Morpheus Rising – Lord of the North

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Tim Hall

First official video from York’s Morpheus Rising, from their debut album “Let the Sleeper Awake”. Look out for the post-apocalyptic Gherkin!

Posted in Music, Music News | Tagged | 3 Comments

Top Ten Albums of 2011

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Tim Hall

2011 has been an incredible year for new music. In fact, I can’t remember another year when I bought so many new release, which makes the traditional end-of-year list especially hard this time round.

So, after much deliberation and consideration, here’s my completely personal and subjective list of ten best albums released in 2011.

10: Uriah Heep – Into the Wild
70s veterans Uriah Heep have undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. Even if this album doesn’t really break any radically new ground for them, with their trademark combination of searing guitar and Hammond organ they rock far harder than any band in their fifth decade of existence has any right to.

9: Steve Hackett – Beyond the Shrouded Horizon
Much like Uriah Heep, the former Genesis guitarist has hit something of a purple patch recently, with his third album in two years. It’s a rich, ambitious album that combines some heartfelt songwriting with his distinctive symphonic liquid guitar style that has rightfully made him the godfather of prog guitar.

8: Anathema – Falling Deeper
A largely instrumental set by Liverpool’s Doom-metallers-turned-proggers, containing radical orchestral reworkings of material from their earlier metal years. It’s an album for which you should sit back and let the huge atmospheric soundscapes wash over you.

 

7: Touchstone – The City Sleeps
The rising stars of the British female-fronted progressive rock scene deliver a strong third album, with a highly melodic mix of prog, hard rock and metal than builds on the success of their previous album “Wintercoast”.

 

6: Within Temptation – The Unforgiving
In which the Dutch band opt out of the symphonic metal arms race in favour of a far more rock-orientated album that emphasises Sharon den Adel’s incredibly powerful vocals over overblown arrangements. More varied than previous albums, there’s an emphasis on big anthemic choruses that ought to have a lot of crossover potential.

5: Chantel McGregor – Like No Other
Chantel’s debut album proves she’s far more than just a virtuoso guitarist, and far more than just a blues artist. It’s a hugely varied album demonstrating her talents as a singer-songwriter who can do hard rock, folk and pure pop as well as she can do blues-rock guitar wig-outs.

4: Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn of Events
The band which more or less invented prog-metal deliver their best album for years, proving that Mike Portnoy’s departure, far from finishing the band, has given them the kick up the backside they needed, with more emphasis on composition than instrumental showboating.

3: Liam Davison – A Treasure of Well-Set Jewels
The solo album from Mostly Autumn’s second guitarist was an unexpected surprise, with some great songwriting and big atmospheric arrangements reminiscent of the early years of Mostly Autumn. Great guest performances from supporting cast including Iain Jennings, Gavin Griffiths, Anne-Marie Helder and Heather Findlay, but none steal the spotlight from Liam’s own contributions.

2: Steven Wilson – Grace for Drowning
With his second solo release, Steve Wilson has taken a step away from the metal stylings of recent Porcupine Tree albums in favour of swirling Mellotrons and spiralling saxophones. The resulting jazz-tinged album sounds like a cross between 70s King Crimson, Canterbury-scene prog, and the ghost of Porcupine Tree past.

1: Opeth – Heritage
Sweden’s finest drop the death metal growls and go all-out prog with perhaps the most musically ambitious album they’ve done to date. Far more varied than their earlier non-metal “Damnation”, it manages to sound both gloriously retro and absolutely contemporary at the same time.

With such a strong year, there are many more great albums that would have appeared in many years’ top tens, so honourable mentions for Also Eden’s progtastic “Think of the Children” Magenta’s excellent “Chameleon”, Matt Stevens unclassifiable instrumental “Relic”, very solid releases from veterans Yes, Journey and Megadeth, and Mastodon’s “The Hunter”.

I’ve also made the decision to exclude live albums, but I will mention Mostly Autumn’s powerful “Still Beautiful”, Heather Findlay and Chris Johnson’s beautiful “Live at the Café 68″, and The Reasoning’s hard rocking “The Bottle of Gettysburg”.

And there are a few albums I’ve yet to hear, and since it’s too close to Christmas to be buying albums for myself. So the reason for the absence of Nightwish’s “Imaginaerum”, Kate Bush’s “50 Words for Snow” and Morpheus Rising’s “Let The Sleeper Awake” is not that I don’t think they’re good enough, only that I haven’t heard them yet. Perhaps, for the purposes of end-of-year lists, the year should run December to November, so that late-year releases count as next year?

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Incantations in High Elvish?

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Tim Hall

Great blog post about exploratory testing by James Marcus Bach, and why some people Just Don’t Get It.

It’s difficult for them because Factory School people, by the force of their creed, seek to minimize the role of humanness in any technical activity. They are radical mechanizers. They are looking for algorithms instead of heuristics. They want to focus on artifacts, not thoughts or feelings or activities. They need to deny the role and value of tacit knowledge and skill. Their theory of learning was state of the art in the 18th century: memorization and mimicry. Then, when they encounter ET, they look from something to memorize or mimic, and find nothing.

Those of us who study ET, when we try to share it, talk a lot about cognitive science, epistemology, and modern learning theory. We talk about the importance of practice. This sounds to the Factory Schoolers like incomprehensible new agey incantations in High Elvish. They suspect we are being deliberately obscure just to keep our clients confused and intimidated.

As I’ve explained in previous blog posts, I’ve always taken an exploratory approach to testing, even if what I did wasn’t formally identified as such. Trying to force testing into a purely mechanical script-based approach not only sucks all the fun out of testing, risking disillusionment and burnout, but makes the actual testing less effective.

And while we’re on the subject of old-school techniques, are these guys for real? “Unlike a traditional development process, ours establishes all the system’s requirements before a line of code is written“. Seriously, folks, does anyone still try to develop software that way in 2011? Sounds like a perfect way to implement what the client thought they wanted eighteen months ago.

Remember that old cartoon of the swing hanging from the branch of the tree?

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Autumn Concert Photos

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Tim Hall

The last couple of months, as is usual for this time of year, has got completely silly gig-wise. I’ve reviewed as many as I’ve had time for, either here or on Trebuchet Magazine – These are some of my photos.

Heather Findlay and Chris Johnson at Bilston Robin 2

We start at Bilston, back in October. Here’s Heather Findlay and Chris Johnson playing as an acoustic support for Touchstone, at The Robin 2. Great to see Heather back on stage again after far too long an absence.

Kim Seviour of Touchstone at Bilston Robin 2

Touchstone just rock. Kim Elkie Seviour is a great frontwoman and visual focus.

Moo Bass (and Henry Rogers) of Touchstone at Bilston Robin 2

Moo Bass and Henry Rogers make a powerful rhythm section, and put the “rock” into “prog-rock”!

Heather Findlay at The Brook in Southampton, first date of her debut solo tour with a full band.

Heather Findlay followed that successful support tour with a headline tour of her own, with a full band. This is from the opening date of the tour, at The Brook.

The Heather Findlay Band unplugged.

The unplugged segment was a highlight of the set.

Bryan Josh of Mostly Autumn at The Grand Opera House, 19th November 2011

Two days later, Heather’s old band Mostly Autumn played an absolute blinder at The Grand Opera House in York.

of Mostly Autumn at The Grand Opera House, 19th November 2011

Olivia Sparnenn is far more confident fronting the band after eighteen months in the role. The huge smile said it all.

Anne-Marie HelderAnne-Marie Helder of Mostly Autumn at The Grand Opera House, 19th November 2011

Anne-Marie Helder plays a big part in making Mostly Autumn a great live act in her role as multi-instrumentalist and backing singer. And playing completely different instruments (flute and keys) to what she plays in Panic Room.

Pete Harwood and Damien Sweeting of Morpheus Rising at The Robin 2 in Bilston, 4-Dec-2011

In December, it was back to The Robin, with Morpheus Rising supporting Panic Room. This picture ought to sum up what they sound like.

Anne-Marie Helder and Paul Davies of Panic Room at Bilston Robin 2, 4th Dec 2011

Anne-Marie Helder and Paul Davies of Panic Room blowing the roof off The Robin at the start of the set. The pyro (yes, they used pyro) turned out to be unnecessary – There was more than enough fire in the music itself.

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Magenta – Bilston Robin 2, 20th November 2011

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Tim Hall

Welsh progressive rock band Magenta have established a strong reputation over past decade, with five studio albums to their name. They don’t play live often, but they’re well worth catching on the rare occasions when they do. The Sunday night show at Bilston Robin 2 was only their fourth full-band appearance of the year, following on from a successful appearance at the Summers End festival back in October.

The Robin 2 in Bilston is one of Britain’s premier classic rock, progressive rock and blues venues outside the capital. Tucked away in the heart of the Black Country they always put a lot of work into promoting their gigs, so even for a Sunday night there was a good-sized crowd.

Support came from former Pallas vocalist Alan Reed, fronting a semi-acoustic four-piece band. They managed to sound very proggy at times for a band without electric guitars, although their bassist doubled up on electric cello on a couple of songs. Their set mixed songs from Alan’s recent EP “Dancing with Ghosts” with a couple of Pallas oldies, and he warned us they might have to eat one of the band if they didn’t sell enough CDs. His spirited and impassioned performance made me wonder quite what Pallas were thinking when they sacked him. Especially when compared with their own somewhat lacklustre set without him at High Voltage in August.

Magenta are now officially a trio, consisting of composer and multi-instrumentalist Rob Reed, vocalist Christina Booth, and lead guitarist Chris Fry. For live work, Rob plays keys, and they’ve borrowed Godsticks’ excellent rhythm section to expand to a five-piece.

They were incredibly tight for a band who perform live so infrequently, such that it was hard to believe they’d played together live so few times this year. This was full-blown symphonic prog, with swirling keyboards, complex multi-part song structures and dense arrangements. But it was also all-out rock at the same time, a huge level of energy and intensity throughout their lengthy set.

The set spanned their entire career, going from the dark and intense 20 minute epic title track of “Metamorphosis” to selections from their more streamlined and accessible new album “Chameleon”, to older material such as the lengthy medley from their first album “Revolutions”. Magenta may be one of those bands who wear their influences on their sleeves, but unlike some lesser bands they put enough ideas of their own to become far more than a derivative pastiche. Occasionally they will throw in a few bars of something recognisable from 70s Yes or Genesis, but all of these are, as the band once stated, quite deliberate.

The diminutive Christina Booth showed just why she frequently wins awards for best female vocalist, singing with a lot of power and precision and making full use of her impressive vocal range. Chris Fry reeled off some amazing solos. At times his sound is reminiscent of Yes’ Steve Howe, but much of the time his sound is all his own; avoiding the sometimes clichéd Steve Hackett-meets-Dave Gilmour of too many neo-prog guitarists. And you’d never know that the rhythm section were just hired hands given the rhythmic complexity of the music.

Despite the infrequency of their live appearances, they’re every bit as great a live band as any of their peers in the female-fronted progressive rock scene. Quite when they’ll hit the road again is anyone’s guess, but on the strength of this show, they’re definitely not a band to miss.

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Has Classic Rock presents Prog Jumped the Shark?

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Tim Hall

I am very disappointed by the way this month’s Classic Rock Presents Prog has published an appalling attack on one of the bands I follow in the guise of a review.

Even though the review of the actual gig was very positive, the reviewer devoted more space to unfair, inaccurate and deeply damaging nonsense accusing the band of lacking professionalism regarding promotion than to the actual music. Exactly what is this supposed to achieve?

Reading between the lines, which I know is always dangerous, it seems as if their “crime” appears to be spending their time touring the length and breadth of the country playing before actual paying punters rather than spending it schmoozing with self-important music journalists who never venture beyond the M25.

I’m thinking of other bands who I won’t name who seem to have to spend as much time travelling to meet up with the London-based hacks as they actually do out on the road. That to me epitomises the fundamental rottenness of the “Music press as gatekeeper” model of the old-style music business.

It’s sad to see Classic Rock Presents Prog descending into the “Build ‘em up, knock ‘em down” mentality normally associated with style-over-content rags like the NME. I had, perhaps naively, thought this magazine was above that. They’ve done a lot for this band in the past, now they give every appearance of having turned against them for reasons that appear to have far more to do with music press politics than with music.

My copy is now in the bin.

Posted in Music, Thoughts and Opinions | Tagged | 8 Comments

Heather Findlay Band – Fibbers, York, 18th November 2011

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Tim Hall

Heather Findlay made début as a solo artist with a full band with a couple of festival appearances back in August. After an acoustic support slot for Touchstone in October, she came to Fibbers in her home town of York as the second date of her much-anticipated first tour as a headline act.

The venue was packed. Her former band Mostly Autumn were playing their annual home town showcase at The Grand Opera House the following night, which encouraged many fans to make a weekend of it and take in both shows. And it was nice to see her former Mostly Autumn band-mates Bryan Josh, Olivia Sparnenn, Anne-Marie Helder and Angela Gordon in the audience.

Support came from Shadow of the Sun, the new project featuring Dylan Thompson, formerly of The Reasoning, on lead guitar. They played a tight high-energy hard rock set which showed a lot of promise for the future. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more of these guys in the coming months.

The atmosphere was electric with anticipation by the time Heather and her band hit the stage and launched into the title track of “The Phoenix Suite”. This was Heather in full-on rock mode. The full band shows delivered a very different experience to the acoustic sets with Chris Johnson supporting Touchstone, even though a lot of songs were common to both.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, the lengthy and varied set proved Heather still has all that magic from her time in Mostly Autumn. She’s assembled a very talented band. Alongside multi-instrumentalist Chris Johnson, Dave Kilminster’s guitar playing is a great example of restrained virtuosity, acting as a foil for Heather’s lead vocal without overplaying, and Steve Vantsis and Alex Cromarty make for a powerful rhythm section. The end result felt far more like a band than a solo artist backed by anonymous session musicians. Having the best sound mix I’d heard at any gig at Fibbers since refurbishment didn’t hurt either.

On the songs from The Phoenix Suite the band kept close to the original arrangements, although all the songs benefited greatly from a thicker guitar sound, with “Seven” particularly memorable. The only significant change was Dave Kilminster’s playing the sort of melodic and expressive solo on “Mona Lisa” that I’d loved to have heard on the original record.

The rest of the set consisted of Heather’s older songs, many of them radically reworked. Rather than play all of the obvious standards like “Evergreen”, they took us on a tour of less well-known highlights from her songbook, drawing heavily from Mostly Autumn’s “Heart Full of Sky” and “Glass Shadows”, including many songs seldom, or in some cases never before played live.

Without the walls of keys, there was a lot more space in the arrangements, with Dave Kilminster’s guitar taking flute and clarinet lines in songs like “Caught in a Fold” and “Blue Light”. An acoustic interlude with upright bass, mandolin and ukelele(!) featured a surprisingly funky take on Odin Dragonfly’s “This Game” and a great version of Mostly Autumn’s “Unoriginal Sin”. In contrast, Odin Dragonfly’s “Magpie” turned into a full-on rock number complete with a shredding solo at the end.

The encores began just Heather accompanied by Chris on piano, with a medley of “Broken”, a few bars of “Carpe Diem” leading into “Bitterness Burnt” and a deeply moving “Paper Angels”, which saw the band return for the closing section. They left us with what had become one of Heather’s signature songs, a mesmerising “Shrinking Violet”.

Playing a full-length headline set with only a five song EP’s worth of new material was always going to be a bit of a risk, but the completely fresh takes on the older songs made for a great gig. Significantly, they played a set made up largely from Mostly Autumn songs without sounding much like Mostly Autumn at all. It’s a show unlikely to be repeated once Heather has written and recorded more new songs, so catch it while you can at the last two dates on the tour, at The Borderline on the 26th, and The Robin in Bilston the following night.

Posted in Live Reviews, Music | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

A Question for Readers

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

This blog got it’s name because it covers a diverse range of different subjects – I neither want to force myself to blog about one and only one subject, nor deal with the overhead of maintaining half-a-dozen separate single-subject blogs, each of which gets updated once in a blue moon.

Since I can’t imagine anyone out there is really interested in every subject I write about, what I’ve done is subdivide it by the different subjects you see on the menu above, using WordPress’ category feature, and each category functions like a separate sub-blog. Several of them, like Music or Testing have their own unique header images to make it clearer which part of the site you’re in.

I’ve considered getting rid of the all-subject fire-hose view on the front page altogether, replacing it with a static introduction page, and encouraging readers to bookmark individual category pages instead.

So, before I make any more changes, I have a few questions for those of you who read this blog.

Which of the subjects on here are you interested in reading about? Do any of the other subjects make you less likely to read the blog on a regular basis?

How do you read the blog? Do you just keep checking back on a regular basis, use RSS feeds, or follow the links I post on social networks? Or are you one of the many who just stumbles on random pages as a result of Google searches?

Answers in the comments sections.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 10 Comments

Beware the Unknown Unknowns

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

Another testing story of mine.

The two related projects were interfaces with external systems handling rent deductions and water billing respectively, both of them for a large overseas customer.

A major problem was that neither developers nor testers had any access to the third-party systems other than specifications for the file formats to be used in the interfaces. This made it impossible to perform complete end-to-end testing within the internal test environment. My biggest challenge as the tester on the project was to try to simulate the external system by creating input files based on those file specifications. The physical sending and receiving of files was beyond the scope of my own testing.

One warning flag was the way one of the sample input files didn’t quite match the file specification. This really ought to have been taken as an omen of how the project would unfold.

It was all flat text files with fixed-length fields, so I put together a suite of SQL scripts which I ran in TOAD (A third-party tool to access Oracle databases) to generate the input files containing the data our system would expect in response to the output files it had produced. These scripts covered various “Happy Path” scenarios, and I’d hack the files with a text editor to test various error conditions. This meant I could simulate end-to-end business scenarios from the perspective of our own system.

I laced my test reports with caveats making it clear that we hadn’t been able to test the full processes with an actual instance of the third-party system. So as soon as the system went into acceptance testing with the client, the response was a flood of issues and defects, almost all of them relating to flawed assumptions and understandings during business analysis. The fixing and retesting went on for more than a year, far longer than the initial development phase of the project.

I can’t honestly describe this as a happy and successful project, but it’s the nature of experience that you frequently learn more from something that’s gone badly from something that went well. While I feel I did as professional a job of testing as was possible under the circumstances, I still wonder how things could have been done better. I did ask my line manager whether the operators of the third-party systems had test instances of their systems available for developers of third-party interfaces, and never got any answers.

This is a good example of risk of using the Waterfall method of development for a project as full of assumptions and unknown unknowns as this one.

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Opeth – Brixton Academy, 13th Nov 2011

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sweden’s Opeth have come a long way in the past twenty years. Starting out playing death metal with growling vocals on the heaviest songs, their ambitious music mixed light and shade from the beginning. Recent albums “Ghost Reveries” and “Watershed” showed an increasingly strong 70s British progressive rock influence with Mellotron and classic 70s keyboard sounds. This year’s impressive “Heritage” took things far further in that direction with an album that was far more prog-rock than death metal. So there was a lot of anticipation when they came to London’s Brixton Academy. At a far bigger venue than they were playing a few years ago, the huge snaking queue outside the building was testament to their growing fanbase.

Support act, fellow Swedes Pain of Salvation impressed a lot, with a tight and energetic set mixing metal and hard rock with echoes of music as diverse as the quirky 70s proggers Gentle Giant to moments from Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks. They’ve been going quite a few years with several albums to their name, and it showed.

From the opening serpentine guitar riff of “The Devil’s Orchard” onwards, Opeth’s set drew very heavily from “Heritage”, eschewing the death metal side of their music entirely in favour of their progressive rock leanings and mellower material. There wasn’t a single cookie monster grunt to be heard all evening. They still reached back to earlier in their career with the atmospheric “Face of Melinda” from the 1999 album “Still Life”. A early highlight was an excellent “Porcelain Heart”, which even the lengthy and unnecessary drum solo towards the beginning of the song failed to ruin.

A three-song semi-acoustic interlude went back to some of their very early work, including “Credence” from “My Arms Your Hearse” (Is there a more Goth album title than that?), alongside the obscure “Throat of Winter” from a recent video game soundtrack.

I love Mikael Åkerfeldt’s completely deadpan manner between songs, with self-deprecating quips engaging with the audience while avoiding most of the typical rock frontman clichés. Although he did get the audience chanting Dio’s name to introduce the deliberate Rainbow tribute “Slither” featuring guitarist Fredrik Åkesson’s Blackmoresque solo.

A powerful “A Fair Judgement” and a thunderous rendition of “Hex Omega” from “Watershed” ended the main set. After the predictable encore ritual which Åkerfeldt proceeded to ridicule when they came back, they launched into what he announced as ‘some Swedish folk music’, in other words, the epic “Folklore”, undoubted highlight of “Heritage”, the incredible closing section a good candidate for one of the most exciting pieces of music I’ve heard all year.

The one big downside was the amount of chatter; I really don’t understand why people pay good money for a gig, only to talk all the way through the headline act. The somewhat muted sound didn’t help. Opeth have always gone for clarity rather than volume, but when you’re hearing between-song chants of “Turn it up”, perhaps this was a gig which I felt might have benefited from upping the volume a notch, if only to down out the talkers.

While it lacked the intensity and intimacy of many smaller club gigs, big corporate venues are the price you pay when a band you’ve followed for years have finally hit the big time. Although it seemed a few dyed-in-the-wool death metal fans weren’t so happy with Opeth’s recent direction, and I heard one dismissing the gig using Anglo-Saxon language on the way out. But for me, seeing five thousand people attending an out-and-out progressive rock show and the vast majority enjoying every minute was a joy to behold.

Posted in Live Reviews, Music | Tagged , , | 4 Comments