in the studio, putting them in-scope for this column.
Arriving three years after their last effort, Perilymph’s fourth album, Progressions Imaginaires, is this group’s newest output. I’ve covered this band a couple times in the past, and I’ve always enjoyed their work. They have always done a great job at contrasting spare, acoustic passages with big, warm retro synth tones.
Perilymph’s past work has often straddled the always-fuzzy line between psych and prog. That has a lot to do with the way that they evoke the instrumental tones of the late 1960s, when psych and prog were both in their infancies and it was all a big mushy blob of forward-thinking rock music. This album, though, sees the band pushing in a more clearly progressive direction. The tones and textures are as lush and psychedelic as ever, but the songwriting is more dynamic, mature, and inventive.
Band: 55YT MQRT | Album:55YT MQRT | Genre: Space rock, Progressive rock | Bandcamp
This band’s name might look like a license plate number, but their sound isn’t nearly that ordinary. They play a vast, cosmic variety of heavy psych and prog, and the album art of an astronaut traveling through an ancient temple is weirdly fitting. The soundscapes are vast and huge, and everything has a massive amount of weight behind it. Even though this album is a bit on the long side, it works. This is the sort of music where stretching out benefits the band.
Score: 80/100
Band: AKU | Album:Solipsism | Genre: Jazz-fusion | Bandcamp
The six songs on Solipsism effortlessly blend jazz and progressive rock into a rich, organic melange. Each of the four members of the band puts on a great showing. Guitar is the lead instrument more often than not, but the keys are smartly deployed and add a great depth. The bass playing is punchy and energetic, and the drumming is skillful and varied.
Plantoid is a Brighton-based four-piece that expertly manipulates textures to create an enveloping auditory experience. Jazz and psychedelia commingle on Terrapath, along with progressive rock, indie rock, and bits of folk. The sci-fi album art matches the hazy, otherworldly feel of the music. The band manages to establish a sense of musical continuity without coming off as repetitious or uncreative.
