Album Reviews

I came to the Riverside camp quite late, discovering the 2016 album Eye of the Soundscape which was a compilation of ambient and instrumentals. Initially, it was the striking cover artwork that grabbed my attention, but the music within has left me captivated to this day. And so my love …

With their January releases, Frontiers Music are not only spoiling fans of top-notch hard melodic rock and metal, but they are also pretty much throwing down the gauntlet and saying: “follow this”. January brought stunning new albums from W.E.T., Phantom Elite, Jason Bieler, Creye, Labyrinth, and the long-awaited return of …

German metal masters Accept return with their sixteenth studio album “Too Mean to Die”. The label “iconic”, when applied to bands, is probably overused but in this case, it rings true. The group have been part of the metal landscape since their debut in 1979 and have consistently released classic …

Nashville might be referred to as “Music City”, but Austin, Texas goes one better as it’s known as the “Live Music Capital of the World” due to the high volume of venues hosting live music performances in the city. Obviously, the pandemic put the brakes on that claim, but you …

Therion’s last studio album, ‘Beloved Antichrist’, was an almighty affair (sorry, not sorry). A 3-hour long, triple album, rock opera featuring 46 songs, and 27 characters played by 15 different vocalists. An exhausting experience for the listener who tackled it the way that Therion mastermind Christofer Johnsson intended it to …

If ever a band deserved a residency at the Carpathian Mountains Apollo (please note this may or may not be an actual venue), these guys would be the ones. Swedish goth metallers Tribulation return with their follow up to 2019’s Down Below, a creeping composition that could provide an adequate …

Where there’s a will there’s a way might have been a more apt title for the debut album from Kent-based rockers The Petal Falls. Forming in the mid-’90s, the band were prolific songwriters but for one reason or another, the material was never released, and the band split-up. Through will-power …

For once the phrase “an album decades in the making” really does mean that. Made up of musicians who had written, recorded, and performed with artists as diverse as John Fogerty, Air Supply, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Chaka Khan, Quincy Jones, Kenny Rogers, Supertramp, Donna Summer, and Neil Diamond, World …

One of the results of the pandemic and the subsequent cancelling of live gigs has been the rise in the number of bands revisiting previously released material, and re-recording it acoustically. For Glasgow’s The Swamp Born Assassins, the seeds were sown by performing an acoustic set instore in a local …

If you were savvy enough to get down to the Royal Republic European tour/disco/party-night in Winter 2019, then hopefully you were savvy enough to get there early enough for opening act Blackout Problems. In terms of sheer energy, the German alt-rockers gave the headliners a run for their money and …