Reviews

Right around the corner from The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind was already waiting in 1983. If The Number of the Beast was still a kind of bridge or transition between Iron Maiden's NWOBHM era (Iron Maiden and Killers) and the…

Heartland have been around for 14 years, and "Mind Your Head" is their jubilee 10th studio album. Good lads, these Heartland guys. The band formed in 1993 on the ruins of FM and The Kick. Funnily enough, even today Hear

When a new metal subgenre started popping up in the mid-nineties, symphonic or gothic metal if you like, its popularity shot up fast… and then, thanks to a flood of bands who took the genre's pioneers like After Forever and Nightwish as…

With their third album, "H To He, Who Am The Only One", Van Der Graaf Generator finally and for all eternity etched their names among the greatest innovators in the history of British progressive rock and created one of the b

Label: EMI RecordsRelease date: May 16, 1983Production: Martin BirchAlbum length: 45.28 minGenre: Heavy Metal Rating: 9.0/10 Right around the corner after The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind was waiting in 1983. If The Number of…

Releasing official bootlegs has been all the rage lately. Last year, for instance, Depeche Mode came up with something like it, one of the first bands to really start smashing taboos, arguing that official bootlegs don't sat

Since the release of the excellent "Bursting Out" (1978), Jethro Tull's first live album, quite a few years passed before its follow-up arrived. In that time the band went through many ups and downs, constant sonic changes

In the early and mid-1990s, symphonic rock made a big comeback. That's not all that strange, considering symphonic was the most popular of all the progressive rock subgenres. What's stranger is that a lot of symphonic bands popped up in the…

Swedish prog rock revivalists The Flower Kings are never happy unless they put out at least one new album a year, crank out at least one epic of more than 20 minutes and deliver at least 70 minutes of music (I have to say I'm quite surpr

Where can the reconceptualization of musical frameworks possibly go in an era so packed and saturated with the inventive logic of progression and perpetual motion? In an ocean of sounds and images, it's hard to add to the imaginarium…

Wurdah Itah is officially not even a Magma album, but a solo project by the band's drummer and visionary Christian Vander. Still, pretty much everyone files it under Magma, so I'll go along with that too. The album is quite

Ever since the release of the rather mediocre album "The Glorious Burden" in 2004, which was saved from total gray mediocrity mainly by the fantastic Gettysburg trilogy, silence reigned in the Iced Earth camp. At the start of th

"Baby James Harvest", the fourth studio album from British symphonic-leaning art rockers Barclay James Harvest, was originally conceived as a double concept album split into four parts, in which each of the &

The 20th studio outing from a living legend of Slovenian singer-songwriter music! Hats off, my sincere respect. This time Sašo comes with a light, laid-back pop rock album, built of course on those indispensable acoustic-guitar foundations,…

Big Brother And The Holding Company's poorly produced album, the one that weighed on the conscience of Janis and her Big Brother, was bound to sink into oblivion once Cheap Thrills arrived in 1968. With its unusual cover of caricatures of…

It was only a matter of time before a major label came knocking for Interpol. After a huge breakthrough with their debut "Turn On The Bright Light" (2002), and then with the album "Antics" (200

Harmony and love are the main binding agents of Ben Harper's eleventh album so far, recorded in a measly seven days in the most traditional way possible. Away with computers or whatever other creative gadgets so many people now consider…

A good four years have passed since the last release from German prog heavyweights Poverty's No Crime, The Chemical Chaos (2003). The creative break has done the guys a world of good – Save My Soul is quite possibly the brightest moment of…

A blasphemous quote from M. Night Shyamalana's Signs, "I am not wasting one more minute of my life on prayer! Not one more minute! Understood?", kicks off half an hour of sinfully good thrash/death metal. It hasn't even been half a

Življenje v čipkah, the new record from quintet Bordel, is yet another in a long line of gargantuan attempts to give the hopelessly doodled-on Slovenian public a proper taste of the essence of rock n roll. An ambitiously planned…

(reissue, 2007) "The Buddha Of Suburbia" is the logical stepping stone between "Black Tie White Noise" and "Outside". Dance-leaning pop rock with a dash of prog, or let's rather call them art touches, kno

Arena, who started out as a joint neo-prog project between keyboard wizard Clive Nolan (Pendragon, ex-Shadowland) and drummer Mick Pointer (ex-Marillion), turned into a proper band with a vision of their own after the release of their…

The Aquasphera DVD is a live project recorded at the Laguna water park in 2005. Considering Veronica aren't exactly a hugely popular band, this must have been a pretty big financial undertaking, since in this show they mix music w

After trying out nearly every major genre within the concept of his band over the years (from blues, hard rock, prog rock, folk rock, electronica, synth pop, and so on), the indestructible Ian Anderson found himself seriously running out of…

There's One In Evey Crowd probably marks the point where the curve of Clapton's cosmic journey grinds to a halt dangerously close to total creative "black out" territory, where it finally goes dark for good. Which, of course, seems hard to…

The mannequin-style cover of "Wildest Dreams", where the three remaining original members of the eternally overlooked Canadian art rock greats Saga (who are, of course, anything but

Blues rock hit the peak of its thrilling journey in the late sixties, sure, but that doesn't mean its dusty old bag ran out of dirty tricks in the years that followed, tricks that practically every English schoolboy of the time wanted to…

Through the rather grueling 80s for prog rock, King Crimson were the only band from that elite of the genre's most important groups that actually kept making innovative, rhythmically demanding and varied music that pr

If Magma created the template for a genre called zeuhl with Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh, here they went in a different direction. MDK is packed with rich, layered chants, battle horns and manic drumming, while K&

Mama mia! This album is a tribute to Journey, the greatest American rock band ever, says its creator Kevin Chalfant! Just what the hell makes someone suddenly dare to challenge the gods of heaven and hell, and how does he even have the…

Mr. David Readman, our good old acquaintance from Veliko Ubeljsko, vocalist of the German melodic hard rock outfit Pink Cream 69, with whom he played in Slovenia at the Heavy Metal Night festival in mid-July 2007 (RockLine repor

If Slovenian metal lagged behind its foreign counterparts in many ways in the early days, today we can claim quite the opposite. Let me limit myself to thrash metal, since that's what this review is about anyway. Thrash metal on a global le

Eden's Curse, a new band made up of old acquaintances. The idea for launching Eden's Curse came from American vocalist Michael Eden and Scottish bassist Paul Logue (Cry Havoc). The two also wrote most of the material (lyrics and…

Folks! There's way, way more going on behind this album, and not just this album... Let's start like this: Circus Maximus are no joke. No beating around the bush, I'll say it straight: Europe has finally

In November 1978, seven years after Morrison's death, the album An Amarican Prayer – Jim Morrison with Music by The Doors came out. It's built from old interviews, recited poetry and live recordings. The songs were carefully picked from

The story of The Used began way back in 1990, when three fresh-faced musicians came together wanting to start a band: guitarist Quinn Allman, bassist Jeph Howard and now-former member, drum

Stone Orange are still finding their feet with their debut. Still, they deserve every bit of encouragement, simply because they exist. And Slovenia doesn't exactly have a ton of solid hard rock references raised and nurtured in its own…

Ace Of Spades is surely one of the greatest rock & roll albums of all time (hm, if nothing else, you'll find its famous cover of three horribly stinking cowboys on every list of the filthiest albums ever, right next to a Claydermann…

Who said the eighties are over? The coastal chaos thrash crew Bleeding Fist definitely didn't get the memo. Their brand-new demo Funeral… plants us right in the front seat of the DeLorean from Spielberg's cult film Back to the Future and…

With Certitudes, Present finally made their return to the music scene after a long absence. This time the lineup even features two members of Univers Zero: besides drummer Daniel Denis, bassist Guy Segers is on board too. Many people

In the mid-eighties, the more-or-less handsome faces (I'll gladly leave the detailed analysis to you) of a quintet of New Jersey cowboys, predictably named Bon Jovi, soon started attracting, after a well-received debut, the annoying st

"Thrash is back!!!" It's true: over the past year or two, thrash metal has been slowly but stubbornly waking up again and clawing its way back onto metal's throne. The golden years of thrash, which ran all the way into the early nineties,…

Korni Grupa was the first true progressive band out of Yugoslavia. Time existed at the same time, sure, but they weren't progressive in the same sense of the word as Kornelije Kovač and his crew. Most progressive bands from

Nektar, British space rock visionaries who spent most of their recording time in Germany thanks to bigger tax breaks, took a huge step forward in maturity with "A Tab In The Ocean" after the sci-fi concept debut "Journey To The Centr

After a decade of nonstop touring and a handful of albums marked by commercially minded, more or less unsuccessful attempts to chase the trendy shifts of the eighties, guitar legend Eric Clapton finally learns, at the turn of the decade,…

How do you at least partly dodge the usual stereotypes of melodic hard rock? You write ten songs, invite 10 different vocalists who, with 10 different voices, are supposed to bring the required diver

Rory Gallagher is one of the few musicians for whom the leap from the mostly blues-oriented bands that, with the explosion of the r / b revolution in the mid-sixties, started popping up in an already annoying number like mushrooms after…

Steve Newman is a British melodic AOR/hard rock artist. Busy as a little ant. Ever since "Sign Of Modern Times" (2003) and "Heaven Knows" (2006), he's been marked by remarkable consistency of quality, artistic reliability

Ommadawn came out a year after Hergest Ridge. Mike Oldfield had clearly learned a lot from the first two albums, and you can already feel a greater maturity on this one. He took the variety of arrangements and composition from Tubul

Cornerstone – the brainchild of Danish melodic hard rock keyboardist Steen Mogensen and former Y.J.Malmsteen's Rising Force/Rainbow screamer Doogie White, are back with their fourth studio album. No beating around the bush, this is

Just One Night brings fourteen Eric Clapton "toe-tappers" recorded way back in December 1979 at Japan's Budokan theater. While the album itself doesn't mark any particularly noteworthy creative peak in Eric's career (which is hardly…

Gotthard are blooming! "Domino Effect" is the culmination of their hard graft, and it clearly marks the artistic peak of their career! It's incredible how they pull it off amid the acrobatics of a wild ride full of hairpin turns, facing…

Michael Thompson is an American guitarist who every few years records an album under his own name or plays on a ton of projects as a session musician. No matter how much musical fashions keep shifting, the US always needs capable

Michele Luppi is an Italian vocalist who honed his singing chops in the US too, at the VIT school in Los Angeles. His mentor was Robin Randall (as a songwriter he's worked with names like FM, Mark Free, James Christian and others). Los Ang

Simple, not always reliable but user-friendly, and above all thrilling in its self-sufficiency! No, this isn't yet another ad for deluxe-packaged hair plugs from the latest Janez Janša line, it's Coco Montoya!! V&scaron

White Wolf are a Canadian hard rock band who, after two excellent albums, "Standing Alone" (1984) and "Endangered Species" (1986), never quite broke through to the top. They had incredible musical potential, selling 250,000 copies of their…

We keep seeing reissues of classic records by artists who heavily shaped the course of pop music history. It's honestly surprising where they dig up all those old tapes, give them a modern polish, and on top of that add &scaro

After Ceux du Dehors, which many people consider the peak of Univers Zero's career, bandleader Daniel Denis decided to shake things up a bit. The lineup for Uzed was completely different. The oboe, bassoon and English horn were repla

The letters TRW stand for three American musicians with plenty of experience recording and playing pop and rock. The T is for Michael Thompson, a terrific guitarist we've known for more than thirty years as a veteran

Van Der Graaf Generator are a band that still stirs up the spirits today with their visionary albums, packed with complex progressive rock anthems that offer a lyrical glimpse into the complexities of the human soul and contain numerous

""The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other" is one of those albums that was, in a way, at least ten years ahead of its time. Over the following year Hammill would push the band to the very limits of what it could do, and with the next two…

Robert Johnson – The Complete Recordings is an unusual yet essential musical testament to the most influential blues musician of all time, and by extension the person most responsible for the shape popular music has taken over the last…

Ian Anderson, that cheeky Scottish uncle with a flute in one hand and a pipe in the other, and his slightly less shameless band of merry men must have been laughing all the way to heaven when, after the release of »Crest Of A Knave« (1987),…

AaRON is a duo from France made up of two multi-instrumentalists. Simon Buret is also the singer and songwriter. When I got this album, I didn't really know what to expect, but I've had good experiences with multi-instrumentalists

Legendary Ken Hensley, former keyboardist and the creator of the original Uriah Heep magic, is back with the autobiographical rock opera "Blood On The Highway". The album is pitched as an ambitious piece, a kind of rock opera that presents

"Live In Moscow" is a document that marked a turning point for both Uriah Heep and rock music as a movement. Uriah Heep were the first "Western" band with the guts to tour the Soviet Union (and survive it).

I won't argue! Quite likely, to plenty of "modern folks" my taste in music looks like some long-dead beast, its little body rotted away by the tireless work of assorted parasites and so soon to be thoroughly fossilized

Barclay James Harvest, known in their early years as symphonic idealists chasing the mysticism of Celtic moors, fields and forests, took an ambitious approach to their third album "And Other Shorts Stories" too, carrying on with the…

"Crest Of A Knave" is both the story of the biggest joke in Jethro Tull history and the story of the resurrection of a band that was already clinically half-dead, one that rose from the ashes like a mythical phoenix after the dismal "Under…

By the mid-80s, Saga had largely ditched the progressive rock elements built on long instrumental excursions and polished interplay between guitar and keyboards, steering toward shorter

After the big commercial breakthrough of the excellent "Worlds Apart" (1981), Saga cashed in on their newfound "stardom" and kept polishing their music into something more commercially sophisticated. On "Heads O

Aaaah... The two years of rest since the band's last record, Annihilation of the Wicked (2005), were enough! Nile have woken up from their slumber somewhere deep in the chambers of Cheops' pyramid and grabbed the oars again. The Nile is…

Asia's rising stars of symphonic black metal Chthonic, dressed in folkloric trappings, the most striking of which is the use and sonic integration of the two-stringed fiddle "Er-hu", mark their first 10 years of existence with the rel

The album Hergest Ridge is named after the range of hills where Mike Oldfield was living at the time. The beautiful, empty landscape, where he walked his dog and flew model planes, helped him find inspiration for a new venture and a new…

After five years of lying low, Joe Lynn Turner is back and fired up with his latest effort Second Hand Life, with which the legendary Rainbow/Yngwie Malmsteen vocalist manages to keep up the steady level of his previous work, which will…

"Yet another attempt to break into the big leagues" Yogurt are neither a new nor a fresh face on the Slovenian music scene. They swap singers about as fast as some other bands swap bassists, while the reins stay in the hands of guitarist…

After a good few years' break following Natura Naturans, Veronica came back in 2001 with a new release, Triac. The core of the lineup stayed the same, with keyboardist Matej Oset and drummer Franc Podgoršek, and after the first album…

Can you follow up a mega hit with a mega album? Everybody remembers Maroon 5 for This Life from their debut, a song you couldn't escape at the start of the 21st century. This Life was something like Smooth, except it was a huge hit for a…

The second solo record from a singer who will either grow into a great solo artist or join some insanely good band. Chris Cornell left Soundgarden in 1997, cleaned up, and put out a relaxed, one-of-a-kind solo debut, Euphoria Morning. More…

Fogerty pulled off what many of his peers couldn't: he carried old, often forgotten musical genres into the 21st century and served them up with real taste for younger and older listeners alike.

In 1988, American vocal wizard Bobby McFerrin conquered the world with the infectious, upbeat Don't worry, be happy. The chart breakthrough wasn't planned; the song was born in moments of anxiety that needed a way out.

The record is a cross-section of Fogerty's outstanding career, whether you mark it by one of the best lineups of the sixties or by his solo run, and it also shows, of course, that this excellent singer-songwriter is in top form

Another year rolls around, and our good old gray-haired friend, still blessed with a mighty screech and wail, serves up a new record almost on reflex. What else could anyone expect from Dirkschneider, the former Accept squealer, after a…

"A supergroup becomes a super band." You could write about Audioslave the same way you would about Velvet Revolver – a bunch of more or less (well-)known musicians pulled together from all over, who earned their "supergroup" status mostly…

Tommy Bolin, the gifted American guitarist, rose to guitar-god status in the eyes of the average music enthusiast mainly during the infamous, high-flying post-Blackmore Deep Purple adventure, which in March 19

Kaiser Chiefs, a great name for a new brand of Austrian doughnuts! No joke! They're sweet as a doughnut and MTV loves them. With a pinch of scandalous cheek, and otherwise playfully innocent looks hiding the notorious spirit of street…

What could possibly still drive a great Beatle forward these days? He has nothing left to prove. Because he's a Beatle. And since he's a born Beatle through and through, it's only natural for an artist like that to keep going. Ka

How many people can you say single-handedly invented an entire genre? Not many. Christian Vander is one of them. The development of that genre (zeuhl) started with this album. After two more jazz-flavored releases, it was time for a change.…

You don't find a heavy metal act every day that can boast such a strong sense of individuality in the messages it delivers as Mr. King Diamond does! We're talking, of course, about the continuity of the classic "eig

(re-release for the European market - June, 2007) Taiwan! A bloody history of the fight for independence, which has really been a loyal companion of every global civilization on our planet since time immemorial. Suppressed, oppressed fury…

L.A. Woman came out in 1971 and captures the band's musical depth and lyrical power like no other album before it. Apart from their debut, it was their biggest success and their most popular record. It features two Morrison classics,…

This album kicked off Mike Oldfield's musical career. After his debut sold like crazy, his life changed completely. A young guy who had spent quite some time creating the now-famous Tubular Bells became a superstar overnight. Tubular Bells…

Clouds are a young American band, and they shouldn't be confused with the Australian group of the same name that was active in the late eighties. Mixing them up is impossible anyway the moment you hear their music. While Clouds from…

With their third album Octopus, The Bees carry on their odyssey through mainly British music history, from The Beatles to The Specials with a hefty dose of R & B in between. And if it sometimes sounds like something in the vein of

Balance is the eleventh release from Van Halen, the ultra-popular heavy metal quartet from California. They've come a long way since dropping their debut in 1978. On the first quick listen to Balance, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd…

The fifth studio album, "Morrison Hotel," is without a doubt a return of the good old The Doors. No long-winded songs, no spoken-word recital, no revolutionary sagas. Instead, it serves up a raw blues rock sound that leaves o

The forest clan strikes back! This time, for the fourth time. Barely a year has passed since their last release, Tales Along This Road (2006), and the unstoppable Finns are already serving up a new studio record called Tervaskanto. Whatever…

You could probably call Greenslade a supergroup, a band made up entirely of masters of their instruments. When they released this album (their debut), the lineup was Dave Greenslade, Tony Reeves, Dave Lawson and Andrew McC

John Mayer is a guy who can write serious, deep songs and spontaneously cheerful ones in his sleep. On Continuum, which lifts him higher than ever, he turns his attention to the frantic rush of modern life, with days that

Dennis "Fergie" Frederiksen is best known to the music world as the singer on Isolation (1984) by California's Toto. He also left his mark on records by Trillion and Le Roux (formerly Louisiana Le Roux), and he's definitely among the better…