The sun is out, the sun is shining, but we’re not slumming it in parks listening to terrible summer music just yet. Oh no. Some of us are making sure the beard-stroking, mind-expanding sphere that is Prog isn’t going unattended – step forward David Keevill, who returns with his latest column examining what the big stories and events in the world of Prog have been over the last few weeks…
After their brief but well-deserved Winter hibernation, we’ve finally gotten round to poking our columnists back to consciousness and then to their keyboards so they can bang out some more monthly missives for us on their respective corners of the rock and metal pantheon. First up is David Keevill, who returns with to take a long hard look at what’s been going on in Prog so far this year…
December is an empty month, filled with too many cash-in re-releases and tedious album-of-the-year content to make our monthly genre-columns thing really work. That’s why we asked David Keevill to give us a retrospective of the Big Things that happened in Prog in 2014, before getting back to the serious business of 2015 next month…
We’re starting something new here at Thrash Hits. We’ve asked some of our favourite writers to put together some monthly columns, focussing in on the genres they’re most passionate about. We’re kicking off this new series with David Keevill taking on what’s been going on in Prog over the last month or so. Take it away, David….
Soen
Tellurian
Spinefarm Records
03 November 2014
The old adage about difficult second albums usually applies to bands whose debuts were heaped with a barrage of saccharine praise. Soen, a supergroup made up of members of Willowtree and Opeth, are now are in a similarly difficult juncture but for opposite reasons. Their debut, Cognitive, was universally criticised for its borrowings from Tool, from its sleek, subversive delivery and socio-enviro-eco-political parables, right on through to its Lateralus-like artwork.
Everyone Dies In The End
All Things Lead To This
Futurerecordings
22 September 2014
As a purely instrumental band, you have to remember that every word you do write will be analysed within an inch of its existence. Hitching a ride on the fatalistic “post-” bandwagon, Everyone Dies In the End have their mouths full with their debut album All Things Lead To This, and their heads stuffed with notions of their own grandeur.
Rise Against have achieved both commercial and critical success. The former is the result of a well-formed career but to be as widely appreciated by the music press, a band needs to have some substance to their style and with the word ‘punk’ so easily used as a stick to beat some in the genre, David Keevill explains why Rise Against are flying the flag the highest at the moment.
Over the last few weeks, pictures and videos of the devastating air attacks in Gaza have filled social media. Accompanying the outpouring of grief and sympathy for those unwitting civilians caught in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli military is (rightly) anger on behalf of those unable to defend themselves. As anybody with a first, second or third hand opinion wades in to shout ill-formed slurs at their chosen target, Twitter and Facebook – the 21st Century’s soapbox equivalents – have become a cacophony.
Eluveitie
Origins
Nuclear Blast
04 August 2014
Eluveitie have been quietly but confidently building a fanbase in their corner of folk metal for twelve years now. As an eight-strong group featuring archaic instruments and a penchant for mid-European Dark Age origin stories, their tale was practically primed for obscurity. However, their winning of a prize at the 2014 Swiss Music Awards for their live show proves that their brand of eclectic, heavy Celt-metal isn’t just another hilarious gimmicky oddity, devoid of meaning or content.
Sabaton
Heroes
Nuclear Blast
16 May 2014
Metallers are po-faced. We don’t really like the idea of a joke, because the joke is often on us. We can laugh [ahem] at Steel Panther because the obvious pastiche of 80s glam rock drips off them as evidently as tequila, sweat and silicon shavings. But at the end of the day, we can just listen to Slayer and remind ourselves that the kernel of heavy metal is serious business, crafted by stocky-legged men hitting the bottom E string really hard and really fast.
Epica
The Quantum Enigma
Nuclear Blast
05 May 2014
The horrendously lazy ‘female-fronted’ tag is a relic of a bygone era and its continued existence is an insult to anybody who believes in the progressive opportunities that metal often affords. Epica, a band central to the European symphonic metal scene over the last eleven years, have too been lumped with this description in their time, in addition to being grouped in with other bands who use classical aspects in their music. In both counts, and especially compounded in the release of their latest album, The Quantum Enigma, there is far more to this Dutch metal outfit than the reductive sum of just their vocals and symphonic elements.