About Nathan Brooks

Album Review: Anderson/Stolt – Invention of Knowledge by Nathan Brooks

I don’t get on well with modern progressive rock. Contemporary prog bands appear to have little interest in actually progressing

Less is more; a saying found in fortune cookies from Chinese takeaways across the country. Evidently, Yes don’t eat much Chinese food. After scoring two home runs in 1971 and 1972 with Fragile and Close to the Edge, Yes felt it was time to go bigger. Literally bigger. In 1973, Yes released their sixth album Tales From Topographic Oceans, boasting a staggering 81 minute running time. Nearly double that of Pink Floyd’s legendary album The Dark Side of the Moon, and monstrous compared to the mere 37 minutes of Close to the Edge. But is bigger better? And if less is more, is more less?
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The Beatles’ sort of seventh album Revolver is one of the most important in the history of popular music. And on 5th August 2016, it turns fifty. After deviating from their usual sound in 1965 album Rubber Soul, Revolver marks a seismic shift in their style. Ditching live performances, the fab four set to utilise the studio to its full potential. Complete with a lot of drugs.
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English rock band Muse’s 2009 album The Resistance blew everyone’s heads off. It’s a masterclass in stadium shaking bombast. Every track makes me want to go to the houses of parliament and punch the nearest politician in the nose. How on earth they were going to top it was beyond anybody. So their sixth studio album,The 2nd Law (released in 2012), had a lot to live up to.
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Whenever anybody complains about pop music being all a load of rubbish, two bands pop (ha, see what I did there?) into my head to contradict that: Animal Collective and Miike Snow. Admittedly the former is probably only classified as pop (or experimental pop, rather) because they’re too weird to properly define, but the latter, Miike Snow, are without a doubt a pop band.
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Jay “Gumby” Watson is a multi-instrumentalist, touring member of the Australian neo-psychedelic band Tame Impala and a member of another Australian neo-psychedelic band, Pond. On his own, he goes by the fittingly bizarre moniker GUM. Glamorous Damage, released in November 2015, is his second solo album. What does it sound like? Imagine Daft Punk. On drugs.
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Tame Impala sound like a band. The music they produce has many different layers of sound to it and it is incredibly complex. Technically they are a band live, but all the recordings you hear on the actual albums are done entirely by one guy. Kevin Parker, a multi-instrumentalist from Perth, Australia, writes, performs, produces and mixes all of the music, but it doesn’t sound like it. You’d expect to hear just a lone performer strumming away timidly on his acoustic guitar, but you don’t. You hear electric guitars and synthesisers playing beautiful melodies, face melting basslines and captivatingly intricate drum beats across all of his music.
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