Progfreak.com - Progressive Music Ratings & Reviews - Rock, Metal, Jazz, ...

I've never understood the hype around Muse among progressive music fans. Having heard this album, however, I do appreciate the fact the Muse's music is quality alternative rock containing some progressive elements. I have yet to join the hype, but I do like this album, which has a very retro feel to it while still looking forward, sounding most of all like the offspring of Queen and 80s U2 in space (which, I must admit, does make me think "Haven't I heard this before?", every now and then?). The main strength of this album, I think, is combination of athmospheric synthesizers, catchy melodies, and melancholic vocals which has a strange drawing effect upon the listener.

 Sadly overlooked group, really. Doppler 444 is a strong but perhaps a bit unfocused album, although "Driller" is one of the genre's better songs. I'd like to call this 'Kenso with a Dream Theater attitude' since cool fusion licks with heavy intensity really defines this album's overall sound. Really nice!

Great performance - as always - but mediocre sound production.

Short songs but with powerful synth plus orchestration and paranoic voices in it...a hard-to-categorize musical style as before.

The theme is exactly a Japanese Dadaism named "Taisho-Romanticism", shouted about a hundred years before in Japan. The members of Guernica veiled themselves antique dresses and archaic words & music, produced by a talented multi-instrumentalist Koji UENO, a voice bewitcher Jun TOGAWA, and a terrifically illusionary artist Keiichi OHTA. The songs here have, just as the previous ones, frequent rhythm alterations and quick changes of the scenes, far from the current pop- or media-ism. Even only the instrumental plays on her background are so avantgarde and progressive, and Jun's mysterious and paranoiac voices can completely immerse us listeners into her psychotropic caravan. Yes guess almost all of progressive rock fans have not known about Japanese old-fashioned songs at all but let me say they should have such flavour as GUERNICA - loud and exaggerated horn sections, inorganic and strict-for-tone voices, and a bad recording condition (oh, it's not here...sorry). GUERNICA went ahead and showed antique, archaic, and artistic technique on a progressive way.

Maybe...in my humble opinion, surely...GUERNICA will be progressive forever all around the world.

While not perfectly, this is basically a good and, at the time of making, original idea. Puffy64 seemlessy mixes heavily distorted guitars with the C64-ish sounds reminiscent of those used in the original game. While not that well executed, the music on this album does have a certain drawing je ne sais quoi to it. There is some really nice quitar work on it in the form of solos and interesting rhythms, and the use of C64 computer sounds makes for a semi-progressive edge (but not enought to even make it prog-related) and an interesting retro ambience.

A great surprise in 2009 came from this multi-instrumentalist. A superb debut album. If you like Porcupine Tree or Steven Wilson compositions you have to buy this abum.

A classic and one of the best - and most influential alternative metal albums of the last millennium. It contains a lot of progressive elements (such as tempo changes, odd time signatures and quirky 4/4 patterns, and genre transendence) without ever being a full-blown progressive album. There are individual tunes, however, that could be categorized as progressive proper, such as "Zombie Eathers" and "The Real Thing". In any case, this is a classic alt metal album fusing metal with funk, rap, hard rock and other genres without being as dull as a lot of nü metal is.

If you like doom metal, you have to acquire this classic. While very obviously inspired by the likes of Candlemass (there's even a silly Candlemass-like narrative voice on one of the tracks), "Into the Depths of Sorrow" is nonetheless original in its own way. Firstly, it contains several heavy riffs that are based on Middle Eastern scales, which has more or less become a trademark of SA's. Secondly, the incorporation of power metal elements (and eastern influences) creates a genre that is not as blues inspired as many first generation doom bands were (still, there are some cool pentatonic riffs on this album). Thirdly, SA's compositions one this album are more complex than was typical of the doom metal at the time. And lastly, there's Rob Lowe's voice - that in itself is worth buying the album for.

Brilliant. Beautiful. Would have been perfect with better production...

An awesome album. Somewhere between old MotW and Kayo Dot, but without harsh vocals... and it can be downloaded for free!!!

A lot of strong power metal tunes on this one, but boy am I glad they got rid of that vocalist, because he's terrible.

Another power metal milestone by Iced Earth.

What a great album this is! The music's straight out epic doom the way it should be. I really like Johan Langquist's vocals on this album (theer's a quality of desperation to his singing that neither Messiah Marcolin nor Rob Lowe possesses).

 I stumbled across this album in the local record store in the discount section. The price was 5 DKR (that's less than one Euro), so I thought "What the hell!".

Was it worth it? Gee, I actually don't know. I guess, stylistically, it's a sort of mixture Grunge, Hardcore and early Nu-Metal. There are a bunch of nice groovy riffs on this album and some cool breakdowns and changes, too, but on the whole this album is quite forgettable and uninspiring and tends to be monotonous (they could have avoided this by adding some guitar melodies and solos). The yelled vocals quickly get annoying and add further monotony - had their vocalist been able to add some variation to his singing, Compression would have sounded less monotonous. As it is now, this album is boring - simply boring.

It's really a shame, because, as mentioned above, there are a lot of cool riffs and a lot of potential, which unfortunately drown in monotony and boring, stipid, crappy vocals. A shame!

Their most depressive work since "Discouraged Ones".

Very, very hard to fault. Amplifier create a mighty wall of sound drowned with lots and lots of guitar riffs.

Definitely sparked my interest in getting more of the DVDs of the series, an excellent concert.

Fans of The Enid will love this!

One of the finest release this year with a great singer, nice arrangements and very good compositions.

Best reason for having this album is that it was produced by Alex Lifeson from Rush.