ONIRIS were a band from France who released this one album back in 1979. There are plenty of theatrical vocals, atmosphere and adventure. This is such an interesting listen and they have given a lot of attention to detail. The album i thought of most while listening to this was Emmanuel Booz's 1974 release. We do get some welcomed female vocals at times and she is fantastic.

"Schizologues" opens with dark atmosphere as piano and bass join in. It's building. Theatrical vocals 2 minutes in. It changes and becomes jazzy before 4 minutes with electric piano and guitar. Another calm with atmosphere follows then the vocals are back. Theatrical spoken words after 6 1/2 minutes then it's jazzy again. It's catchy but laid back after 8 minutes. Female vocals help out as well. A brief Zeuhl vibe after 10 minutes is cool. It's jazzy again. Some nice guitar after 14 1/2 minutes then atmosphere ends it. What a great side long suite that is.

"L'homme Voilier" opens with piano melodies as fragile vocals join in. Not a fan of this but thankfully it changes and turns experimental but not for long as we get more mellow stuff. It's fuller then we get an atmospheric calm before 4 minutes. Some crazy theatrics late. "Enferologues" is a short psychedelic conversation. "Le Reve Et Le Quotidien" opens with drums as vocals and a fuller sound follows. The female vocals here are sound amazing. Insane is maybe the word. Atmosphere and whispering 3 minutes in then it picks up again. Laughter before 5 minutes and a guitar solo 6 1/2 minutes in. The intensity is rising 8 1/2 minutes in with the vocals leading. Amazing ! A calm ends it as it as the album ends as it began.

A very solid 4 stars.

This is structurally very much like a symphony. One must admire how the band crafts such a work, with recurring melodies intricately and subtly woven into other sections of the album. From the perspective of a prog fan, the dull or excessive moments are few and far between. The album should be listened to in its entirety for the listener to fully understand it, and they will pick up on some wonderful examples of musicianship. Aside from a few sections, the album is certainly more listenable and digestible than many other prog rock albums. Too many listeners get hung up on its reputation I believe.

Anyone who fails to see this as a progressive rock album has not listened to it or analysed it properly. Whether or not to takes into account the innovative production techniques on "Owner of a Lonely Heart", one cannot dismiss the lyrics of "Hold On" as being distinctively prog, in fact, they're the proggiest lyrics I've ever heard! The first time I heard the intro to "Changes" I actually thought it was from an earlier Yes album, and "Hearts" could easily have been from a 70's Yes album. Lastly and most importantly, "Leave It" is possibly the most musically accomplished top 30 hit in history. The vocal harmonies are brilliant and echo choral music from throughout the centuries. The way they use syncopation and the way they transition the sections of the song is stunning. I would go as far as to suggest that compositionally, this is one of Yes' most unique and most well-crafted songs.

This album has some really strong songs on it, and it is vastly underrated and overlooked. Structurally, "Survival" may be the definitive Yes song. "I See You" is magnificently crafted, with the band slipping with ease between a rocker and a Baroque fugue and back to a rocker again. "Beyond and Before" is a worthy starter to the band's discography and "Harold Land" is filled with a haunting, mystical beauty. While neither their sound or lyrics are fully developed here, I have found this to be a great album to introduce prog to people with, as it is pleasant, intelligent and digestible. I personally think its at least on par with The Yes Album, and overall more enjoyable.

Before hearing this album, I was a prog fan but my interest in metal of any sort was minimal. A good friend bought me this album on vinyl. The opening track "Scavenger of Human Sorrow" hit me immediately as being distinctly prog, and while it took 2 or 3 listens to get used to the rest of the album, I became hooked. It appeals to me for the same reason any other prog, and I would not hesitate to recommend any fan of prog try this out, particularly if they enjoyed ELP, King Crimson, Focus and Yes at their loudest and heaviest.

— First review of this album —

This utterly unique band from San Francisco put out a nice collection of albums in the 1990s, forming a strange collision of Sonic Youth guitar experimentation, The Residents' affinity for weird sounds and voices, and the gnarly multi-guitar counterpoint of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. The band sports a three-guitar front line, any one of whom could pick up a mandolin, banjo, trumpet, kazoo, what have you, at any time. Each of the five band members contributes more or less equally to the writing and singing, though guitarists Brian Hageman and Mark Davies seem to take the lead the majority of the time.

This is their fourth full-length album, and this is the band at their peak or close to it. Over the course of their career as a band, they honed a concept that I will call Fellers' Law of Hook Dynamics: "Anything can be a hook if you repeat it enough times." This is similar to the Trout Mask Replica aesthetic, but the Thinking Fellers turn these little noise licks and atonal soundbites into bona-fide post-punk rock songs that are unique, memorable, and yes, pretty rockin' too.

This is probably the band's most sprawling, messy album, the most "damaged" and "out there" they ever got. As a result, as stunning as this album is, I cannot award it five stars because the sprawling nature of it does drag it down just a little bit. HOWEVER, the first 40 or so minutes of the album (tracks 1-12) undeniably contains the best sequence of songs this band ever wrote. "Gentleman's Lament" has the rollicking forward momentum of an avalanche of whirring guitars and drums, complemented by some very melodic, almost manic vocals. "Catcher" offers the same brisk tempo to a darker song. "Hornet's Heart" has a great vocal hook and a woozy vocal, with a pounding rhythm. "Star Trek" is an aggressive riffing instrumental with odd meters. "Hive" is essentially a ballad, with a quiet echoey atmosphere, chiming guitars, and a lovely passionate vocal by Mark Davies. "Tell Me" is a favorite of mine, beginning fairly normally, but erupting unexpectedly into a middle section of pure noise, then into a furious rifferama at the end. This section of the album closes with "Infection", a late-night fuzzy drone number with quietly chugging acoustic guitar and buzzing violin, which eventually fades away, feeling like the conclusion to the best Velvet Underground album that never was......

But you're not off the hook yet. What follows is what is commonly known among fans as "Feller Filler". Feller Filler occurs on each of their albums, usually short little interludes taken from lo-fi rehearsal jams. Fans are pretty unanimous in the opinion that these little pieces are by no means their best works, but they do seem to give their albums their unique character, and they give the listener a glimpse into the creative process - the trial and error that eventually results in the wonderful fully developed pieces. On a typical album, there will be a few of these numbers scattered across the album. On this album, there are about 5 relatively lengthy ones right in a row, taking up about 15 minutes. This effectively takes the album abruptly out of avant-rock bliss and straight into an alternate universe of sinister noise, like a long unused jam from the Trout Mask Replica sessions or something.

The album concludes with a rather quiet, cerebral group of songs that maintain the random, focus-less mood of the prior section, but with smoother pieces. "Raymond H", the closest thing to an classic prog number on the album, sits uneasily among this group, with prominent banjo giving it a Camper Van Beethoven-in-a-prog-mood kind of sound. The other pieces, like "Cistern", "1" Tall", and "El Cerrito" are all brooding, ominous, and just a bit confused.

"Mother of All Saints" is a "trip" record, a strange linear trip with two sudden changes in trajectory. It's a long album, and it's long forays into weirdness rob it just a wee bit of its overall consistency, but in the end this album undeniably ranks up there with their best, in a catalog that has very few low spots.

— First review of this album —

PEANUT BRITTLE SATELLITE are from Buffalo, New York and this is their debut which was released in 2011. They are a six piece band and play all-instrumental music. They obviously have a sense of humour when you consider the band's name and the title of this record. That really doesn't show up in their sound though as we get fairly heavy music here with lots of violin and guitar.

"Anisotropic Axon Re-Electroplation, Mvt. 1" has a nice heavy sound and some impressive drumming around 1 1/2 minutes. A spacey calm comes in after 2 minutes to the end. "Cruisin'" has a jazzy flavour early on. Violin after 2 minutes as it turns intense, then back to that jazzy mode late to end it. "Billie's Blue Bodega" turns heavy 1 1/2 minutes in. This continues to shift and change as drums standout 4 1/2 minutes in and violin before 6 1/2 minutes.

"Fierce Chemchok Heruka And The Between Dieties" builds and it sounds so good as the violin rips it up over top. It's the guitar's turn next. It does settles some 4 minutes in. Nice. "Showdown At The Bump-Bump Ranch" has a heavy drum led intro with violin over top. Huge bass lines join in. Great sound 3 minutes in when it settles. "Fear" has crisp drumming with guitar to start. It picks up before 2 minutes. Violin after 3 1/2 minutes and the guitar joins in too. Bass and drums lead late. "Anisotropic Axon Re-Electroplation, Mtv 3" ends the album with more heavy music with violin playing over top. It's intense 4 1/2 minutes in.

This has impressed me enough to offer up that fourth star.

Here's one of those albums that snuck its way into the Prog Archives by default, in the sense that going by the definition of "prog rock", it's pretty far removed from the genre itself, including your basic progressive metal characteristics. It's straightforward speedy thrash rhythms structured in a verse/chorus format with ultra-catchy anthemic lyric shouts for the choruses (basically growling out the song title in deranged fashion). Just about every song here follows the same blueprint. Yet, it's also quite progressive in a sense, just not in a conventional manner. Playing "Regurgitated Guts" after Genesis' "Suppers Ready" might work for someone who needs severe therapy, but for the rest of prog listening fandom, this album's notoriety is strictly an important evolution for the metal genre alone.

This is thrash taken to extreme levels with a meaner, thicker sound than the norm for its time, downtuned just enough to add a heavier sense of brutality, and adolescent, enthusiastic gore lyrics that would have been quite shocking for their time if they were decipherable. This, of course, leads into probably the most memorable aspect of this album, being the vocals. Growling and grunting vocals didn't commence with this album, but they were, and still, pretty sick. Rather than gutteral inhuman grunts, here we have insanely hoarse growls and occasional screams that effectively capture an intense vibe of sheer rage and anguish. As a whole package, these elements create a unique mix, since the instrumentation, particularly concerning the guitars, is also well played, unlike many of the sloppier grindcore bands contributing monster growling for the starving masses.

Scream Bloody Gore is essentially an early death metal album before the grindcore influences, such as blastbeats and ultra low grunts, entered the genre and merged with the more technical and vicious thrash of bands like Possessed or early Sepultura. Although it's also the least technical of Death's output, I find it personally the most fun by far. There's something hilarious about singing along to "Zombie rituuaaaal!!!" that I don't get in their more musically accomplished later works. In fact, in this rare case, my enjoyment of the band seems to dwindle with each of their succesive efforts in spite of them becoming more and more progressive and skillful in execution. I'm not sure why that is since I do admire strong technicality, but Death's later material never grabbed me more than "wow, that part sounded cool" whereas this questionable release in terms of tastefulness and competence I play more often despite its repetitive nature that I admit gets tiresome after awhile. It's like certain film directors who are better at releasing entertaining shlock than trying to release something important, profound and deep. I suppose I just dig Death when they sang about, well, death.

Having heard Pekka Pohjola's first four solo albums before taking on this one, this one came across as something of a departure to me, dominated as it is by synthesisers. It comes across as an attempt to blend classical choral work with New Agey synthesiser meditations, and whilst there's nothing inherently silly about that idea at the same time I don't think it works particularly successfully here; rather than creating a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, I feel that the album ends up adding subpar New Age music to subpar choral music and ends up with something mildly more irritating than either of its halves.

Those who come to Pekka's music specifically looking for his Zappa-esque hyperactive workouts or his more sedate fusion styles (as seen in albums such as Visitation) will find this album a disappointing oddity. Those who are particularly interested in fusions of electronic music and choral music might consider this a worthwhile attempt, but I'm sure there's better examples of this sort of thing out there.

Matthew Parmenter did a decent job keeping the Discipline sound alive on his two solo albums, but it's still incredibly gratifying to see the band back together and sounding like they'd never been away. Some of the material on To Shatter All Accord was already fully developed back in the band's last rise to prominence in the 1990s, with Circuitry and the wonderfully megalomaniacal When the Walls Are Down having appeared on live shows from that era, as did the coda to When She Dreams She Dreams In Colour, whilst Dead City, Rogue, and the bulk of When She Dreams... seem to be shiny and new.

The structure of the album seems to be a balance between the shorter and more succinct pieces of Push and Profit (in the first three tracks) and the longer workouts of Unfolded Like Staircase (as represented by the final two tracks), though the seamless transition between Circuity and When the Walls are Down blurs the boundaries between those two songs somewhat, and on the whole all the best features of those albums are present here. Once again, Discipline prove themselves to be absolute masters at establishing atmosphere and striking the precise emotional chord they are going for. I don't mind that some of the material on here can already be heard on live albums from the earlier era of the band, because I think the inclusion of that material helps the album succeed at seeming like a natural followup to Unfolded Like Staircase, rather than the sort of reunion album where it feels like there's an abrupt discontinuity between where the band left off and the sort of material they play when they get back together.

In fact, it's one of the best reunion albums I've ever heard - much like Van der Graaf Generator's Godbluff, the fact that the main songwriter of the band was keeping the approach alive in his solo albums pays substantial dividends. Highly recommended.