351: BLUE MAN GROUP

I’m sure you know of the Blue Man Group. They’re stage performers with wacky mime stuff and blue paint. Yeah, they’re a pop culture institution. Sure. But did you know the Blue Man Group also put on one of the most electrifying and incredible rock shows on the planet? Their first album, 1999’s ‘Audio’, was …

348: OPETH

I considered writing about Opeth back during the Chameleons series of posts, but came to the conclusion that two posts, covering early and late periods of the band, just would not work in this case. Opeth’s evolution has been steadily taking place over thirty years. Starting out as a more extreme band mixing death metal …

346: DEVIN TOWNSEND

The fact is, I could continue the format of the past two days, spending each day focussing on various projects and chapters of the great man’s influential and biblically prolific career, but there’s less than three weeks left of the year. Today’s post, in a sense, is about the man himself. Strapping Young Lad and …

345: THE DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT

Perhaps one of the biggest parts of Townsend’s post-SYL career, The Devin Townsend Project started out at a 4-album project, neatly compartmentalising the music he had produced since returning from hiatus, clean and clean it. Devy found the ~60 songs he had written fell into four distinct groups - bluesy prog rock sort of stuff …

327: LEPROUS

Leprous, for me, remain one of the best examples of a modern prog metal band, while simultaneously straying further and further from the core of the genre - and that’s pretty exciting in and of itself. Across seven albums, Leprous have expanded increasingly upon their prog metal beginning. Firstly into prog rock territory, but in …

322: DOOL

I stumbled across Dool in 2017 via their (at the time newly released) debut, ‘Here Now, There Then’, and it was like nothing I’d heard before. It was a refreshingly progressive mix of goth rock and doom, with a gloomy, passionate atmosphere. I spent that winter utterly enamoured with that album and that band. It …