Reviews

Suicide Silence are a band from the US (California). Their album "The Cleansing", the follow-up to the EP "Suicide Silence" (2002), came out in North America, where releases like this often beat the European market to the punch, last

In the late nineties, IQ were incredibly busy. Besides studio albums, they were also putting out DVDs, live albums and re-recordings of old albums. And with all those projects on the go, in 1999 they still found the time to put out The L

When you get your hands on the first EP from Slovenska Bistrica's young death/thrash metal crew Burning Legion, the first thing that hits you is the incredible cover art, which I'd say is one of the best, most beautiful and most effective…

In 1972, after a disastrous end to a tour and the breakup of his backing band The Mothers (originally The Mothers Of Invention), Frank Zappa, genius composer, guitarist, director, satirist and a whole lot more, started gathering fresh…

Marzla vada is an intriguing package of five self-image-burdened uncles, whose debut Med Venero in Jupitrom is one of the latest leaps into the gloomy dimension of Alpine-foothills rock intellectualism. The band proudly puts down its ro

I've been pretty lucky with Slovenian music lately, and I've discovered some truly wonderful artists. Of course there are the old hands like Begnagrad, Quatebriga, Bratko Bibič solo, Milko Lazar and a few others. In this group of more avant

Jorn Lande is still in top form. The Norwegian-born singer, whose vocals take your breath away, knows no rest and no limits. Since 2000 he's put out 4 solo albums and one live album, and between roughly 1998 and 2007 he lent his vocals to

Your only hope of getting your hands on the original CD from the legendary Pomaranča, with material from their golden era in the first half of the eighties, when heavy metal was still young, is hidden in a compilation released in 1993…

Ayreon is the brainchild of Dutch "wunderkind" Arjen Anthony Lucassen, who, for me personally at least, is a kind of modern-day Mozart. For a good decade now Arjen has been delighting us with great releases, each one an upgrade on the last

Hard to believe, but Lenny Kravitz has been on the wider music scene for a full nineteen years now. An undeniably enviable stretch that has taken the New York-born musician through practically every phase of musical development,

The double live collection "Cirkus" was one of the first King Crimson releases to come out on Discpline Global Mobile, the band's own label, run by their ever-disciplined and strict chieftain, guitarist Rober

The third album from Oklahoma metalcore assailants The Agony Scene, very warmly titled ("Get Damned"), came out on Century Media, which makes it the third label the guys have gone through so far in their career

"Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With" (anyone who can say that five times in a row without tying their tongue in knots deserves a heartfelt congratulations) was an EP of over half an hour and, in many ways, a tasty appetizer ahead of

King Crimson, the original apostles of progressive rock and one of the most influential rock bands of all time, stepped into the new millennium as a quartet. After the excellent album "Thrak" (1995) and a pile of releases under the…

Aleph are an Italian band that's been around for roughly ten years. The album "In Tenebra", which landed in my hands and my ears, is the product of a long gestation. As the years since the band's formation rolled by, the songs grew right…

Eric Clapton's career was a popular target for all sorts of misfortune at the turn of the 1980s. After his trip to the Far East, so brilliantly documented on the superb Just One Night, Eric was once again wr

By the time of Ceux du Dehors, Univers Zero had probably hit the peak of their creative powers, but there was no time to rest. They were back to gigging hard, mostly in smaller venues. Throughout all of this

Of all the Thin Lizzy albums, Renegade is probably the most one-dimensional, monolithic piece of work. After painful lineup shuffles that led to dizzying attempts to keep up an appearance of normality inside the band, followed so kindly by…

For all of us who lived through the eighties in the golden years of adolescence and teenhood, this reissue of the classic VHS recording, now finally on DVD too, is a must-have gadget for everyone with that "Duran Duran

review no. 2 by Peter Podbrežnik (15.01.2008) "Thrak" was yet another magnificent comeback for prog rock champions King Crimson, a band that at the time probably even most of their most loyal followers weren't sure would ever crawl back…

"Everyone Is Everybody Else" was the first Barclay James Harvest album released on Polydor after the band parted ways with their original label, EMI-Harvest. For a band that was building up more and more recognition

Noxire, the alt rock n' roll band from Celje, are no innocent little lambs. They certainly don't lack experience. They've got talent, a polished musical outlook and a creative vision. What they lack is recognition, especially in Slovenia.…

Calla is the Latin genus name for flowering plants known in Slovenian as kačunka. If you steer clear of swamps, their natural habitat, you can find ornamental varieties of these plants at the florist. But Calla is also

Alongside all the "boom rock reunion" concerts currently gracing planet Earth (mega reunions like Genesis and The Police, for instance), there's been one more. Just one show, but it kicked up as much dust as if a new one were being born

A reunion of rock legends that sent a wave of mass excitement racing through our solar system at the speed of light and nearly bent the magnetic fields on Earth - we're talking about the one and only concert, the O2 concert pre&

Slovenian metal veterans will probably remember Game Over well, a band formed way back in 1988. In their (way too) short career they put out the cult demo Tilt!, which is a real collector's item today, and then sank into oblivion. Bo&#3

Slovenia's black metal champions Dekadent were founded in 2002 under the name Vigred, with mastermind Artur Felicijan as the sole member. In 2005, a prolific creative streak gave birth to the debut album Manifestation of Seasonal

Singer David Coverdale and guitarist Jimmy Page have joined forces in a rock star duo. I don't think either of them needs much of an introduction, given that both have had hugely successful music careers. Still, a bit of

Ry Cooder is one of the most respected names among music connoisseurs – he's made a ton of interesting film scores and a wild variety of studio albums, and he's the guy who introduced the world to the musicians under the Buena Vista Social

Neil Young is one of those artists who definitely belongs in the "old farts" category, but his "farts" are anything but stinky and definitely not all that innocent. On his recent studio records he did try his hand at concept albums built on…

Maggie Bell is probably an unknown name to most music fans, closely tied to a character-packed, purely vocal flirtation with the motifs of Black musical-artistic expression (soul, gospel and, of course, blues) that white folks adopted as…

Tide, I think the four young, talented and likeable guys no longer need much of an introduction, since in 2005 they made an incredible splash with their debut "Seven Days", which even got a reissue. Three tracks stood out from the first…

I've known the band Billy's Private Parking for quite a while, since their name pops up pretty often on TV screens and the radio waves. They recently renamed themselves Billysi (no, it's not a mangled version of the Georgian capital,

Strong Bear is a solo project by Bernard Pintar, who, after playing in Heavy Hamsters, Wastem and Nadangel, decided to go his own way musically, kicking things off with Strong Bear and its first album Arcane Coloured Head: Chime

The second solo studio album from the Depeche Mode frontman, titled "Hourglass", is a turn you wouldn't expect from a musician who belongs to a big band and decides to go solo. Usually the basic motive for such a decision

The reunion of three Genesis members was without a doubt one of the biggest music events of 2007. After their solo careers gradually faded in popularity, Messrs. Banks, Collins and Rutherford realized they had never forgotten their first…

Don't let the logo of the legendary German progressive rock band on the album cover fool you. "Codename Wildgeese" has about as much in common with Eloy's traditional space rock sound as Klaus Kinski has in looks

Gibonni is a guy who needs no introduction, unless this album review were written in some foreign language for readers outside the former Yugoslavia. The gentleman who rules the peaks of mainstream pop in neighboring Croatia, who is also…

The follow-up to "Kobna ubavina - Terrible Beauty Is Born" (2004) brings the band's original singer Goran Tanevski back into the lineup, which is a huge win. The noble element of original authenticity is restored, something that, given…

In 1968, the breakup of the mighty Cream kicked off the final episode of the so-called explosion of the British blues and R & B movement. The sudden split of the legendary trio left a huge hole behind it, and it was filled in no time by

In case you haven't noticed lately, the Ljubljana air, saturated mostly with smoggy, sedative-flavored elements, also carries the intensely sour taste of the roaring of the legendary, quite possibly one and only Pa

If Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are the godfathers of metal, then Accept are its godparents. Few bands had such a huge influence on the music of the day, and at the same time, more or less content with the status of grey eminence, stayed…

Tiles are an American band that's been haunting the world for quite a while with their lukewarm music and driving people to despair. It's pretty surprising that they ended up on Germany's Inside Out, a label that backs more progressive

Just a few years ago they were considered a very promising Slovenian band, and today they've become darlings of young people both in Slovenia and abroad who are hungry for good, noisy music. The story of Ljubljana's hard-hitters began in…

It was 1998 when the emo/screamo outfit UNDEROATH was born in Florida, in guitarist Luke Morton's bedroom, to be exact. After that unusual start the band is still going, but with a hugely changed lineup – every single member has been…

With the release of "Performance" (1983), German space rock greats Eloy went through a minor sonic rebirth that brought them closer to some of the sound concepts of the 80s. Their traditional space rock sound

"Izštekani" is an audio-visual record of Slovenia's most successful rock band, captured during the group's appearance on the legendary Val 202 show Izštekani. What more can you even hope to achieve on Slovenian soil if you're Siddharta?…

Yes, one of the best, most influential and most beloved progressive rock bands of all time, set out on their long road, marked by unpredictable adventures, a few months before the release of their

Grad are a band from Rijeka (Croatia) with a 20-year career behind them. "Glad" is their fifth album, which sounds awfully modest when you say it out loud. The new record took shape over a solid five years since its predecessor…

Oh boy!! I can't write much differently than I did for the Majestic album! With the new album "Land Of The Free pt. II", Gamma Ray only confirm that the band's paths of development are completely used up. If "Powerplant" (1999) was the…

Big Brother's self-titled debut, released in 1976, was definitely not made under conditions that guaranteed maximum success. With such great material as the band had managed to pile up, the recording sessions were rushed way too much, and…

With QE2, Mike Oldfield finally said goodbye to the sound of the seventies and stepped into a new era of shorter songs and pop hits. Even though Platinum had already shown a big departure from the typical sound Oldfield produced

"Time To Turn" picked up the sci-fi concept Eloy started on the previous album, "Planets" (1981). The big change on this record was undoubtedly

After the glorious breakthrough into the elite of the so-called cock rock scene of the late eighties, which Bon Jovi delivered in the form of the phenomenon Slippery When Wet, the question quickly came up: what could the boys do to top…

"Performance" marked the moment when Eloy, after two conceptual space rock masterpieces, which both of the previous albums, "Planets" (1981) and "Time To Turn" (1982), undoubtedly were, decided to come back down to earth a bit &r

"The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn", the debut from prog rock giants Pink Floyd, is without a doubt one of the most important and influential albums in rock history, one of the cornerstones of progressive rock, and the record that wrote the…

In the wake of "mad diamond" Syd Barrett's departure and the release of their second album "A Saucerful Of Secrets" (1968), Pink Floyd, at the urging of renowned German director Barbet Schroeder, recorded the music for the film "

Third studio album, and the first new one in four years. Dežurni krivci, those clattering Soc-combine-harvesters, add their new opus of immoral songs, bottled up in a little vial of deadly poison. It has nothing to do with Alice Cooper,…

Label: EMI RecordsRelease date: June 13, 1969Production: Pink FloydAlbum length: 44.57 minRating: 8.0/10Genre: Psychadelic Rock/Progressive Rock In the period after the departure of the "crazy diamond" Syd Barrett and the release of…

Three years and one album (Entertaining Thanatos) later, American symphonic rockers Metaphor are back this year with The Sparrow, which tells Mary Doria Russell's sci-fi story about a Jesuit expedition to a distant planet. W

Bay Area in the Dolina šentflorjanska! Thrash metal from Goričko to Piran, as if Kreslin were mumbling it. Wherever the road winds, at every stop (thrash in every Slovenian village!) you can run into excellent thrash metal. Na&scaron

After a long hiatus, American progressive rockers Metaphor decided to make a comeback in 2004. After the superb Starfooted, which became something of a cult classic, a lot of people had high expectations. It often happens that nothing good…

It's been a good while since my ears were regularly fed on the sounds of bouncy Cali punk, and one of the main staples back then was the headline attraction, NOFX. Quite some time has passed and those legends have become label owners, club…

From the land of macaroni and tortellini, symphonic prog rock revivalists The Watch are back with their new album "Primitive". If I count the record they put out under their original name, The Night Watch, this is already their fourth album

German space rock champions Eloy had more than enough reasons to be happy at the start of the '80s. The excellent "Colours" (1980) was the album they strode into the new decade with, and they pulled it off without having to

FrozenchilD, a trio (by some sensational findings even a foursome) of music fanatics, after years of wearing out local and often foreign stages, in 2007 launches its first assault on the ears of the sub-Alpine populace with a pre

Magma went more than two decades without releasing a studio album, then in 2004 they announced a new record. Kohntarkosz Anteria was composed three decades ago, but Christian Vander simply never fou

"Living In The Material World" is Harrison's fourth studio album in a row and his second of the post-Beatles era. Following the lead of the solo debuts of his two former bandmates Lennon and McCartney, Harrison as a solo artist proved

The fourth full-length from Isis is something every post-rock fan has been impatiently waiting for and never dared to ask for out loud. LA – the Boston alliance of music shamans has, after a pretty fruitful run with a bunch of lesser-known…

Conxious are Austrian youngsters who are true scientists of composing outrageously unlistenable creations. Specialists in torturing the mechanoreceptors. In all my years of reviewing records, I've yet to hear such an extremely…

A flood of more or less decent and less decent emo bands pick unhappy love stories, wrecked relationships between man and woman, death and transience as the central theme of their music, and the lads from Crash Romeo had no intention of…

Very few bands arrive at their debut with such a polished, fully formed approach to musical maturity and such a crystal-clear vision. The problem can be that the creators who came together to put their heads together and, with combined…

In the late eighties, an Italian guy decided to blend his love of horror movies, baroque and progressive music into a strange new concoction called Devil Doll. Right after the release (even during the recording)

At the turn of the eighties into the nineties of the 20th century, Korn were a cornerstone of a new genre that was only just taking shape in the transoceanic empire of noise. They were something fresh and not yet hear&scaro

With the arrival of Borknagar, who have been steadily stringing together wildly incomparable albums since 1996, albums whose layered complexity and sonic diversity make easy categ

The story of Celje melodic metal outfit LastDayHere isn't exactly a long one, since their beginnings only go back to 2005. Despite quite a few lineup changes, which kept coming almost on a conveyor belt right up until this April, and a long…

After a few years off and some experimenting with rather different music in The Offering, Christian Vander decided in the early nineties to bring Magma back to life. One of the first gigs was the so-called "Les Voix" in Fran

After 1978 and the album Attahk, Magma decided to take a bit of a break. Really, it was more about focusing on live shows and less on studio projects. So in the early eighties they decided to put out

Way back in 2001, after their 1999 debut The Frailty Of Words, Hopesfall served us up the EP No Wings To Speak Of. Just four tracks, with the last screams (and only a little singing) from Doug

Amid the flood of all sorts of reunions of rock gods we've witnessed in the last few years, we've now also seen the return of the immortal Queen, admittedly without Freddie Mercury but with another eminent voice from the world of rock, Paul…

Hard Core. We could kick off the lesson and the first contact with dry definitions that really say nothing. HC is more than just music and a polished look with military-short buzz cuts, tattoos, and scowling like you're pissed off at the…

After the folk-rock, baroque-spiced quintet of indie poppers got bold enough to step out of the shadow of the small labels and aim a signal flare at the sky above the major labels, the first giant to spot the light was Capitol

Before the release of their second album "A Saucerful Of Secrets", Pink Floyd were without a doubt the top name on the British psychedelic rock scene and one of the leading pioneers of the emerging progressive rock. Their p

Label: EMI RecordsRelease date: June 29, 1968Production: Norman SmithAlbum length: 39:42 minGenre: Psychadelic Rock/Space Rock/Progressive RockRating: 8.0/10 "A Saucerful Of Secrets" is the second studio album by Pink Floyd, hands…

Bold, biting, exhibitionist, snappy. Flinty Slovenes from the Prekmurje wine region, raised on the voluptuousness of boozy brews, a spirit their musical reach in no way denies. For once, we Sloven&#

"Colours" was something of a bridge between the old and new sound of German space rock legends Eloy when it came out. If "Silent Cries And Mighty Echoes" (1979) was their peak for crafting symphonic waves and esoteric atmospheres

The year 2001 was something of a last-call borderline, when even the final holdouts could still pour their share of rage into the melting pot of a freshly formed genre – metalcore. In fact, in the case of a band that took its name from a…

Empirical proof of a band's quality is its ability to survive creatively, plus the endurance test of defying the teeth of time. In 1995, the young Berliners Beatsteaks weren't weighed down by anything. In the name of a good time and

This time, American powerhouses HOPESFALL are introducing themselves with their new record MAGNETIC NORTH, released this May on TRUSTKILL RECORDS. The band's roots go back to 1998, when a bunch of barely-grown kids from the small city of…

After their best album "Ocean" (1977) and their first live album "Live" (1978), Eloy were at the peak of their creative powers. With "Silent Cries And Mighty Echoes" they didn't just hit their

Norway is known musically mostly for weirdos stomping around the Norwegian fjords in corpse paint, with an unstoppable urge to flip crosses 180 degrees and worshipping the Goat at every turn. Sadly, because of the dominant black metal, the…

Incantations was the peak of Mike Oldfield's creative run in the seventies, but a project and feat that huge may have worn him out a bit and drained his appetite for such heavy, ambitious undertakings. With Incantations he used up most of

After the release of their best album "Ocean" (1977), Eloy rightfully enjoyed the reputation of being Germany's most popular (prog) rock band, one that could easily go toe to toe in popularity with the biggest names

»Ocean«, a concept album about the rise and fall of mythological Atlantis, was the greatest triumph of the career of the legendary German space rockers Eloy, both artistically and commercially. As for the latter, it's telling enough that…

After leaving Greece, Aphrodite's Child made a name for themselves mainly with pretty, kitschy pop ballads that get stuck in your ear fast. Especially huge was Rain And Tears, which you can still catch on the radio every now and then

The question that pops up while watching and listening to this DVD is: is Steve Vai slowly turning into Frank Zappa? With that little beard under his lower lip he already looks the part, and now the "little

Mosquito Bite is a seriously interesting record born of constant competition between two incorrigible music enthusiasts, Enrico Crivellaro and the hyperactive Graz-born Raphael Wressnig. The latter in particular deserves special p

With "Dawn," Eloy made a gigantic leap in their musical evolution. After the release of "Power And The Passion" (1975), their first bold foray into the world of concept albums, which many now consider one of the cult albu

"Weasels Ripped My Flesh" was, after "Burnt Weeny Sandwich" (1970), the second of two posthumous releases Frank recorded with the original lineup of his backing band The Mothers Of Invention, which in the minds of

Performer: King, AlbertLabel: StaxRelease: 1979Rating: 4.6/5 Albert King was a big man (if nothing else, the affectionately nicknamed "velvet bulldozer", with a not exactly modest 120 kilos stored in six and a half feet of roughly…