Tag Archives: Scardust

Steven Wilson, The Future Bites – and the loss of prog in metal!

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At the beginning of 2020, the outlook was dire. The progosphere started to lack any snazzy voice or a powerful ‘dear leader’ to pull the Progressive Metal genre down the road. Leprous just jumped off a cliff to sugary-sweet Lalaland with some confused wailing all their own. And Steven Wilson – well – after a testy go-between prog rock thing a few years back, he was about to defect to the anodyne world synthpop occupies – and occupied for many years.

It was thus great that by the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we saw … [...] Click to raid more!

RMR’s 2020 Top 10 Records

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RockmusicRaider 2020 Top 10 Records

The terrible and unholy year of the Dark Lord 2020 was not as fertile as last year’s harvest would suggest. The crop yielded a fair amount of pretty excellent records. Yet, most of them erred on the good to very good territory1) and did not really qualify for that coveted top 10 spot.

After a slow start, things started to look more lively. At first, we thought that the progressive folks would pretty much deliver naught. Yet, suddenly we have a choice, and a difficult one at that.

Then we stumbled across folk pieces where there should be none, … [...] Click to raid more!

Scardust – Strangers (2020) – Review

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RockmusicRaider - Scardust - Strangers - Album Cover

When Scardust’s Sands of Time hit our shores in 2017, we knew that we had something special on our turntable. This was (and still is) one stellar piece of Progressive and Symphonic Metal that ultimately bubbled to the very top of RMR’s annual ten commandments of that same year. And those are some mighty big shoes to fill for any follow-on record.

So, along came Strangers in this unholy year of 2020. Now, I admit that – at first – we got a little hot under our collar. Because a first spin did not quite deliver that warm … [...] Click to raid more!

Amorphis – Queen of Time (2018) – Review

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Aye! Guilty! The first listen of Queen of Time – Amorphis‘ 2018 concoction – originated from a relatively lo-fi streaming platform. And – unsurprisingly – this first glimpse left yours truly wondering where Amorphis was headed these days. Terrible visions of Amaranthe-esque disasters, misguided Power Metal et al. But the Finns usually have been a stable brand. At least until now. So, confusion reigned for a while at the RockmusicRaider offices.

Just think back to the outstanding ’96 album Elegy or the 2015 piece Under The Red Cloud, perhaps with the exception of Circle that earned fewer … [...] Click to raid more!