Fed up with Covid restrictions? Longing to get back to the old normal? Well, here's an album that will put a spring in your step and banish those isolation blues to the musty pages of the history books. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_laIbzhC50SwNk5dui0F639xGE9D0jpy2c The Backstage is a band born in adversity. When Steve Hackett's U.S. tour was cancelled last…Read more Isolation
Flown
Burning Shed is inviting pre-orders for CD and vinyl versions of Flown, the debut album by the Norwegian trio, Dim Gray. They list the band as "art rockers" and describe the album thus: The music on Flown combines strings-infused chamber pop, dark indie folk and grandiose art rock. An ambitious musical statement [...] in the vein of…Read more Flown
Lucky Dip
Hear My VoiceLiquid EvolutionLord It's a FeelingThe Gift of LoveClocks For this post I'm offering an assortment of easy-on-the ear pieces: three songs and two instrumentals. Click on the images above to enlarge the picture; click the caption to go to the corresponding YouTube video. Alternatively, all five pieces have been collected as both a…Read more Lucky Dip
Pianocean
Today we will be sailing with an ocean-going piano. With the piano we will take a yacht called Lady Flow, a pianist, singer and songwriter called Marieke Huysmans-Berthou and a cat, whose name I do not know. Together they have created a project called Pianocean, sailing from port to port, meeting the locals and putting…Read more Pianocean
Te Acheres
I believe the title of this track-of-the-week, Te Acheres, is in the Ethiopian Amharic language1. Unfortunately, I have not been able to work out what it means. The Web does have the lyrics of the song and Google Translate will give a literal translation of them - but it refuses to decipher the title. And…Read more Te Acheres
Evergreen
A rather lovely song by the progressive folk band, Honeysuckle, floated by on the cyberwind last week. And this week the wind blew a big container ship askew across the Suez Canal blocking billions of dollars worth of trade. What's the connection? The song and the company that owns the stricken ship are both called…Read more Evergreen
Strong Feelings
If a music blogger is only as old as the songs he reviews I have been getting ever more youthful. And my slide backwards has never been more apparent than with this latest track-of-the-week. Strong Feelings, was only released last month as a taster for Dry Cleaning's forthcoming album, New Long Leg, due out on…Read more Strong Feelings
Symmetry
We all know what symmetry is, don't we? If we take this lovely picture of the dome of the Sheik Lotfollah mosque in Isfahan, Iran and flip it horizontally the resulting pattern will be indistinguishable from the original. There are several other operations we could perform that also leave the pattern unchanged - we might…Read more Symmetry
Fjieri
Fjieri is an Italian band. It was formed in 1997 by Stefano Panunzi and Nicola Lori. Their music falls at the soft end of prog rock, somewhere between Tim Bowness and King Crimson. They have released two albums: Endless (2009) and Words Are All We Have (2015). Both albums are superb, as you'd expect from…Read more Fjieri
Prophecy
I have seen the future. A vinyl edition of Solstice's 2013 album, Prophecy, will be released on 2nd July 2021. Or so the Burning Shed oracle tells me. The significance of this revelation, though, was obscure for, although I have seen many summers, no Solstice had ever appeared on the domestic music machines. While the…Read more Prophecy
Crotchety Man 