Mostly Autumn are very proud and excited to announce the pre-sale of the special edition of their new album…

The Ghost Moon Orchestra.

The special edition will be limited to 2000 and will consist of, as well as The Ghost Moon Orchestra; a second album entitled A Weather For Poets, which will be an acoustic album with some new and some re-worked Mostly Autumn songs.

“Some songs, which don’t fit the ‘vibe’ of the main album, but work beautifully as acoustic songs make this special edition album the ideal place to showcase them. Also some Mostly Autumn songs work really well acoustically and again, this is the ideal way to put a different slant on them. I hope you will enjoy it.” Bryan Josh

This special edition is on sale at £20.00 (plus P & P) only from Mostly Autumn records and we hope to be shipping it late May/early June.

Their previous album “Go Well Diamond Heart” saw the band bounce back strongly for the first record with Olivia Sparnenn taking over on lead vocals. With a stable lineup that’s gelled strongly over the course of three tours in the past eighteen months, I have very high expectations for this album.

After the disbanding of Iain Jennings’ band Breathing Space, it will be very interesting to see how much he contributes to Mostly Autumn’s songwriting on the new one. Is “Ice”, the song he co-wrote on the special edition of the last album a taste of things to come? I hope so.

As an independent band not dependent on a record label, Mostly Autumn fund the recording by pre-orders, so if you want to support them, go and order the album now rather than wait until June to buy it!

The four-track EP marks both the end and the beginning of an era, in that it’s the final release by the band as independent artists on Comet Records, and the first new studio recording of the 5-piece lineup of the band.

The official release date is 12th March 2012, but the band will dispatch pre-orders received before the end of February a week early.

Oh, and the first 500 orders received will be signed. So go and order it now!

I won’t name the band, but I have to say I wasn’t impressed by what I heard.

The singer sounds as though he wants to be Fish, but without the charisma. The guitarist tries to be Steve Rothery, only without a fraction of the talent. It’s all there; the widdly solo on a 1980s synth, the portentous spoken-word section, even some sub-Pink Floyd FX. The lack of originality might not have mattered so much had the songwriting been great, but sadly, it’s very very ordinary. Bands like this are to prog-rock what The Kooks are to indie.

If bands like The Kooks are labelled as “landfill indie”, then this is surely landfill prog. The stuff that falls well, well below the Sturgeon threshold.

This isn’t a “prog” versus “progressive” thing by the way; that’s something that always degenerates into a “my music is better than your music” pissing contest. The real problem with bands like this is not that they’re “prog” rather than “progressive”, it’s simply that they’re not very good. Neo-prog, when done well, can be great. Bands like IQ or Magenta demonstrate this. They might still wear their influences on their sleeves sometimes, but they can write strong original material with enough of their own identity to be far more than a derivative pastiche.

Which is something the landfill indie bands conspicuously fail to do.

The big studios and labels love to quote figures stating how much money they’re losing because of copyright violation, and how many jobs are allegedly at stake. Far too often lawmakers and major media outlets will accept these figures at face value and not subject them to any kind of scrutiny. Just how much of their declining profits is to do with “piracy”, and how much is down to them losing market share because the internet has eroded their role as gatekeepers, and allows smaller self-publishing competing content creators to flourish?

As The Electronic Freedom Foundation says, if laws like this are allowed to pass, they will have a severe impact on any sites that rely or allow user-generated content, from Facebook or YouTube down to blogs that allow comments such as this one. Site owners will be forced to police all content, including any external links, with the threat of being shut down if they don’t enforce it zealously enough. The overhead of doing this could well undermine the viability of many high-traffic sites, which perhaps explains why some venture capitalists won’t be funding Internet start-ups if this passes. Remember Fotopic.net? That could be the fate of many of your favourite sites.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of copyright and piracy, this is a badly-drafted law which will do more harm than good.

Despite what professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski would have you believe, this isn’t just a few “geeks” and “freetards” whining about some impractical libertarian utopia. It’s nothing lass than handing over the keys of the entire Internet over to the big studios, major record labels, and big publishers, and giving them more or less unfettered power to shut down anything they don’t like, regardless of whether it infringes copyright or not. The lack of any checks and balances gives enormous scope for abuse, for example, using bogus copyright claims to threaten sites whose real crime is publishing bad reviews.

Before you accuse me of being a “freetard”, no, I don’t believe anyone has a right to consume music and film without any financial compensation – most working musicians I know are aware of how much I spend on your music a year. But this bill goes way, way beyond anything acceptable as a means of enforcing copyright, and could do untold damage to all kinds of legitimate businesses.

And any Americans reading this – Please fix your rotten, corrupt political system, which allows well-funded lobbyists to trample over the rights and freedoms of ordinary people, not just in America, but in the whole of the world.

It’s prompted me to dig out a lot of old Ozzy-era Black Sabbath albums, many of which I’ve not played for years, and it’s reminded me just how consistently good they were. Also it’s remarkable just how well-mixed and mastered the albums are, especially when you consider how little time they took recording their earliest ones.

I’d say all the first six albums deserve to be in any self-respecting rock and metal fan’s record collection. It starts with their debut, when they were in transition from the blues band Earth, and blues-rock workouts sit alongside the doomladen distorted tritones with which they made their name, and the quality is consistent right the way through to the metal juggernaut of “Sabotage“, with the face-melting centrepiece “Symptom of the Universe”

Black Sabbath, despite some of their Hammer Horror imagery, were never really the Satanic band portrayed in some sections of the media. When you know that main lyricist Geezer Butler was an Irish Catholic, a song like “After Forever“, with it’s infamous line “Do you want to see The Pope on the end of rope” is clearly all about sectarian bigotry.

As an aside, playing seventh album “Technical Ecstacy” and Led Zeppelin’s “Presence” back-to-back makes me think the often maligned and in my opinion somewhat underrated Sabbath album is the one of the pair that’s aged the best. Take away the obvious classics “Achilles Last Stand” and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” from Presence, and you’re left with rather a lot of filler.

The best album of the lot has to be “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath“. The monumental title track has to be one of the best songs about being totally pissed-off with life, the universe and everything ever written; “Bog blast all of you” is a great line. But the whole of the rest of the album is pretty much flawless, and displays a far greater musical sophistication than anything they’d done before, whether it’s the keyboard-led “Who Are You”, or the ambitious multi-layered closing “Spiral Architect”.

My own RPG is finally starting to come together after far too many false starts, and a lot of the advice makes a lot of sense. Not hiring an editor is one; enough people have been complementary about the quality of my writing to give me the feeling I can get away with competent proof-reading rather than go to the expense of getting it professionally edited. Layout, well, I’m not sure about that one.

At the moment, the biggest question is artwork. I don’t have the budget for any significant amounts of specially commissioned art, not convinced the game is ‘generic’ enough to be able to use cheaper stock art, and certainly not confident of my own artistic skills in that area. Suggestions gratefully received.

Panic Room’s album, which they will be recording in January and February is slated for an early Summer release, while The Reasoning’s is due in November.

Both bands have put in a lot of hard word slogging round what is euphemistically known as “The toilet circuit”, steadily building a fanbase and honing their acts to the point where they’re capable of giving far higher profile bands a run for their money. They’ve probably got as far as they were going to get as independent artists, and signing with a label is what needed to happen if they were to get to the next level.

I’ve followed both bands from their very first gigs (The Uplands Tavern in Swansea, and The Town Hall in Lydney), and it’s exciting to see where they’re going to go next. While I don’t expect them to be headlining enormodomes just yet, being signed to a label will open a lot of doors, whether it be prestigious support slots or support for overseas tours.

While I’ve heard too many horror stories in the past of labels interfering in the creative process to the detriment of an artists long-term future, I’m confident this isn’t going to happen here. It’s not like either band is a bunch of fresh-faced innocents just out of The Brit School about to be chewed-up and spat out by the major label sausage machine. Given their artist roster (including prog veterans Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator), Esoteric Recordings don’t sound like that sort of label.

Does rather make a mockery of the ridiculous claim that Panic Room don’t want to “dirty their hands with commerce”, doesn’t it?

Kids stopped playing with trains, and the businesses that remained dedicated to hobbyists who got more disposable income as they grew up, until the price of the hobby was out of reach of anyone except those older hobbyists. Eventually, it became a high-end hobby with very expensive products, sold to an ever-decreasing number of hobbyists. As those folks die, the hobby shrinks. That is what is happening to the tabletop RPG business.”

Ryan Dancey knows nothing about the model railway hobby.

He reminds me of the record label executives trying to defend a dying business model in the music industry – like Dancey, they’re marketing types who only care about selling “product”, and aren’t interested in actual creativity. Dancey was notorious a decade ago for a master plan to drive all games other than D&D out of business, spouting nonsense about “Network externalities”. If he’d been working for a model railway company he would have made his mission to destroy N gauge and 0 gauge in order to make 00 more popular.

It seems to me that there are a lot of parallels between the RPG industry and the cottage industry end of the music business. It’s all about creative types taking advantage of massively reduced barriers to entry to product things that can be sold direct to the customer, and using the Internet to build communities around those products. This is bad news if your career, like that of Ryan Dancey, is based on marketing things that others create – they don’t need you any more, and the viability of their businesses in a fragmented market often depend on them not having to share their revenue with you.

The irony is that one of the things fuelling the cottage industry is the Open Game Licence, which Ryan Dancey himself was responsible for…

As is usual for this sort of thing, it’s a completely personal and subjective list. But I’d much rather listen to any of these than any X-factor bollocks, and so should you. So there!

10: Yes – Fly From Here
The title track of Yes’ most recent album saw the “Drama” team of Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn return with a much-expanded version of what started life as an unrecorded Buggles song. I suppose calling a five-part prog-rock epic taking up half an album a “song” is cheating, but I’m setting the rules here, and this is certainly the best thing Yes have recorded for years.

9: Journey – Edge of the Moment
One of the standout songs from “Eclipse”, this classy hard rocker is a great example of the other side of Journey’s music from the radio-friendly ballads.

8: Blood Ceremony – Daughter of the Sun
The ten-minute epic that closes track of their second album “Living With the Ancients” is a great example of why I’ve described them as sounding like Black Sabbath fronted by Angela Gordon, with it’s combination of bewitching flute and doom-laden guitar.

7: Mostly Autumn – Questioning Eyes
It’s not a completely new song (It originally appeared on Breathing Space’s 2008 album “Below the Radar”), but the powerful live version on “Still Beautiful” rises to even greater heights. It shows the extent to which Olivia Sparnenn has grown as a vocalist in the past three years.

6: Mastodon – The Sparrow
The multi-layered ballad with it’s rich harmonies is my clear favourite from “The Hunter”. Probably because it’s the most prog thing on the album.

5: Liam Davison – Heading Home
Liam’s long-awaited solo album “A Treasure of Well-Set Jewels” was one of the surprises of 2011, a well-crafted album with a very capable supporting cast. This song is a standout with it’s wonderful interplay between Liam’s soaring lead guitar, Iain Jennings’ swirling Hammond organ and Paul Teasdale’s propulsive bass riff.

4: Panic Room – O Holy Night
A welcome and unexpected end-of-year surprise was this spine-tingling version of the traditional carol released as a free Christmas download from their website.

3: Heather Findlay – Seven
Heather’s solo EP “The Phoenix Suite” took quite a few listens to fully appreciate, and once the record finally clicked, this atmospheric and brooding number became the firm favourite.

2: Opeth – Folklore
The dramatic closing section on this song with the galloping bass riff has to be one of the most exciting pieces of music I’ve heard all year.

1: Steven Wilson – Raider II
Another lengthy prog epic is my “song” of the year. With its swirling Mellotron and spiralling sax and flute it sounds like a cross between 70s King Crimson and Canterbury-scene jazz-rock dragged into the 21st century, and the heaviest sections are the bits without guitars. Amazing piece of music.

A sublime spine-tingling version of the traditional carol, with a wonderful vocal from Anne-Marie Helder. Christmas started for me this year when they performed this live in the first weekend of December. Now they’re recorded it and made it available as a free MP3 download – go to the official Panic Room website for details.