STCBM041: A Boy in Darkness

Tonight’s Sounds That Can Be Made playlist:

Big Big Train - A Boy in Darkness (from English Electric Part One)
Marillion - Three Minute Boy (from Radiation)
Fractal Mirror - Universal (from Slow Burn 1)
British Theatre - Blue Horror (from Mastery)
IQ - You Never Will (from Dark Matter)
Fruitcake - On the Edge (from Man Overboard)
Mystery - The Sailor and the Mermaid (from Beneath The Veil Of Winter's Face)
Oktopus - Eyes Open (from Worlds Apart)
Amplifier - The Octopus (from The Octopus)

SWMBO’s The Eighties at 8: 
Electric Light Orchestra - Ticket to the Moon (from Time)
Twelfth Night - Love Song (from Fact & Fiction)

Niall Mathewson - Left it Behind (from Eclectic Electric Volume 1)
Messenger - Dear Departure (from Illusory Blues)
Sylvan - Turn of the Tide (from Force of Gravity)

Hope you enjoyed it…
(repeats on Progzilla.com Friday at 1.30pm)

Next week’s edition of Sounds That Can Be Made on Progzilla.com will feature music by Paradigm Shift, Dreamscape, Lee Abraham, Parzivals Eye, Riverside, Lonely Robot, Asia, Gazpacho, Mr. So & So, Spock’s Beard and The Skys with our Eighties at 8 tracks from OMD and Fischer Z…

STCBM023: Wassail

Tonight’s Sounds That Can Be Made playlist:

Twelfth Night - Blondon Fair (from XII)
Big Big Train - Wassail (from Wassail EP)
All About Eve - Apple Tree Man (from All About Eve)
Spock’s Beard - Bennett Built a Time Machine (from The Oblivion Particle)
Maze of Time - Do Androids? (from Lullaby For Heroes)
Miosis - The Moth (from Carpito)
Hillward - Walls of Apathy (from Flies in Amber Stones)
Mystery - Wall Street King (from Delusion Rain)
Mr. So & So - Paperchase (from Truths, Lies & Half Lies)

Hope you enjoyed it…
(repeats on Progzilla.com Friday at 2pm)

2012 Top Ten: 10. Big Big Train - English Electric (part one)

To kick things off I thought I'd post my top ten albums of 2012 over the last few days of the year - assuming the Mayans aren't correct in which case I think we'll have only got to number 5 before it all goes belly up! :-)

I don't think 2012 has been a vintage year musically, there have been some good releases but generally not as many as in 2011.

Kicking off my 2012 top ten is Big Big Train's English Electric (part one)...

Big Big Train are a band I know nothing much about and have never seen, but lots of prog friends were raving about it and so I decided to give it a spin (mind you they all raved about It Bites, Rush and Storm Corrosion so maybe I should have been a bit more wary!)

The album is a pretty good collection of songs with a definite old school seventies prog feel with echoes of seventies Genesis and a bit of Tull folkiness thrown in. Some songs sounded like they have a Spock's Beard influence to my untutored ear.

Quite a mellow album, whilst I do like my bands to remember they are supposed to rock on occasion, it is something of a retro-chill out pleasure and I am looking forward to part two next year.

Track wise The First Rebreather and Winchester From St Giles' Hill stand out for me, you can hear the former below...