Reviews

The Enemy Inside is a progressive metal album in the spirit of Pain Of Salvation, Redepmtion, made for the most demanding fans of the genre, and a record with an almost excessive dose of motif fragmentation

Ampulla Magnifying is a brilliant vision that sets The Daedalus Spirit Orchestra a little apart from traditional prog rock bands.

Dead Heroes Club don't hold back on convincing emotional expression with a melancholic edge, while keeping the best sonic ingredients that graced some of their legendary role models.

The angry words are history. On Minut sa njom, Bora gives sentimentality free rein, and Čorba has made an album full of mellow ballads, while still keeping a few hard rock marches in the mix.

With their debut, Memento mori manage to squeeze out a few flashes of exciting potential here and there, but it all stays hostage to a predictable chase after musical accessibility.

Esthema blend elements of jazz, progressive rock, classical and, of course, world music, drawing mostly on Balkan and Indian sources.

With their first live album in a twenty-year career, Dark Tranquillity prove why they're the standard-bearers of melodic death metal.

Temple of the Dog isn't your typical grunge album. Cornell took the Mother Love Bone sound as his starting point, stripped out a big chunk of the hard rock side, and replaced it with blues-tinged guitars.

Sleep Talking serves up just the right dose of post rock/alternative rock accessibility and hypnosis, plus a healthy helping of avant-garde musical mischief.

With their first proper studio album, Lene kosti show how a band should come back after a 15-year break. And how heavy metal should sound in 2010!

Moby's ninth studio album is an innocent expression of musical creativity, free from the pressure of the market and money, inspired by David Lynch's speech at the BAFTA awards. A commercially unburdened record.

The documentation of Bad Company's live comeback speaks to just how exceptional the band's catalog is. With a performance that's confident enough, if at times mostly routine, the tension holds from the opener onward.

»Seven Frames Of Mind« features eight tracks that add up to a solid 40 minutes of top-shelf jazz-fusion playing.

“Destined Solitaire” is packed with variety and wild black-and-white swings, with touches of jazz, folk, metal, ambient, noir and even pop, but it's not just a mindless mash of all those ingredients.

Genetic, the EP from Postojna symphonic power metal outfit Divine Illusion, is a rock-solid foundation! It's no herald of a musical revolution. What it does is fill an untapped genre gap on the Slovenian metal scene.

Instead of continuing to pour on the symphonic prog rock, Pendragon went for a more commercial sound on "Kowtow". The end result is their worst album.

With its unique fusion of jazz rock, funk and world music, Osibisa's debut takes us deep into the heart of the African savannas and jungles, with a short layover in the Caribbean islands.

Last year Divje jezero unleashed a more-than-decent debut. The band is still hunting for its sound, and for now it may also be a little short on creativity and ideas.

"This is more than a decent debut. The band is still searching for the right sound, and for now maybe still lacks a bit of creativity and ideas. The tracks are pretty similar to one another, with too much repetition of "riffs" and certain…

Bwase nwge! A rock & roll guerrilla from hell that couldn't care less about norms and clichés in music, and instead marches on, with not a shred of an ear for conformity, paving its own expressive path.

The first proper Gamma Ray live album, capturing a concert from the tour promoting a studio record. The set list is less interesting than on Skeletons In The Closet, but the band's magic wins out anyway!

Innocence is by no means a softer album than earlier Saxon releases — it's sharp as a razor. Above all, it's a record of new dimensions, with an energy that flows in very different directions compared to Crusader.

"Facelift" is where the Alice in Chains success story begins, an album that neatly captures the spirit of an era, when a heavy metal-leaning band got swallowed up by the grunge scene.

»Man in the Moon« isn't a bad album at heart, and it has a fair few things to offer melodic rock fans, but sadly it falls well short of the usual sonic adventurousness of these legendary space rockers.

After their debut »Visionary Position«, Panic Room have put out another excellent album, "Satellite", that has no trouble topping its predecessor.

Nčodnč swear by angry, aggressive punk with a big dose of melody, both in the guitar passages and the vocal harmonies.

On "Gutter Ballet," Savatage took another successful step in their sonic transition, slowly steering into far more symphonic waters with more complex melodies, longer songs, and a variety of vocal styles.

The fight for survival, the core motif of the film "The Road," pushed the two musicians to bring their score very close to the music of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

"Gryphon" carried some ancient, traditional pieces into the second half of the 20th century and kneaded them into something new that will never go stale, so it keeps delivering plenty of good fun time after time.

Brain Connect is an experimental-progressive trio from southern Poland with two demos under their belt.

Human Playings is a foursome of "youngsters" from Ljubljana sailing the waters of jazz fusion.

ChillOut is a band from Jesenice. All three tracks on the "If You Can" EP show that these guys are just the right leavened rock dough. They also offer several possible cues for where the band's character could develop next.

“The Age of Plastic” is a downright revolutionary album that left a major mark on new wave and synth-pop in the years that followed, while also catapulting the music and production careers of two exceptional talents into orbit.

The new album shows Gamma Ray are firing on all creative cylinders again. It sits right up there with the best work in the band's catalog, and it's got no shortage of caustic venom and defiance, a textbook definition of old-school power…

»Love 2« is an impressive achievement, but it takes a few more listens to really settle into your ears, since it's not as instantly accessible as the early albums from the lab of the cult French duo.

"Heligoland" successfully brings back tighter song structures and, above all, the dark atmosphere that defined the album "Mezzanine", while also building on the sonic experiments of its predecessor "100th Window".

With "You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll", Twisted Sister proved they were no flash in the pan on the music scene.

Shutdown prove that the "youngsters" can show the veterans how real heavy metal is done!

"These Days" is a major milestone in the Bon Jovi saga, meticulously wedged between rock accessible enough for a "mature" listening crowd and organic music with plenty of high-octane piston-pumping in the band's engine.

The duo of teacher Andre Orsel and student Kas Kluitman makes music that blends elements of metal and jazz with a touch of ambient atmosphere.

Kraški solisti are like a stray bullet. You never know where the next sound is going to come from, and running into them is usually a painful experience.

Album length: 43:25 Production: Drevored Release date: 2009 Label: Nika Records / Franklin Republic RecordsBuy the album!Rating: 8.0/10 Drevored, a good thirty years after they first formed, are finally putting out their studio…

Drevored's vibe fits the square footage of Slovenia's territorial integrity from head to toe. "Dekade" is a superbly produced album of trivial, middle-of-the-road pop rock solutions.

"Strings To A Web" is a great Rage album that, considering the long-running band's road-weary mileage, thankfully shows no creative fatigue and washes away the doubts left by "Carved in Stone".

»Anno Domini High Definition« is, as Riverside's fourth studio album, by far the band's most challenging, expressively richest and most complexly structured record.

"Let's just hope Riverside keep spoiling us for a long time to come, in this peak period of their own artistic creativity, just like they do with "Anno Domini High Definition.""

"Rock In a Hard Place" is the only Aerosmith album where you'll hunt in vain for the grit and quickly contagious perversity of the Joe Perry / Brad Whitford guitar tandem.

Comparisons of their studio debut, from a band whose members average under 20 years old, to Dream Theater, Symphony X, or Pain Of Salvation speak to their exceptional talent, inspiration, and ambition.

With In The Night, Dream Evil stay true to their fanbase. They offer nothing new, so "cliché corrosion" is a threat, but they fend it off with excellent production that breathes fire into typical power metal riffs.

Toxine introduces itself in the best possible way: with a high-flying demo that leaves us hungry for something more substantial.

"Živa pička" is a gold-plated document for the band's devoted fans, but the casual rock connoisseur won't keep it in the player for long.

Even after a fourth studio album, InMe's way out of the identity-crisis abyss is going to be a very long one. With it, they prove they're the latest artificial product of today's instant, bloated, hollow and puffed-up Britishness.

Dial down the rock edge of the minimalists Spoon a notch, tack on the repetitive single-note keyboard tapping of the weepers Snow Patrol, add a Britpop Oasis-style vocal, and back the whole thing up with double drums.

"Scratch My Back" falls well short of Gabriel's body of work so far, painting a sad picture of a creatively and emotionally drained musician who has opted for a bizarre studio move just as he's hit the big six-oh.

"Reciklejšon" is in many ways the logical continuation of the minimalism expansion Anderej Šik and Boris Beštjak launched with their debut "Dance Mamblita".

Gonoba charge in on camelback with their debut, Chains of Ignorance!

Dan D have cashed in big on that unforgettable evening of September 13, 2009, when they played a jam-packed Križanke backed by the RTV Slovenija Symphony Orchestra. The DVD, though, doesn't hide a few reservations

With their first demo, young Ljubljana crew Panikk prove that thrash metal still has plenty left to say.

The lost piece of the mosaic has found its rightful place with the album Še pomnite tovariši? Kuzle proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with the most important Slovenian rock acts of their time. It doesn't get more authentic than this in…

With their third album, Broken Lock have finally nailed down the uniqueness of their own artistry, which is rarely matched on the Slovenian rock scene or the global one. An art rock album of fresh, intelligent challenges

Three years on, Crazed Farmers are back with a fresh record. "Far Ma" is an album that will keep the "farmers" firmly on the radar of that rare handful of lucky souls with refined musical taste.

With his latest album, Zuljan didn't set out to discover new musical horizons, but he has made an easygoing, ear-pleasing record that won't be leaving your player anytime soon.

Even though this debut was paving their way to the top of the music scene of the day, they went for a soundtrack career instead. It was hugely successful, sure, but we can't help wondering where the road of "real" music would have taken…

»Paths of Civilization" is the debut from coastal bores Sin Story, a bunch of guys who'd love to spit fire but only manage to "release" the occasional puff of methane.

He shows off his top-notch vocal chops on this record too. But you can definitely hear a touch of 2009 in there as well, especially in the production.

Diffusion is the most accomplished album yet from 7for4, both production-wise and musically. They've stretched their creative reach even further, and it'll be fun to watch what else they surprise us with down the road.

Blackwood Creek is a trio made up of the Winger brothers and guitarist Peter Fletcher. It's not Winger and it's not a Kip Winger solo album, but it leans, free and easy, on a classic yet melodically organic hard rock approach.

Nineteen years after the celebrated masterpiece "Lofcaudio", which pulled the very best out of arena-sized melodic rock, a fantastic successor comes crashing into the world, carrying the same feelings but defining a new era.

El Desperado was a big step forward for Let 3, less in terms of the record's sheer quality than in carving out a sound all their own, the thing that makes them so different from everyone else.

Given how high the bar was set by its predecessor "Waiting For The Wings" (2006), "Mercy Falls" is the expected next step, and the band masterfully capitalizes on the potential of the concept they picked.

For this old tomcat, Tr3s Lunas is a very welcome return to form.

Their debut Under the Blade is the embodiment of the stereotypical Twisted Sister image: a rebellious band whose anthems celebrate the rock'n'roll lifestyle, free from everyday obligations.

Strange Cousins From The West is another superb achievement from Clutch, riding the best possible curve that the band's inexhaustible creative spark for fusing stoner rock and blues can draw.

The album itself doesn't stick in your memory, but the goal was to create music that fits the story unfolding on the movie screen. Oldfield pulled that off.

Even the seasoned Wharton's experience, dressing the new album from British AOR rockers Dare in top-notch production, can't hide the self-cloning, the lack of inspiration and the missing freshness of expression.

"Memorial Roots" fixes the bitter aftertaste of its predecessor "Downburst". The band keeps channeling its creativity into melodic hooks and pomp. A few "holes" still need patching, though.

With "Rh-", Siddharta hit the peak of their career. They put out the album of Slovenian generations, maturely cashing in on the full measure of their huge artistic talent and the commercial potential of "Id" and "Nord"

"Welcome Back My Friends..." is one of those classic live albums that gives you the best possible window into a band's most fertile stretch, in this case the golden creative years of this legendary trio.

Discovery is another solid entry in Oldfield's catalog, though it plays it a bit too safe compositionally, and that's almost certainly down to Virgin steering him in that direction.

Hear "Liebe Ist Für Alle Da" and you can hardly believe four whole years have passed since its predecessor "Rosenrot" (2005). Rammstein keep their character untouched: morbidly savage satire.

Čista jajca? brings nothing new, and it's a good thing the multi-instrumental sound now partly leads the listener away from the dull guitar motif - Zmelkoow have turned into a seven-piece band

Even though the album is clearly a product of its time (the eighties, that is), Ballard's songwriting is pretty convincing here, even if the lyrics get a bit syrupy.

Inspired from start to finish, "Dancing To The Devil's Beat" proves that after more than four decades Strawbs are nowhere near ready for the scrapheap. They age like wine: the older they get, the better they get.

Home & Minor shows a different side of Oceansize, but it also pulls them away from their own way of expressing themselves. This time the influence of certain post rock bands is almost too obvious.

Steve Vai is leaving the European philharmonic halls that defined the DVD Visual Sound theories behind and heading back to rock stages.

Despite Rob Halford's worn-out vocals, this document still earns its place in the classic Judas Priest collection of their huge catalog, and every devoted fan of the band will gladly pick it up

Arch Enemy look back at the start of their career, but in the meantime the roots of evil have almost withered.

Diane Birch is a soft-souled musician with a clearly tough heart, and her debut "Bible Belt" is the newest weapon in the hands of the champions of young-generation vocal soul.

7for4 stay true to the signature sound they found on their debut Contact. They can still surprise the listener in a good way.

With "Nord", Siddharta went for tighter melodic compactness, a sharper contrast in the riff distortion, a dose of symphonic flavor, a recognizable vocal character and much more control over the sound.

"Smoke and Mirrors" could well be called George Lynch's triumphant comeback, the record that finally gives the legendary "Wicked Sensation" a worthy successor.

A reissue of the debut by Siddharta, a band whose arrival changed the face of Slovenian mainstream rock for good. "Id" was a pioneer in opening up some views on rock that Slovenes had never encountered before.

With their fourth record, Sweet Sorrow hit the peak of their long-running career!

Either way, this is an album that fans of experimental music that's still accessible really should hear.

"Absolute Greatest" is yet another pretty pointless attempt to squeeze as much cash as possible out of the pockets of longtime Queen fans with as little effort as possible, and as such it'll vanish into oblivion as fast as it can.

This Is War, with its misleading title, proves the band exists only on the surface, serving up a cure for the Leto brothers' egotrip. There's less rock in it than feathers on a frog's head.

With their debut Two Dogs Fuckin', an album firmly anchored in rock waters, Let 3 laid solid foundations and a strong springboard for the rest of their journey.

"Catharsis" doesn't mark a step forward for Elis. "Griefshire" (2006) remains the better album. Only the follow-up to "Catharsis" will show whether the band can get past its identity crisis.

The album "Nibelung" wraps up Siegfried's trilogy built around a single concept story. It's a step forward in maturity. Despite being stuck in formula and predictable, it manages to squeeze out enough variety.

"Njord" is a mature, polished record, and so far the best-tuned album in the style that defines Leave's Eyes. With it, Leave's Eyes have caught up with the top names of gothic power metal.