Reviews

1994. A young band from Bakersfield was overflowing with idealism and defiance toward every rule of the music business and every social norm. Forever true to themselves and their own musical voice. Even at the price of possibly

Eric Clapton, nicknamed Slowhand, and some people just call him God. Eric Clapton, who left his mark on legendary bands like The Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream and Blind Faith, and has also been a successful solo artist for…

Camel really rose from the ashes like the mythical phoenix with their magnificent comeback at the start of the 90s. As I already mentioned in my review of "Dust And Dreams" (1991), where I mostly stressed how much I

Nekoč prva kitara Irskih trubadurjev Thin Lizzy Gary Moore, se po desetletju igranja heavy metalskega bojevnika na začetku 90tih vrne nazaj h svojimi bluesovskimi koreninami. In to v velikem slogu. Still Got The Blues je verjetno njegovo…

John Mayall is rightly considered the godfather of British guitar rock, since Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor all cut their teeth in his backing band The Bluesbrakers, and Mick Fleetwood, Aynsley Dunba

Writing about Manowar is actually a pretty thankless job. Why do I say that? Because Manowar are considered one of the biggest, maybe even best bands in metal... yet they're also a target of mockery and contempt for plenty of people. Just…

Alias Eye are an interesting art rock band from Germany who have made a bit of noise in the past, though judging by the looks of it, even after the release of "In Focus" they'll remain a well-guarded secret for a handful of

"The Thieving Magpie - La Gazza Ladra" is a double live album that marks Marillion's first real official live recording, if you don't count the live tracks that came out on their "first" live release, "Real To Reel" (1984) and the EP "Brief…

Crusade is the last of the three Mayall albums that successfully launched guitarists like Eric Clapton and Peter Green into the ranks of the greats. Mick Taylor is the last to set off down the road to immortality, and after the phenomenal

We all know Slovenia has no shortage of quality bands, but thanks to the greedy policies of labels and retailers alike, fewer and fewer of them are putting out records and looking after their own visibility. Thank goodness we've got small,…

The untamed troubadours of progressive folk rock went looking for creative inspiration this time in the baroque era of Elizabethan theater and folk lore, which fit perfectly with the established image of their brilliant chieftain Ian…

Some say the second album is the hardest to make. Especially if the first one was a big hit, which was definitely the case for The Magic Numbers. Well, they're back, and Those the Brokes, to be honest, doesn't sound like a problematic…

On their second album, Barclay James Harvest didn't skimp on the great musical ideas that made their solid debut stand out. What's more, with "Once Again" they cemented and deepened their distinctive

Most people just shrug at the name Naglfar. What the hell is that weird name supposed to mean!? So let me start by explaining. Naglfar is a name that comes from Norse mythology and stands for a ship made entirely out of the fingernails of…

Ian Anderson and his merry band of prog-rock troubadours have gone back to tighter songs on "Warchild", and in terms of mood, back to something a little brighter and wittier

Even though their charismatic frontman Freddie Mercury died thirteen years ago, Queen are still alive in the hearts of fans, who now have tons of chances to hear and see plenty of concert record

Have you ever been stuck in a pit with no way out? Has life ever brought you to the point where despair pushed you to end it all? Did the people around you treat you like a clown, or just one more loser? Were your

Now this is an interesting band! A must-try for fans of Scandi-Central European melodic hard rock and AOR! A must. This hyperactive band, whose "Saturn Skyline" is already their fourth studio album in a row,

Canadian veteran Bryan Adams has just put out his fourteenth album, Room Service, recorded on his latest tour, which also took him to Ljubljana, so it's no surprise that a few guitars and backing v

Willy Mason, a voice that sounds like it's got way more miles on it than just 22 springs (or winters, since he was born in November 1984). His music isn't exactly super modern either. His whole way of expressing himself feels more like the…

What does it look like when one of the most ambitious musicians in these parts reveals his fetish? Much like it looked on his past, equally ambitious releases. But this isn't just another round of routine, it's constant exploration within…

Iron Maiden have been officially on the music scene for a good twenty-five years now, though their journey actually kicked off back in the second half of the seventies. And since a quarter of a century is an enviable stretch in any band's…

Riding high on the wings of their unforgettable masterpiece »Thick As a Brick« (1972), Jethro Tull headed to France, where they started recording a new concept album at the legendary Chateau D’Herouville studio, and its sound changed…

The day I discovered this record, my life literally changed. Some records have that power over our lives. Those two sentences aren't exactly original, since I've come across them on the internet in all sorts of word combinations, always…

Pride Of Lions is a band, or rather a duo, made up of the seasoned old tomcat Jim Peterik (ex-Survivor) and Toby Hitchcock. In a very short time they've squeezed out a nice catalog of albums. "The Roaring Of Dreams" is thus overall &#3

"Genius" is a rock opera, and the idea for it came from Italian multi-instrumentalist Daniele Liverani, who has played in bands like Empty Tremor and Khymera. What I'm holding in my hands is the third and final part of this ambitious…

From the opening chords of Regression, the fifth studio album Scenes From A Memory by American quintet Dream Theater whisks us off into a surprising world, the kind only the champions of modern progressive rock and the leading shapers of…

The album that simply carries the band's name, The Doors, came out in 1967 and, alongside Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band by the legendary The Beatles, was one of the finest artistic achievements of that year. On top of that, it's…

Danny Vaughn is a man with serious mileage in rock music. He lost his innocence as a vocalist on one of the better albums by Waysted, "Save Your Prayers" (1986). Incidentally, Waysted was founded by Pete Way, bass

Label: Elektra RecordsRelease date: October 26, 1999Production: Mike Portnoy & John PetrucciAlbum length: 77:06 minGenre: Progressive Metal From the opening chords of Regression, the fifth studio album by American quintet Dream…

Rocks is without a doubt the purest "distillation" of real hard rock, the album that finally crowns Aerosmith as the greatest American rock band of the seventies. Raw, gritty energy leaning heavily

Barclay James Harvest were one of those bands that, despite a pile of excellent work marked mostly by exceptional sophistication, soaring melodies, gorgeous arrangements and lovely harmonies, were doomed to go without

These days Metallica inspire others who will never reach them, let alone surpass them. But what inspired Metallica in their early years, and what still inspires them today? And which of the legends did they match and surpass?! Metallica…

Currently one of the most progressive and promising Slovenian bands The Tide was sadly "marked" even before the record came out, all because of a slightly awkward choice of name. Around the same time, a band called Tide started breaking…

When Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw join forces, it's no joke anymore. The two once sat side by side in the school benches of Damn Yankees, then went on to even more successful musical careers, Shaw in Styx, Blades in

Yet another in a long line of greatest-hits collections In the mid-seventies, Aerosmith were hailed as America's answer to The Rolling Stones – blues-soaked rock, a charismatic singer, a brilliant guitarist, a "love-hate" relationship…

Anyone who's even half-listened whenever someone says "progressive metal" knows Charlie Dominici, the first vocalist of the progressive metal institution Dream Theater, who went through the transformation from Majest

"Damage Case", a double-CD retrospective, charts the career of one of the greatest rock'n'roll icons of all time! Some will find the label "one of the greatest rock'n'roll icons" overblown, but the very fa

After such an excellent debut, it was perfectly reasonable to expect that ELP wouldn't rest on their laurels and that their next album would be something special, thrilling and completely new. In the end it turned out (in my humble opinion)…

With the first part of the O3 trilogy (2005), Charlie Dominici returned to the music scene after more than eighteen years. He crept back in quietly with a fully acoustic record, and it looked like he was deliberately distancing himself from…

Rory Gallagher is considered one of the nicest guys in the history of rock music, which is a bit surprising given his job as a "professional" blues rocker. Rory devoted his life to blues music, whose unique and

A live album, and an acoustic one on top of that, from an otherwise die-hard, full-throttle rock band!!! Up to their last double studio album In Your Honor, Foo Fighters were known as a rock band that wasn't exactly into acoustic music

With their original album, nOdus set out to take on the Slovenian pop rock scene and prove that bands with a female singer can be really interesting. All well and good, if only the likes of Lunapark and Yogurt weren't also making music in…

They defined the young Slovenian scene and injected fresh blood and energy into the capital's music scene. The fight to break through was tough and merciless, but they passed the test of time and made it to the present day. Still, they've…

After the huge success of their timeless concept masterpiece "Misplaced Childhood" (1985), and especially its two hit singles, Marillion completely unexpectedly morphed from a cult new-wave prog rock band into a world-class act that could…

A Queens Of The Stone Age side project? A full-blooded retro rock'n'roll treat! With Eagles of Death Metal, you first have to get the name straight – this isn't some sinister heavy metal subgenre creature, but rather

Camel, by then long under the wing of the excellent guitarist, flautist and singer Andy Latimer, won their court battle against the extortionate manager of their previous label and, after almost seven years of creative silence, they

Mr. Neal Morse is a tireless workhorse, and ever since he traded a successful musical career with modern prog icons Spock's Beard for an almost even more successful path as a solo artist, so he could focus more closely on his encounter with…

A fair bit of time passed between their first live album, »A Live Record« (1978), and the mid-80s. In that stretch Camel went through plenty of changes (mainly the gradual dropping of symphonic arrangeme

Peter Hammill, musical visionary, indestructible doctor of post-apocalyptic poetics and one of the greatest vocal oddballs of our time, spent most of 2005 busy with the newly reformed prog rock legends Van Der Graaf Generator

RAK? Not the sea kind, not the river kind, and definitely not the boiled kind. It's an exceptionally odd name (where it comes from, I have no idea, and there's very little info on the band out there so far) for a young, obscure Swiss…

After the excellent box set "Archive – Volume 1: 1967-1975" (1998), which covered the Peter Gabriel era and was a real treat for fans of the band, it made sense to expect a follow-up too, even if I have to admit I didn't await it with as…

Death metal is more than just music of insane speed, inhuman vocals, crushing drums and lyrics about exhuming and desecrating corpses. Need proof? I couldn't hand you better proof than the one sitting right in front of you

Of the legendary symphonic prog rock bands that created most of their best work in the '70s, the Dutch troubadours Focus, despite masterpieces like the albums »Moving Waves« (1971) and »Hamburger Con

This is the first DVD release from Swedish melodic hard rockers House Of Shakira. Judging by their years on the scene and the quality of their records, these guys are a well-oiled, seasoned machine. The chance, with a bigger crowd than…

When I glanced over the usually sad shelves of one of Slovenia's metal shops, I almost had a stroke. Almost a year after the official release, and long after the debut from the Scandinavian gloom-prog crew had been sitting in stores across

It Bites will apparently go down forever as a one-of-a-kind band with a style you can spot from a mile away, even though in their short-lived existence they never made it into the league of rock's big names. They're one of those

Thin Lizzy's big breakthrough with Jailbreak brings international fame, something the boys first got a serious taste of when Whiskey In The Jar happened to them. But if they naively let that opportunity slip through their fingers back then,…

Majestic vocalists Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Trapeze, Black Sabbath), Kelly Keeling (Blue Murder, Baton Rogue, MSG, Carmine Appice's Guitar Zeus and more,…) Eric Bloom (Blue Oyser Cult), Steve Walsh (Kansas), Paul Shortino (Rough Cutt/The…

A little over five years ago, Paul Baloff, the legendary vocalist of the cult Bay Area thrashers Exodus, suffered a massive stroke. On January 31, 2002, he was brought to the hospital where he was declared brain dead, and at the request of…

The start of the year, when expectations of everything the year in music still has in store grow by the day, is when an album sometimes shows up quietly, almost inaudibly, and then spills over into a full-blown deluge that covers everything…

When Jethro Tull comes up in a musical (and not a historical or agricultural) context, the average, musically aware person usually pictures Ian Anderson, who for most of the music crowd is

Stormzone are Irish melodic hard rockers from Belfast. New name, old hands. Look at the cover, read the band name, take a closer look at the logo, and your mind drifts straight back to the eighties and the n.w.o.b.h.m

It's been 20 years since the cult rock compilation Rijeka – Paris – Texas put the Rijeka rock scene of the eighties on the map, and the locals have decided to wake up their sleepy scene. The compilation in question was back th

"Lint" is the debut from Swedish melodic hard rockers House Of Shakira. It originally came out in 1997 on Bluestone Records. When it dropped, the album was met with an incredible wave of enthusiasm, and many critics

Why did emo core as a genre start withering and dying off in installments a few years back, and why are emo-core heroes so rare today, with even those few starting to change their sound (and if they haven't croaked, they've at least gone…

"The title We Must Obey is a big 'Fuck you' to people who like to tell us what we can and can't do. It's not specifically directed at any one person, just at the thought of someone thinking that they know what's best for you, more than you…

Sinner's new record "Mask Of Sanity" is a classic Sinner album. What Sinner established as their trademark over a 25-year career, they still stay faithfully true to. Mat Sinner, the undisputed leader and founder of the band Sinner, p

A revolution for purely rational reasons? A very, very rare thing in human history. It has practically never happened. But enough of the heavy philosophizing, which belongs in endless debates and is merely the product of this band's…

Black Sabbath... a musical institution. A cult in the truest sense of the word. The first real heavy metal band (at least that's the commonly accepted view, so let's set aside the sea of influences for a moment). Their debut, Black Sabbath,…

Well, there you go. I can now conclude that Rob hung around in Judas Priest for as long as heavy metal was "alive" (only Rob knew how long heavy metal stayed alive and when it was time to tell Judas Priest "hasta la vista")

" Heaven and Hell is a real heavy metal wrecking ball! On Heaven and Hell, Black Sabbath truly ditched the blues roots that dominated the Ozzy era for the first time in their career. Okay, I'm lying, but more on that later. Basically, with…

Here's yet another sign of the awakening of America's answer to late-era "1987" Whitesnake! The boys from the House of Lords, with plenty of career highs and lows behind them. After last year's long-awaited new studio album

"The Aerosol Grey Machine" is by no means a revolutionary debut, and it's even the least conspicuous record in their history, but it's more mature than many a first album from their peers, which says a lot about the remarkable consistency…

The return of American symphonic prog heavyweights Starcastle, almost 30 years after their last (rather ill-fated) studio album "Real To Reel" (1978), is a peculiar surprise and an event that hardly any fan of their music saw coming.…

36-year-old German Oliver Hartmann, a multi-instrumentalist, is best known as a member of the metallers At Vance! Before that he was busy with the prog rock project Centers, who released two albums in their three years together (1995 –…

Before putting out a first DVD of live material and extras, any band could take a page from Arch Enemy, because the Swedish metal giants followed every principle of making a quality audio-visual package to the letter on the double DVD Live…

After the classic "Aqualung" (1971) turned Jethro Tull from a cult band into a world-class act, the many eyes of the (prog) rock world were glued to Ian Anderson and his cunning crew of musical perfectionists and innovators

Kelly Keagy! Don't worry, he's not a member of The Kelly Family. He's the Night Ranger drummer with a knack for singing, back with his second solo studio album, following his debut "Time Passes" (2001). This time the man declares that he's…

Many artists eventually want to build the equivalent of what the Beatles did with their conceptual artistry on St. Pepper's Lonely Heart Band, but most of them don't have the balls to go over the top like they do

Van Der Graaf Generator's first album was originally conceived as a solo project by the already widely recognizable singer (and occasional guitarist) Peter Hammill, who wanted to realize his musical and philosophical visions, which were far

Of course it's no surprise when someone who's just tiptoeing into the early stages of a midlife crisis suddenly goes completely off the rails. Something similar is clearly going on with a trio of goofy uncles who go by the name Dr.…

" "Thick As A Brick" is a timeless progressive rock masterpiece that has stood the test of time all these years later and still remains an unattainable benchmark for plenty of creative musicians who'd love to get anywhere near the lofty…

As the title says, this is a compilation, a retrospective grab-bag, from one of the finest vocalists of the younger generation, Jorn Lande, known for his tireless musical (hyper)activity. Over his career the guy has sung in T

Nomen est omen. Hmmm. They started out under names like The Uriah Omen and No One Wins in Stronghold. But with the North Carolina quintet He Is Legend (their roots spread out in the little town of Wilmington, to be exact), you really can't…

This time, in the spirit of good neighborly relations, it's the turn of a Croatian compilation of "underground" metal bands. So let's forget the disputes that the political bigwigs on both sides are stoking anyway. But politics aside! What…

Buckle up, dear friends, because "The Boys Are Back In Town". "Warning, Jailbreak" screams the cover of the legendary and all-too-often overlooked album with which Thin Lizzy, after four

Damir Simic – Shime! How homey that name sounds! We're talking about a guitar virtuoso who has lived in the USA for 16 years and in that time has earned himself serious renown and respect from established musicians who sit right at the very…

In 1981, music and especially guitar oddball Robert Fripp, in large part the inventor of what we now call progressive rock, after years as a solo musician, guest spots on various albums by other musicians such as Peter Gabriel and David…

Finski mladci pod vodstvom vokalista Tonija Parviainena so leta 1998 ustanovili skupino Machine Men in že ob izdaji prvenca Scars&Wounds (2003) navdušili metalsko srenjo s svežim pristopom k danes precej izpranim žanrom power met

Swedish art rockers A.C.T. are definitely coming along nicely in their development, even if their musical language doesn't bring anything particularly new to the table and they faithfully carry on the tradition of sophisticated prog rock…

Therion is a name that stands for quality. In their 20-year career, Therion have never put out a real letdown, and they keep surprising us with serious progress in their sound and top-notch quality in the music itself, the vocal work

"Stationary Traveller" was the last Camel album before they went off on an unexpected "break" lasting almost seven years because of legal wrangling with their former manager. Anyone who was hoping Camel would, after "T

If you ever happened to think blues was dull, maybe even soul-crushing music that's all about repeating the same old "tricks" over and over, think again! Johnny Winter, a lanky, cross-eyed albino with long woolly hair, wi

Few melodic hard rock bands today can boast the kind of consistency that Canada's Harem Scarem can! The new album "Human Nature", with its telling cover of a bloke walking down the railway tracks straight into the path of a train that'll…

Are you ready for completely controlled psychosis and the orderliness of chaos in ways we've never heard around here before? Intimn Frizurn hand you an almost too-large dose of all of that with their very first release, and Kokos Kokos…

Southern Styria. The Croatian border is just a stone's throw away. Obsotelje is full of villages in the process of dying out. People are leaving the area. The young head off to school, their parents to jobs. Farming was once, long ago, the…

Cream were considered one of those bands that don't compromise from the very start. And while that mainly applied to their "live" shows early on, things soon started playing out much the same way in their relationships with each other

Opeth are a Swedish progressive melodic death metal band that's been around since the early nineties, but that label only captures part of what Opeth offer. The guys mix jazz, blues and plenty of progressive rock into the metal, which…

The new Grave Digger album. Not again… Holy cow, time flies, or maybe Grave Digger really are just cranking out records at lightning speed. Legends and one of the founders of German Teutonic classic