Author: Logan Rocker

It’s Prog‘s brand new Tracks Of The Week! Six brand new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Congratulations to Halifax post-rockers L.O.E. whose moving I Was Not Magnificent triumphed in the end last week after an intense battle with US post-rock quintet Hiroe and with Sweden’s doomy porggers Katatonia in third place.

The premise for Tracks Of The Week is simple – we’ve collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you – makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn’t it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it’s a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn’t be easier could it?

We’ll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week we’ll update you with this week’s winner, and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you’re a band and you want to be featured in Prog‘s Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo and biog to us here.

RAPHAEL WEINROTH-BROWNE – SPEED OF LIGHT

Thus far, striking-looking cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne is best known to proggers for his work with Leprous, but here he breaks out on his own with a genre-bending reworking of Bach’s Prelude to the G Major Cello Suite, entitled Speed Of Light. It’s accompanied by a striking video shot by Dark Fable Media, who have previously worked with Sleep Token and TesseracT. He’s certainly going to give Jo Quail a run for her money!

“In 2024, I was commissioned by James Wilton Dance, an incredible UK-based contemporary dance company, to create an 80-minute soundtrack to their latest work, entitled BACH Reimagined,” says the cellist. James and I are both avid metal fans and one of the guiding threads of this piece was the intersection between Baroque counterpoint and modern heavy music.

“Speed Of Light was one of the first pieces that came out of this writing process. My first impulse was to take the very familiar repeated arpeggio from the prelude to the G Major Cello Suite by Bach (popularly known as “the cello song”) and reframe it as a jagged, nasty riff. I also decided to redecorate the pattern, transposing it into every metal guitarist’s favourite scale, the Phrygian mode.”

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AVKRVST – THE TRAUMA

Mournful Norwegian prog rock quintet AVKRVST return with their second full-length album, Waving At The Sky, through InsideOut Music on June 13. The upcoming album acts as a prequel to 2023’s debut The Approbation, inspired by a gruesome family tragedy and the bleak soul from the debut, showcased as the lonely man in the cabin in previous music videos, is one of the characters in the new album, highlighted in the video for The Trauma.

“The Trauma is the heart of the story— the origin of everything,” the band reveal. “A harrowing act triggered a wound that never should have been inflicted. This is where it all begins.“

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PETER BAUMANN – A WORLD APART

As a mainstay for the classic 1970s line-up of German electronic prog pioneers Tangerine Dream, Peter Baumann needs little introduction., He’s returned with Nightfall, his first new album for nine years, and which is released today on the legendary Bureau B label, from which comes the haunting, drifting A World Apart.

“I love instrumental music because it bypasses any concepts, it is an expression that words can never capture,” he says. “We can’t hear music exactly the same way twice, it’s always experienced differently, sometimes slightly, sometimes substantially. Like a river, never exactly the same.”

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GÖSTA BERLINGS SAGA – CEREMONIAL

Swedish instrumental proggers Gösta Berlings Saga are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year and will release their seventh studio album, Forever Now, through Pelagic Records on June 6. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s Konkret Music, and their latest single and video, Ceremonial, captures the band at their melodic and intense best.

“Ceremonial is the eclectic final track of Forever Now,” the band say. It’s both lush and propulsive, highly electronic and with an ending that lingers. Eternal Rock. No more, no less. The video, directed by Martin Vogel, is 100% ceremonial VHS worship.”

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DAVE JONES – TREPIDATION/74 HEIST

Prog, jazz and a touch of folk all meld on Trepidation/74 Heist, a brand new track from keyboard player Dave Jones. It’s taken from his new EP, Stratospheric, which sees Jones working with Ben Waghorn on tenor sax and flute, who has worked with Portishead, drummer Elliot Bennett and Tim Rose, who has worked with Toyah, on guitar and bass.

“This new EP is similar in format to Spectrum Analysis in that the tracks are relatively short (except Trepidation/74 Heist) because of their dual purpose – besides this EP release, they also serve as pieces of production music designed for tv and film, which are by nature required to be short,” says Jones. “Think of them as being a bit like the instrumental sections from longer prog songs, that might normally have vocals at the start and end.”

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RED CAIN – FWAB (FIRE, WATER, AIR, BLOOD)

Canadian quartet Red Cain refer to themselves as power prog storytellers, and with new single and video FWAB (Fire, Water, Air, Blood), they certainly make an impact, a powerful mix of prog metal, harmonised choruses among atmospheric industrial synth backing.

“In the frozen Eastern European steppes, there stood a fell ancient god,” the band relate. “Every ill word fed him, and every ill deed made him more potent. For millennia, he grew strong through kingship over mortal ill will, suffering, and pride, until his nourishment took a new form, unable to feed or strengthen. Without nourishment, the god was powerless, and without power, he slept. After millennia, fed full by ill words and ill deeds, searching for an awakening, the god demands the symbols of his power: Fire, Water, Air, Blood. Join the ritual sacrament of Chernobog. With this new release, the Slavic pagan ritual to call forth the “Black God” takes flight, asking the listener what they would be willing to change their fate.”

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Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.

In 2010, Heart released Red Velvet Car, their first album to hit the US Top 20 in two decades. To mark the album’s release, Classic Rock sat down with the band’s Ann and Nancy Wilson to discuss their path from classic rockers to multi-platinum, MTV-friendly goliaths and beyond.

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It was boredom that started it. You’re in one of America’s biggest bands, your album is at No.1, the tour seems endless – night after night the same in nameless, faceless hotels…

“We were bored after a show one night,” chuckles Heart’s Ann Wilson with the benefit of more than two decades’ hindsight. “Our publicist at the time, who’s now the manager of Pearl Jam, well, the two of us broke into the hotel bar which was closed down for the night.

“We had a few drinks and then we plugged in the jukebox, turned it way up, just had a party in there. Real breaking and entering. And we could have really gotten in trouble big-time, because we were in some little town back east that was really pretty conventional and uptight. We left a lot of booze bottles around.”

Ann Wilson’s confession about her most ridiculous rock’n’roll moment doesn’t stop at that.

“We got escorted out of town the next day because things went on from there – the big lawnmower went into the swimming pool, filling the pool with oil. They were renovating the hotel and there were big rolls of brand-new carpeting which got shoved into the pool. Doors were knocked on and when people opened them they were sprayed with the fire extinguisher…”

It was the late 80s, and Heart (the band Wilson has led along with her guitarist younger sister Nancy since the mid-70s) were riding high on their reinvention from 70s folk rockers to polished, AOR megastars. Big ballads and even bigger hair was the order of the day. These Dreams and Alone were monster hits, the band’s videos were all over MTV. It all seemed a world away from their earlier success, driven by consummate acoustic-driven rock albums like 1976’s Dreamboat Annie and 77’s Little Queen.

But after that second massive success the band’s fortunes faltered. The big-hair bubble burst, and it seemed that Heart were over. The Wilsons retreated to their native Seattle.

For all that grunge has been held responsible for slaying the OTT-ballad brigade, somehow the sisters seemed to escape its flannel-shirted wrath. Conversely, grunge actually proved to be their saviour.

“It saved us emotionally at the time,” guitarist Nancy Wilson explains. “We came back out of the 80s with our tails between our legs. We were one of those hair bands that were so uncool overnight.

“I can’t tell you how relieved we were to find that out after the eighties and we came back to Seattle, because guys like [Alice In Chains guitarist] Jerry Cantrell were there going: ‘Oh my god, you’re such an influence.’ I still well up when I remember him asking me how the beginning of Mistral Wind went. We were playing guitars at Ann’s house and just trying to find our community again in Seattle, and there it was, larger than we ever expected it to be.”

“We were really pretty surprised when we came down off of that eighties thing and we were embraced by those guys,” Ann continues. “I just figured, oh my god, now we’ve done it. We’d gone out on a worldwide level, had a few number ones and made a shitload of money.”

“But we came back having made a Devil’s bargain, and in the grunge era that was the kiss of death – the notion of being inauthentic. Here in Seattle I think the musicians have a really hard time in that they’re saddled with their own idea about authenticity being the be-all and end-all. And we have it too – we have the Seattle musician curse as well as any of the other guys do…

“When we came back I was surprised that there were parties we got invited to, and everybody was like: ‘Come on, let’s jam.’ And all that eighties stuff that we were involved with just kinda melted away. Within a year we had The Lovemongers going [an acoustic-based band featuring Ann, Nancy and long-time friends Sue Ennis and Frank Cox], we’d taken off the corsets and the fingernails and the extensions and we were walking around in our own shoes again. It was amazing. A wonderful musical healing that took place.

It was this spiritual and musical regrouping that has led Heart to 2010 and to a brand new album in the shape of Red Velvet Car, their first studio release since 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling. While the latter saw the Wilsons moving away from their polished 80s sound, Red Velvet Car takes it a step further and continues that musical healing.

There are no massive ballads, no multi-layered keyboards, no vocal histrionics. Collaring producer Ben Mink – who worked with Ann on her solo album Hope & Glory, and has produced the likes of Barenaked Ladies and k.d. lang and worked with Rush – Red Velvet Car puts the acoustic guitar firmly back as the organic heart of Heart.

“It spurred us to go back to square one,” says Nancy, the woman who supplies said guitar. “We went back to clubs, we got back to a community and back to the idea of not posing. We’d been posing more and more intensely through the videos. People asked me if I really played the guitar or was it a prop? That was the ultimate insult of the 80s for me.”

“At our age, maybe it’s smarter to cover your ass and pretend,” shrugs Ann. “See, when you’re young you’re fearless and cool; but we’re not posing any more.”

The experience in the studio was also a different one for the Wilsons with this album. Heart (now a sextet, completed by Ben Smith on drums, Ric Markmann on bass, Debbie Shair on keyboards and Craig Bartock on guitar) recorded Red Velvet Car between studios and hotel rooms in Los Angeles and Seattle.

“It was much more relaxed in the studio,” says Ann. “So much fun. I would really look forward to going to work. And after all these years that’s quite a statement from me, because there have been different projects where it wasn’t that much fun, I didn’t like the studio. I had a few experiences with different producers in the eighties where I don’t know why necessarily that it had to be me that they were working with. They just wanted to mould me in a way where it could have been anyone. I never understood that a bit – why don’t you sing it yourself, asshole?!”

Ann wasn’t the only one who relished the different studio set-up. This time, the band played together in the same room – just like they used to.

“It’s a musical conversation between a group of people who are playing with one another at the same time, looking at each other,” explains Nancy, “doing a few takes and not over-thinking it. It’s great to get the dynamic of something before it’s beaten to death. One of our biggest intentions was to try to never go past the point where it was fresh. They say it’s the same with painting – you have to know when to stop.”

Although Red Velvet Car is the first Heart album of new material in a while, the band haven’t spent the intervening years at home with their feet up.

“We’ve continued working with music and with various other projects, not just albums but touring,” says Nancy. The band have traversed the US several times, helped largely by the resurgence of interest in their music, in part spurred by the rise of Guitar Hero, and the use of catalogue music in American TV shows. Heart’s music has been heard in everything from The Sopranos to Glee and American Idol.

“It’s an interesting time for bands – or heritage bands, as they call us now – because I think there’s a cultural craving for a sense of history in pop culture. Like, since there isn’t any,” Nancy laughs. “It’s so disposable now. America’s looking for its own character, and it’s sort of the teenage brat of the world: it’s got everything, it uses all the resources, it’s selfishly egotistical and shallow and hysterical. And all the good things about America too. But I think there’s such a lack of a sense of character and history that stuff like Guitar Hero and American Idol brings the family together. It’s like appointment television, living room game playing that brings America to itself.”

The last couple of years haven’t been without controversy for Heart, either. In the midst of US election fever, the Wilsons made the headlines for having spoken out against the Republican party after their song Barracuda was used to introduce vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“That was funny,” Nancy smiles now. “It was great. We were watching the convention and there it was. I fired off a bunch of phone calls. I used the ‘F’ word and everything! And it was like, this is good, this is good for you guys – this is the kind of controversy that looks good on a resumé. And I’m like, alright, well, whether or not it’s good for us, it’s how we feel.”

It did result in some ugly scenes and threats though. “Some of the fans decided they didn’t like us and didn’t like our music anymore. At least for a while,” Nancy explains. “We were out on the road, and the next show that we played after that was somewhere in Florida – which is not where you wanna be if you’re a Democrat. We were kinda nervous, but we upped our security and kept a close watch on people walking in. But luckily – knock on wood – of all the crazies who have threatened to take us down, nobody so far has done that.”

‘Back to basics’ is an often-bandied expression, but with Red Velvet Car that’s exactly what Heart have done. “We’re not trying to impress by volume,” says Nancy. “I guess one of the most identifying things about Heart through the arc of our career history is that as writers we’re always tried to pull this poetic idea out of the lyric. We’re kinda old-fashioned enough to keep trying… It’s not what everybody’s doing anymore, but it’s where we come from so it’s a good idea to return to it.”

Ann concurs. “This last few years kinda remind me of the original few years when we were a club band and we were trying to get the thing off the ground, just being pretty single-minded and playing everywhere we possibly could. We haven’t been to England recently… But we’d love to come back.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock issue 149, published in September 2010.

Classic Rock editor Siân has worked on the magazine for longer than she cares to discuss, and prior to that was deputy editor of Total Guitar. During that time, she’s had the chance to interview artists such as Brian May, Slash, Jeff Beck, James Hetfield, Sammy Hagar, Alice Cooper, Manic Street Preachers and countless more. She has hosted The Classic Rock Magazine Show on both TotalRock and TeamRock radio, contributed to CR’s The 20 Million Club podcast and has also had bylines in Metal Hammer, Guitarist, Total Film, Cult TV and more. When not listening to, playing, thinking or writing about music, she can be found getting increasingly more depressed about the state of the Welsh national rugby team and her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.

As Britain’s most venerable folk-rock veteran, Roy Harper was ready to bow out in 2013, before being called back onstage by international applause. That year – at the age of 71 – he told Prog about his new album (and most recent to date) Man & Myth, and what else he wanted to achieve.

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It was a good theory: road-weary and happily settled in County Cork, Roy Harper had decided to retire. However, he hadn’t bargained on being championed by an army of admirers from Johnny Marr in Manchester via Joanna Newsom in California to Fleet Foxes in Washington, prompting his discovery by yet another generation of disciples, and his first studio album for 13 years.

We have all of them to thank for Man & Myth, the sonorous new entry in one of the great progressive singer-songwriter canons, recorded by the learned septuagenarian in Calfornia and Ireland. Late October brings three live shows to accompany the release. It nearly didn’t happen – but it’s hats off to Harper once again.

“I did go on what I thought was the last tour; I think it was 2007,” he says. “I’d come to the end of it. There were other things to do. All of the mess with Science Friction [the label he set up in 1993 years ago to reissue his catalogue] – it was such hard work getting all that together, because the records needed to be refurbished.

“Not only had they been ignored sound-wise and come from generation to next generation and lost quality, but they had no sleeve notes – nothing had travelled with them. All the photography lost, everything. You realise this is the way people die, because record companies do not care about that. Anyway, I got interested in doing that, and there were all kinds of other things that kept me busy.

“I started to build a garden here – it was good for my mind to do that. I diarised the tour and came off wanting to write a book. It’s a good book, but so far I’ve not got round to it. But that was the year that all the stuff with Joanna blew up.”

Newsom insisted on Harper guesting with her at the Royal Albert Hall in 2007. In 2011 he took to the Royal Festival Hall stage for a 70th birthday party, with onstage guests including his son Nick, Newsom, Jonathan Wilson (subsequently a co-producer on the new record) and Jimmy Page. Harper may have had other plans, but there was no stopping the renaissance.

“The older fans would have come back anyway, but of course each year the numbers thin,” he says. “Having a younger generation involved – a very much younger generation, like grandchildren almost – it probably alerted their parents to the fact that there was something going on.

“People like Johnny Marr are very vocal in support, and he’s a member of the generation in between, so it’s kind of been reseeded. There’s almost a certain amount of chagrin there, like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m retired!’ ‘No, you’re not!’ ‘Yes I am!’ It’s kind of like it was 40 years ago: being empowered by interest in you. You’re not playing to no one any more. You’ve been refuelled.”

Had he sensed the downward spiral before that? “Absolutely. That’s why I was just intent on saving the records. I knew some of them were really good and needed to be packaged in the right way for posterity. But I’ve been interrupted by myself again.”

It must be a nice problem. “It is; it’s very good. ‘What the hell? When’s my writing going to happen? Am I going to live into my 90s? No, I’m not!’ I’m very enthusiastic at the moment.”

Still, Harper has no qualms about saying goodbye to the road. “I desperately want to give up gigging – I really do,” he admits, “because it’s taking away from what I could write. Rehearsal is like a whole song and dance, literally. “I’m thinking now that I’ll do these dates I’ve got in the next year, and then I’m going to give it a break until I’m 75 or something, and see if I’m still up to it at that stage. If I am, I’ll have another go, maybe, but it’ll depend on a record. I think my heart’s in writing, really.”

Marc Bolan and I used to take the piss out of each other relentlessly; he was set on one course and I was set on another, and we both knew it

That’s patently clear from the mellifluous and mystical Man & Myth, on which his driving melodic structures and unique lyrical mixture of the everyday and the transcendental is revitalised. “Jonathan Wilson was the trigger that started it,” says Harper. “I didn’t know him from Adam, but then I found out he’d been trying to get his American friends to record a Roy Harper song and make a tribute record in California. We’ve become good friends – we’re really alike; we have a lot in common.

“We only actually recorded at his studio for a very short time, but in that time a lot was done. I had to bring it back here to Ireland to get it finished. I recorded the whole of one side and another track from the other side here, and the other four tracks on the first side were started in California. So it’s really kind of a transatlantic record.”

Harper has rarely made his lyrics transparent – in fact, he has often constructed his work in a literary style to avoid it becoming too easily accessible. “The dichotomy is that you want things to be heard, and yet I never wanted to jump onto the commercial bandwagon,” he says.

“I avoided it scrupulously. I wrote even longer and more difficult things to encourage myself to concentrate, because I was a prime candidate to do what my friends had done. Marc Bolan, for instance: we used to take the piss out of each other relentlessly, he and I, because he was set on one course and I was set on another, and we both knew it.”

He recalls the occasions when he almost crossed into the mainstream with his rare ‘songs for crowds.’ There was an early one, the Shel Talmy production Life Goes By, then 1977’s Bullinamingvase album offered both the singalong Watford Gap and the bucolic One Of Those Days In England, of which then-manager Peter Jenner encouraged him to make a single edit. Capital Radio airplay followed in London, and Harper was close to securing a Top Of The Pops performance until the track missed its chart target.

The internet creates mythology, and everybody has their own mythology. Even a baby!

All of which seems a long way from Harper’s customised metaphysical approach, historically influenced by Keats, Shelley, Burroughs and Kerouac, as much as by Lead Belly. “When I was 15 to 18 my heroes were all in their 50s and 60s, and some were in their 70s and 80s; they were legends in the true sense of the word. So you fed from those people.”

The individual song subjects of Man & Myth are always philosophical and often academic, informed by Harper’s keen eye on the world outside his window and on his computer screen. “At my sort of stage,” he muses, “you’re alarmed in some small way by the progress of the human beast. It’s there, ready and waiting in the ether – this great, multi-headed beast – and in some ways the album is influenced by that.

“The phrase ‘man and myth’ is something that’s perhaps been with me for at least 60 years. The internet creates mythology, and everybody has their own mythology. Even a baby! Humans, with their brains and tongues alike, create myth all the time, and the distance between man and myth, or woman and myth, is ethereal. You could describe all the songs as being part of man and myth.”

On Cloud Cuckooland, his attention turns to more prosaic themes. “It’s a song about today, really. It’s an everyday phrase in British-Irish life. For me, I see the whole damn thing as cloud cuckooland, right from The X Factor to the Olympics.

I’m interested in what’s going to happen with my guitar and pen… there are problems I’ve set myself that I’ve got to find answers to

“It needed a commentary,” he adds, quoting his own lyrics. “‘The bankers slide their stethoscopes into the public purse/To track genetic foreclosure from coitus to delivery/From ovary to hearse.’ That goes on now every day: the lawyers trying to scrape around for people to come forward to claim for the last lot that went on.”

Lead guitar was later added, at Harper’s request, by Pete Townshend. “It’s kind of related to Won’t Get Fooled Again – that’s why I asked him to do it. It’s the other side of the coin. ‘We won’t get fooled again!’… Yes we will!’ This is Cloud Cuckooland. So they’re heads and tails of the same coin.”

Re-enthused, Harper can’t wait to see what happens next. “With the next record, I’m interested in what’s going to happen with my guitar and pen. Because there are things to work out, and the problems I’ve set myself that I’ve got to find the answers to. So I’ve got a whole vista, a whole panorama opening up to me of new ideas.”

Prog Magazine contributor Paul Sexton is a London-based journalist, broadcaster and author who started writing for the national UK music press while still at school in 1977. He has written for all of the British quality press, most regularly for The Times and Sunday Times, as well as for Radio Times, Billboard, Music Week and many others. Sexton has made countless documentaries and shows for BBC Radio 2 and inflight programming for such airlines as Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific. He contributes to Universal’s uDiscoverMusic site and has compiled numerous sleeve notes for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other major artists. He is the author of Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia and, in rare moments away from music, supports his local Sutton United FC and, inexplicably, Crewe Alexandra FC.    

Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood often talked about a classical rock project, and the partnership finally came to fruition when the former left the Idle Race and hooked up with the latter in The Move in late 1970.

“Me and Roy used to talk about it when I was in The Idle Race and he was in The Move,” Lynne told Classic Rock. “We’d meet up down the pub or in a club in Birmingham, or he’d come over to my house or I’d go over to his house and we’d listen to the records we’d just done.

“We discussed having this group for a couple of years, and finally we did it when I joined The Move. He asked me before but I still wanted to give The Idle Race more time because I really liked the guys and I enjoyed being with them. But I thought, four years is pretty long and I’m going to be too late if I don’t do something now; try and get a hit, you know. It wasn’t really long at all now that I think about it, but it seemed urgent at the time; ‘Get a hit, quick!’”

Lynne became The Move’s second songwriter on December 1970’s Looking On album, which yielded a hit with Brontosaurus. Its Lynne compositions were What? and epic prog-presaging Open Up Said The World At The Door, which he still holds in special regard.

“It has that real close jazzy harmony, lots of thirteenths in the chords. That was just venturing into that kind of world. It wasn’t really what I intended to do forever. That was just one of the styles that I did. I do many different styles on those albums, really.”

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Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

Join the group now.

Other albums released in December 1970

• The End of an Ear – Robert Wyatt
• Wishbone Ash – Wishbone Ash
• Ginger Baker’s Air Force 2 – Ginger Baker’s Air Force
• John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – John Lennon
• Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band – Yoko Ono and Plastic Ono Band
• Lizard – King Crimson
• T. Rex  – T. Rex
• The Black-Man’s Burdon – Eric Burdon and War
• Daughter of Time – Colosseum
• Desertshore – Nico
• The End of the Game – Peter Green
• False Start – Love
• H to He, Who Am the Only One – Van der Graaf Generator
• Highway – Free
• Kingdom Come – Sir Lord Baltimore
• Lick My Decals Off, Baby – Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
• Pendulum – Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Ry Cooder – Ry Cooder
• ‘Til the Band Comes In – Scott Walker
• Watt – Ten Years After
• What About Me – Quicksilver Messenger Service
• Just Another Diamond Day – Vashti Bunyan

What they said…

“Probably their weakest album, finding the group trying to blend progressive elements with lumpy hard rock boogie on obscure, extended tracks. The songs do look forward to the Electric Light Orchestra, for good or ill, in the helium-like high harmonies and the wide palette of instruments.” (AllMusic)

“Anyone who doesn’t believe heavy metal is a Yurrupean plot will kindly inform me which B the countermelodies on this one were stolen from. Not Berry or the Beatles, believe me.” (Robert Christgau)

“Fans of weird, wild music that maintains some sense of focus without dipping into pointless avant-gardeisms or dissonances should really enjoy this album. Especially if they like early Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer. An obvious must-buy, along with everything else by The Move.” (Culture Fusion Reviews)

What you said…

Mark Herrington: A very different Move was signalled by the release of their 1970’s Looking On. Dense, heavy and quite experimental, with a smattering of lighter Jeff Lynne compositions in the mix. New arrival Lynne’s What and Open Up Said The World At The Door (with echoes of Horace Wimp to come) are both characteristic early ELO-sounding tracks.

The rest of the album is probably the heaviest that the band ever sounded. The nearly eight-minute title track opens up with a heady mixture of styles, followed by the wonderfully titled Turkish Tram Conductor Blues, a hard bluesy wall of sound. Two singles were released from the album, Brontosaurus – which charted at number 7 – and When Alice Comes Back To The Farm. The album’s elaborate nine-minute-plus closer Feel Too Good is another heavy offering, with great guitar.

Certainly a portent of the Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard yet to come, and also the Move’s hardest, proggiest album. It’s perhaps a little overindulgent in parts, but it hits the mark. 8/10.

Chris Elliott: Roy Wood wrote some great singles for The Move and later Wizzard, but never broke in the US, even with that Xmas song. Never made a decent album. This, at least, isn’t his jazz-rock side.

Mike Canoe: The Move is another band I’d heard of but not actually heard.

Looking On sounds like a demo for better things down the road. The opening title track, What?, and Feels Too Good appeal the most, with their instrumental intricacies and pleasing sonic heft. Oddly, it’s the shorter songs that lumber ungainfully. For all the vaunted madcap genius of Messrs. Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, (future ELO) drummer Bev Bevan sounds like the star of the show.

Looking On is an interesting “before they were stars” asterisk to Lynne’s and Wood’s (and Bevan’s) careers.

Steve Pereira: I gave it a go. And I listened to other Move albums at the same time. I think this is a very poor album. Muddy, plodding, boring. A pop-rock band trying to get serious but failing badly.

This is the worst album by the Move, which is saying something, as the Move were a fairly minor late-sixties pop-rock band who produced little of worth. The album after this one, Message From The Country, continues in the same vein – a band looking for a new musical direction as the seventies opened up.

Soon the band would split into the orchestrated pop-rock of ELO, immersed in McCartney-influenced pap, and the rock-revival glam pop Wizzard. And there are elements of both those bands in this album and in Message From The Country. But I found Message From The Country more energetic, more varied, and more fun. There are some really funny tongue-in-cheek moments on that album. But Looking On is too dour, and – other than the daft, plodding, but somehow engaging Brontosaurus, (which I have a memory of Pan’s People dancing to on TOTP back in 1970) – is not an album I’d want to listen to again.

Dale Munday: This is the Move’s best and most cohesive album, whereas their other albums seem to be an inconsistent mix of styles redolent of contemporary bands of the time.

This finds them sticking quite rigidly to a burgeoning heavy rock template. Most of which I really liked. Brontosaurus, released as a single, became an unlikely number 7 hit in the UK.

John Davidson: An interesting curio, but no more than that. There are some heavy psychedelic blues guitars and Bev Bevan’s drums are outstanding, but it rambles in that very 60s way that veers towards twee when it’s trying to be clever. ELO and Wizzard were more fun.

Adam Ranger: I believe this was perhaps only “contractually” The Move, with some personnel leaving the band and Wood and Lynne already recording the first ELO album whilst producing this album.

It shows. This is perhaps the first ELO album, and certainly a good indication of what was to come. Certainly not much like The Move that people knew. A proto-metal, almost Sabbath-like opener that morphs into softer proggy jazz instrumentals. Followed by heavy swampy blues. Tunes and melodies that are reminiscent of the Beatles and very recognisable as ELO?

I like this album.. perhaps more than the actual first ELO release. It’s not a stone-cold classic, but it’s very listenable. The cusp of what Roy Wood wanted to do with Wizard and Geoff Lynne wanted to do with ELO.

Greg Schwepe: The Move’s Looking On was a case of “really liked that one, really didn’t care for that one” for me.

And right at the start, the title track was a good example of that. Long sections that sometimes wandered a bit too much for me (but I am a prog fan!), then some nice gritty guitar to pull me back in. Next is Turkish Tram Conductor Blues and that one totally pulled me back in. Heavy riff grinding away all through the song. Oh yeah. What? follows and has me asking the same question. But When Alice Comes Back To The Farm comes next and the raucous piano and vocals have me back in the “Hmm, this is OK” camp.

Open Up Said The World At The Door” is yet another long foray with a few sections where I can hear Jeff Lynne’s influence. Brontosaurus is my favourite song on this album. And if I’m correct, I can hear the same riff that I hear in the Roy Wood-written California Man that Cheap Trick cover on Heaven Tonight. Very familiar.

Overall, kind of a “Yeah, I guess this is OK” feel for this one. But if I check out some more of their catalogue I would bet I would come back to this and like it a little more. 7 out of 10 for me on this one.

Henry Martinez: Here’s an analogy – the Move are to ELO what Free are to Bad Company. The latter iterations were more commercially successful, but the previous ones have their staunchest defenders as being true to the art. Whereas The Move starts melting into ELO with this unique offering, Bad Company mixed a concoction of Free and Mott with a dash of Peter Grant to keep the boys focused. Looking On is more of a curiosity than anything else but worth a listen. 6/10.

Final score: 6.69 (29 votes cast, total score 194)

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