Fee Waybill and the guys regroup and return following a ten year hiatus and departure from Capitol Records with their first album on the Critique label.
Despite filling the years between 1986 and 1994 with The Tubes on my Walkman, I didn’t come across this album until much later. Thing is, HMV were never any good at stocking records for non-mainstream bands, even though the Tubes were fairly mainstream at the height of their career. Trips to the HMV in Church Street, Liverpool, during my youth would see me flipping through the Ts..TUs…TUB…Oh bugger..TUBEWAY ARMY…no Tubes.
“Never heard of them mate” was the mantra from the shop staff.
And yet, it seems, The Tubes were more influential than we know with some members of the band having sessioned with Chris Isaak , and with Richard “Hazard” Marx producing today’s album.
To say Genius of America takes off from where Love Bomb ended is incorrect. Stylistically, the album is Tubesesque but it’s a far cry from Remote Control and Completion Backward Principle. Indeed, it’s almost as if the band have had a style transplant during their hiatus, because unlike other bands that have split and reformed, there is a recognisable difference in sound.
I’m still waiting for it to grow on me.
Unfortunately, I am unable to back up my conjecture with my usual inclusion of a sample Youtube video for this album. It seems that the copyright police have cleared it of any of the tracks from this release. So instead, here is one of the band’s classic songs.
In true prog fashion, flying teapot hippy group Gong, split and became two entities; Daevid Allen’s Gong (the one responsible for all the pot head pixies) and Pierre Moerlan’s Gong a jazz rock based band.
When I said I liked the Cocteau Twins I should have clarified that I liked a couple of tracks. It’s just that when you mention you like a band you often get inundated with advice about which albums you “should” like.
It seems almost as if there was an explosion of artists heavily influenced by 
There was a fleeting moment when I thought relatives of Kirsty MacColl lived in my street when I was growing up. Instead it turned out Andrea McCann wasn’t related, but just happened that she looked a little bit like her. If you squinted.
Can came into my life in the early noughties when a colleague gave me a copy of their Tago Mago album. I was suitably impressed but more of that when we get to T. Future Days features more chilled out Can rhythms melded with Susuki’s bizarre mumblings and Michael Karoli’s stand out lone-guitar performance. Kind of like lounge avant garde.
Middle class wank mag, The Guide which is usually given away in Saturday’s Guardian, once said that Fur and Gold was the album must have for the noughties coffee table and that if you were to be taken seriously by your painfully middle class Land Rover dinner party guests you should put this album on the surround sound system and look hautily at ones guests when they contemptuously deny all knowledge of its existence. And thus the hipster was born.
Avant Garde shite I downloaded in an effort to out weird hipsters. 
Internet faves Rasputina saw their hauntological American Great Depression era Old South sound into this their fourth studio release.
Scandinavian rock valkyries again, this time with a live set featuring Nightwish’s pre-breakup line-up and Tarja Turunen.
Regular music project visitors, British Sea Power, return today with their 2013 release, From the Sea to the Land Beyond.
No, I’d never heard of Mary Fahl until I came across this album either. 
Bootlegs bootlegs bootlegs. They killed live music you know.
Another appearance from Carl McCoy and his dust ridden forsaken cowboys, Fields of the Nephilim. This time with another compilation of songs from their catalogue. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of production or what, but to me this sounds more like recording of a tribute act than actual Nephilim songs. In the recording I have, McCoy sounds like he’s singer from a slightly higher register than usual.
This was another of the first CDs I bought for my first CD player and I played it over and over and over.
Every so often during this music project I come across albums by bands I have heard of but can’t remember for the life of me what their song was that I liked or why I even have them in the collection in the first place.
I’d heard of Polyphonic Spree in rumours, whispers and the occasional collaboration with other artists like Yoko Ono and I wanted to hear more. So, during the Great Internet Download Free-for-All of 2007-2010 I was able to obtain a copy of Fragile Army.
I originally bought this album from Woolworths in Pwllheli while holidaying in my Uncles cottage. I remember being excited at the prospect of being able to listen to it on the record player we had there. And so, in 1986 progressive rock reverberated across the Welsh mountains for a brief moment Heart of the Sunrise leading the charge. That was until I was told to turn the music down.
More grumpy observations of the preposterousness pervading Britain from Nigel Blackwell and pals.
For some reason, for years I thought the Cocteau Twins were a French band. Turned out Liz Fraser was just singing with a mouthful of gobstoppers or something.
I was never a fan of Tom Hank’s lumbering buffoon Forrest Gump. The film was a little too whimsical for my liking but I felt that the soundtrack was well researched and included a good few classic popular songs from the period of history in which the film is set.
Years ago, before it was ruined by Spotify I used 
At this point, anyone who knows me personally will no doubt be thinking “Hang on, Dance/Trip hop? Isn’t Stegzy a hairy die hard Prog fan?”. Indeed, but sometimes, with every record collection, you find a “loved genre” busting album or band. Faithless are one of those bands.
NME dubbed this “the album that should not exist”. Bloody hipsters.
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