Sunday 8 December 2019

Entertaining, free, honest - The Progressive Underground Vol 2



New review of The Progressive Underground has just appeared in the latest version of iO Pages, the important Dutch progressive magazine.

In iO Pages 158 I had the privilege to review the book The Progressive Underground Vol 1 by Kev Rowland. Between 1991 and 2006 he was a contributor for Feedback magazine and wrote many reviews about progressive rock and related music. Rowland has chosen to bundle his reviews into three books. This is part 2 and deals with the I from Icon to the S from Syzygy. Part 3 will be published later in 2019. Kev can be seen as a colleague of mine and when I read this book, I feel encouraged to do something like that also (when I have the time…). The preface of the book is provided by Mark Colton, the singer of the neo-prog band Credo which is one of Kev’s favorite groups. Neo-prog is richly represented in the book. That is a style that had a lot of releases in the period in which he wrote for Feedback, especially from England. It was the time when artists often sent cassette tapes with handwritten covers and self-burned CDRs in cardboard boxes to the sheets. Yes, magazines, because there were more of those then. I still have some of those private releases myself. Will they still be playable? The beautiful artwork is again from Martin Springett. Again, I have read this book with great pleasure. Kevin writes very entertaining, free and honest. I like the latter very much. He is often quite positive but also knows how to come up with a critical note if he finds it necessary. He not only discusses the music but also deals with the histories of the bands and artists that are discussed. I find that very readable and interesting. The book has also been of extra use to me because I got to know a few names from it, of which I am discovering the music and I read about many names that I honestly had already forgotten or almost forgotten. I think this book is of great value. My compliments.


©2019-Paul Rijkens, Dutch progressive rockmagazine iO Pages


CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GONZO

The Progressive Underground Vol 2
Book - £12.99

The Progressive Underground Vol 1
Book - £12.99



No comments:

Post a Comment

...BECAUSE SOME OF US THINK THAT THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT
What happens when you mix what is - arguably - the world's most interesting record company, with an anarchist manic-depressive rock music historian polymath, and a method of dissemination which means that a daily rock-music magazine can be almost instantaneous?

Most of this blog is related in some way to the music, books and films produced by Gonzo Multimedia, but the editor has a grasshopper mind and so also writes about all sorts of cultural issues which interest him, and which he hopes will interest you as well.