Where Worlds Collide

After many years, the original Karnataka mailing list TheStorm is finally closing it’s virtual doors. Moderator HippyDave will be leaving the archives up there in read-only form, but new discussions should be directed to the web forums for the three bands that arose from the ashes of the old lineup, the new Karnataka, Panic Room and The Reasoning.

Many thanks to HippyDave for moderating this list, along with a great many others (where does he find the time?)

Through a case of very bad timing, I discovered the music of the original Karnataka just before they unexpectedly split up, and never got to see that incarnation of the band live. I joined the mailing list just after the split to find out what on earth had happened. I didn’t actually find out, but did meet a great number of really cool people, many of whom I’ve subsequently met at gigs.

And it was on that list that I first heard of the various successor bands. Without that I doubt that I’d have travelled down to Swansea in the aftermath of a hurricane to witness The Reasoning’s very first gig, or to Lydney in the remote depths of the Forest of Dean to witness the first live appearance of Panic Room.

So a final farewell to the list, but almost certainly not farewell to anyone on it, who I’m sure we’ll see on one or more forums, and at gigs.

Yes folks - Electric Nose is back! Still doesn’t allow comments, though

Some of my highlights (and low points) of the 30+ live gigs I attended this year.

Most hard-rocking gig by a newish band
The Reasoning, when they blew the roof off Crewe Limelight. I’ve seen this band six times this year, and they’ve never disappointed. This one was the best of the six.

Most hard-rocking gig by a bunch of grizzled veterans
The mighty Uriah Heep at Manchester Academy 2. They were good the last couple of times I’ve seen them playing greatest hits sets. This time they took the gamble of playing their new album “Wake the Sleeper” in it’s entirety, which might have flopped if the album hadn’t been up to scratch. But with an excellent album, it turned into a triumph.

Most emotionally moving gig
This has to be Breathing Space at Mansfield. This was about two weeks after the death of lead singer Olivia Sparnenn’s father Howard from a brain tumour. The whole show was intensely moving, especially the final encore of the Mostly Autumn song “The Gap is Too Wide”. Not long after this I lost my temper with a Guardian Journalist who insisted that “Amy Winehouse is an icon because she can articulate pain and heartbreak in her songs”. He just doesn’t get it.

Most totally bonkers gig
Has to be The Mars Volta at Manchester Apollo. A three hour set, no support, no interval, and they played right up to the curfew without going off and coming back for an encore. And the whole thing was one continuous jam. Despite owning all four of their studio albums, I recognised very little of what they actually played. It was intense, complex and very, very loud. Even after nine months I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.

Worst performance by a so-called classic artist.
Andy Fairweather-Low at the Cambridge Rock Festival. “I’m a great sixties icon - you have to bow down and worship me”. Reminded me of The Kinks at the 1981 Reading Festival in 1981, and not in a good way. Tedious set of 50s and 60s covers, made no attempt to connect with the audience, and gave me the impression he was was playing for the benefit of Radio Caroline rather than the people in the hall.

The gig that didn’t actually happen
Panic Room at the Peel where the power failed, and we didn’t get any music apart from 20 minutes of the support band. Fortunately I did get to see the excellent Panic Room a further three times, and there’s a rematch of the cancelled gig on January 31st next year - see you there!

I wasn’t originally going to arrange these in order, but in the end I did it anyway, just to annoy those people who hate ranked lists.

10. Van der Graaf Generator - Trisector
Reduced to a trio after the departure of David Jackson, this album proves the slimmed-down version of the 70s progressive rock veterans can still deliver an album in the same league as their 2005 comeback album “Present”

9. Magenta - Metamorphosis
Magenta are very much old-school Prog, wearing their Yes, Genesis and Mike Oldfield influences on their sleeve, playing 20 minute epics with titles like ‘The Ballad of Samual Layne’. They get away with it though superior songwriting and arrangement, and stunning individual performances from Christina Booth on vocals and Chris Fry on guitar.

8. Josh and Co - Through These Eyes
This solo album from Bryan Josh of Mostly Autumn appeared out of the blue at the end of November. Has a similar sound and production to Mostly Autumn’s last album, but the songs are looser and more contemporary-sounding. Quite dark in places, playfully self-indulgent in others, and Bryan cuts loose on the guitar in a way that shows how much he’d been holding back on recent Mostlies releases; I haven’t heard him shred like that for ages. Although Bryan naturally handles most of the vocals, there are also some quite stunning contributions from Olivia Sparnenn which really make me look forward to the next Breathing Space album

7. Uriah Heep - Wake the Sleeper
Nine years since their last studio album, and the mighty Heep are back with a powerful statement that the hard rock veterans are very much in business. Ironically for a band who have spent much of their career in the shadow of the much bigger and more successful Deep Purple, they’ve now come up with something that blows away anything Purple have done in the last nine years. It compares very favourably with their best output from their 70s heyday, and I don’t think they’ve ever rocked harder than this.

6. Panic Room - Visionary Position
The debut from the band that grew out of the ashes of Karnataka, fronted by Anne-Marie Helder. Three years in the making, it’s a rich multilayered album with a real mix of styles from hard rock, folk, pop and full-blown prog which was well worth the wait.

5. Pineapple Thief - Tightly Unwound
Pineapple Thief are one of the new generation of progressive rock bands who mix elements of 70s progressive rock with more contemporary influences to give a streamlined modern sound rather than produce a pastiche of older bands. You can hear the influence of both early Radiohead and Porcupine Tree on this album, although thankfully we’re spared Thom Yorke-style whining vocals, and there is definitely no shortage of tunes.

4. Mostly Autumn - Glass Shadows
A strong release which is a marked improvement on the patchy and badly-produced “Heart Full of Sky” even if it doesn’t quite match their best work. Written entirely by Bryan Josh and Heather Findlay this time around, it’s more mainstream melodic rock than the celtic-tinged prog of their early work, but retains the 70s vibe that’s still a major element of their sound. Musically it has hard rockers, shimmering piano ballads, dreamy atmospheric numbers and soaring guitar-driven epics. Lyrically they’re certainly not singing about Hobbits any more, this is a true life story about heartbreak, joy, tragedy and hope.

3. Opeth - Watershed
2005′s “Ghost Reveries” wasn’t an easy album to follow, but Opeth managed to equal it with “Watershed“, which contains all their trademark elements; piledriving heavy passages alternating with delicate guitar harmonies, Mikael Ã…kerfeldt’s vocals swapping back and forth between harsh ‘cookie monster’ and heartfelt clean vocals, typically all in the same song. It’s not an easy listen, songs average ten minutes, and don’t have anything as crassly commercial as conventional verses or choruses. But when you get what they’re doing, the result can only be described as ‘symphonic’.

2. Marillion - Happiness is the Road
This double album is a vast improvement on last year’s patchy “Somewhere Else“. The two disks are conceived as two separate single albums; the atmospheric “Essence“, and the rockier “The Hard Shoulder“. Both contain plenty of gems and very little filler. Stylistically it’s the same contemporary sound as recent albums rather than a reversion to an earlier sound. Steve Hogarth is on great form, using his voice as much as a musical instrument rather than solely to express the lyrics, and Steve Rothery demonstrates in many places why he’s one of the best rock guitarists out there.

1. The Reasoning - Dark Angel
It’s difficult to choose just one album as my album of the year, but in the end I’ve settled for The Reasoning’s second album. Last year’s debut “Awakening” was one of my top albums of last year, a great mix of melodic hard rock with progressive flavouring, with three-part vocal harmones and a powerful twin lead guitar attack. This one takes things to another level, adding some metal to the mix, full of melodies that get stuck in your brain, sublime vocals from Rachel Cohen, and some amazing but never self-indulgent playing from new guitarist Owain Roberts.

The Observer Music Magazine’s top Twenty Tracks of 2008 just makes me want to beat my head against the table. They claim to cover everything “From Abba to Zappa”, but the reality is they’re hopelessly biased towards ‘Landfill indie’ and ‘ASDA-Pop’. Just read their list and weep. And watch it get shredded in the comments.

A few commentators tried to defend the list, with comments like this.

..shock horror mainly contains tracks that most people..the ones with lives, will actually have heard.

So to him, ‘having a life’ equates to spending your time listening to daytime Radio 1. Bah!

While I don’t expect them to acknowledge the existence of the independently-released prog-rock releases that have defined my year, I pointed out that bands like Metallica, AC/DC and even Guns’n'Roses have all released critically-acclaimed and massively-selling albums this year, yet are conspicuous by their absence on a list which still finds space for the lumpen indie-rock of Oasis. You really have to have been living under a rock not to have heard of those bands. Yet they’re not even on OMM’s radar screen.

Another commentator wondered what age group this list is aimed at. But I don’t think there’s anything like the generation gap in music that existed 20 or 30 years ago - when I find myself liking some of the same bands as my 13-year old niece, the generation gap is as good as dead, at least as far as music is concerned.

While there’s always going to be acts heavily marketed to a particular generation (usually those too young to have developed a musical taste of their own), any band with a degree of musical substance is going to have cross-generational appeal nowadays. You can tell by the mix of ages you see at gigs by bands like Opeth or Porcupine Tree; they appeal to both grizzled 40-something rockers and emo teens in significant numbers. I’ve even seen teenagers at a Uriah Heep gig this year!

Anyway, I think the target audience of this list is people who neither know nor care about music, but want to know the right names to drop at dinner parties in order to appear cool and sophisticated. And people like that probably get the music they deserve.

My own top 20 (or more probably top ten) list will appear on this blog in due course.

There have been threads on various forums about Christmas music, and what are people’s favourites.

As an unrepentant prog-rock fan, I have a definite soft spot for Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas”. I don’t think it’s as dark and depressing as some people make it out to be; the ultimate message is positive; we only get out of Christmas (or anything else) what we’re prepared to put in. Think of it as an antidote to the over-sentimental or crassly commercial.

A lot of my favourite are traditional carols.

• Silent Night, especially sung in five-part harmony.
• O Come All Ye Faithful, although you’ve got to do it properly and have somebody singing the descants for the “Sing Choirs of Angels” verse. Still think it works best with just four verses - just because a lot of hymnbooks print two extra verses doesn’t mean you have to sing them.
• Hark the Herald Angels Sing - when you have words by Charles Wesley and music by Felix Mendlesson, you really can’t go wrong.

But for every Christmas gem, there’s some Christmas cheese which has passed it’s sell-by date. Now I’m going to risk coming over like a grumpy old man, and cast a vote against any of this lot:

• John Lennon’s “Merry Xmas (War is Over)” - Tiresome hippy platitudes set to an annoyingly twee tune. How is it that Lennon gets a free pass with sentimental mush like this when you only have to mention Paul McCartney’s name and everyone starts shouting “Frog Chorus?”
• Away in a Manger - go look up the Monophysite Heresy.
• The Little Drummer Boy. This one is just plain annoying. There’s something about the par-ap-a-pum-pum that just drives me up the wall.
• That Slade song. OK, it was great fun in 1973, but it’s been played to death, and has suffered badly from over-exposure.

So what are your favourites?

So in Manchester we’ve got a referendum for introducing a London-style congestion charge paid by those people who insist on driving into central Manchester rather than catching the train like everyone else.

As a non-driver, for a while I wondered whether voting for a tax that will be paid solely by people other than me is a morally right thing to do. But then I though about a bit more, and came up with some justifications.

• Drivers get enough subsidies already, despite the endless whining from the motoring lobby. Train fares go up above inflation year after year, yet the cost of motoring has actually gone down over the years.
• It will piss off those annoying libertarians who refuse to acknowledge the existence of any externalities they find it personally inconvenient to deal with.
• If I don’t vote for my personal self-interest, nobody else is going to.

So take that, Clarkson groupies!

Back to the world-famous Crewe Limelight for Panic Room’s final live appearance of 2008.

Support was Jump, who I’d seen (briefly!) at that ill-fated double headliner at The Peel when the power failed just at the point where things were starting to come to life. Tonight we got to see them complete a whole set, and they were very good indeed. More prog-tinged bluesy rock than prog, although you can hear a strong Fish influence in the lead singer. Nice one; I’m looking forward to seeing them again at the rescheduled Peel gig in the new year now.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen Panic Room, and was the best one I’ve seen them play to date. Their sound is an eclectic multi-layered mix of hard rock and prog with bits of folk and electronica, and the five-piece band do a splendid job of reproducing it live; amazingly tight, but they also rock out pretty hard.

Sound was pretty good, certainly better than for either Breathing Space or Karnataka’s gigs in October. Anne-Marie Helder was on stellar form vocally, despite suffering from a cold which I hope she didn’t get it from me, and struggling with a non-functioning pedal board. Can you name any other band where the singer has more effects pedals than the lead guitarist?

Setlist was much the same as the Halloween gig in Worcester, right down to the cover of ‘Enter Sandman’ as the final encore, albeit with a few changes in lyrics. High spots were many; ‘Apocalypstick’ was fantastic, and of the new songs ‘Yasumi’ and ‘Go’ are rapidly becoming favourites. Anne-Marie’s Santa outfit for the encores raised a few eyebrows; I think the rest of the band should have dressed as elves.

Next gig is at The Peel in Kingston on January 31st. Be there!

And so we come to the final chapter of November Gig Madness. And this is really the only possible ending.

The first time I travelled to York for the annual Grand Opera House was in 2007, when it was moved to the beginning of the month so that flautist/keyboardist Angie Gordon, who was expecting a baby in December, could make one final appearance with the band before going on maternity leave. This year it returned to the more traditional date of the last weekend in November. And I’d learned my lesson leaving it too late to order a ticket; instead of the restricted view seat I ended up in last year I purchased a ticket the day they went on sale, and scored the second row, just off-centre on Bryan’s side of the stage.

I’m usually one of those curmudgeons that complains that Christmas starts earlier and earlier, but walking through the medieval streets on the way to the gig with all the decorations out in near sub-zero temperatures meant it was starting to feel like Christmas. The famous Shambles rather beats the 60s grot of Crewe shopping centre as the scenic route to a gig.

Mostly Autumn gigs are known for their great atmosphere; this one, with many friends and family of the band takes that to another level. You could taste the anticipation in the hall. The last Mostly Autumn gig was the Cambridge Rock Festival four months ago, Heather Findlay’s last appearance before going on maternity leave. After four months in which many people wondered if she’d want to take a more extended break from the band, tonight’s was to be her first live appearance with the band on returning.

The band hit the ground running with the now-traditional opener of “Fading Colours”, no trace of the rustiness from having off the road for four months. The setlist started out much as the spring tour with ‘Caught in a Fold‘, ‘Flowers for Guns‘ and ‘Unoriginal Sin‘, although they varied things later on. Nice to hear another couple of songs from “Passengers“, ‘First Thought‘, which I’d never heard live before, and the old favourite ‘Answer the Question‘, which hasn’t been played for something like two years. And they debuted two more songs from this years “Glass Shadows“, ‘A Different Sky‘ and ‘Until the Story Ends‘, the latter featuring a guest appearance from Troy Donockley on Uilleann pipes.

This was really Heather’s show, as much as Cardiff eighteen months ago, although this one was an altogether more happy occasion. She looked wonderful, and sang like a goddess. The sparse piano ballad ‘Above the Blue‘ was possibly the best version I’ve heard so far, and the epic ‘Carpe Diem‘, also augmented by Troy Donockley’s Uilleann pipes, was utterly spellbinding.

If the streets of York hadn’t started the Christmas season, the encores certainly did, with all the traditional Christmas covers, kicking of with their spine-tingling five-part harmony version of the traditional Carol ‘Silent Night’ with guest appearances from former members Angela Gordon and Chris Johnson.

Altogether a magical evening, and reminds me of just why Mostly Autumn remain my favourite band. And it was nice to meet half the band at the Old White Swan after the gig. I just hope I didn’t give one band member my lurgey; she insisted on giving me a hug before I had the chance to tell her I have a cold.

I’ll probably catch the band at least once more on the December leg of the tour.