Witchwood flew into my radar last year, just like the owl on this album cover.  This Italian progressive Hard Rock/Classic metal band has two previous albums-their 2015 monster 80 minute Litanies From the Woods, their 2016 Handful of Stars and now their third album, Before The Winter.  Witchwood play a type of music that sounds […]

Progressive metal may be a something of a stagnant genre nowadays, but there’s still great quality to be found. Metaphysics is an Italian group that have been together since 2005, and though their sound is but a sliver away from the prog metal giants that so clearly influence them, they have created a memorable first […]

After a period of laborious research (read: browsing the web while the coffee kettle boiled), I was surprised to learn that very little has been written about the Ben Levin Group. Although their album ‘Pulse of a Nation’ is nearing its second birthday, I could only find a handful of reviews written for their album, […]

It’s not often you get to cover Buddhist-inspired metal, much less Buddhist metal from Portugal. I was very impressed by The Firstborn’s fourth release, The Noble Search, back in 2009. It blended prog and melodic death with thick, roiling sludge, not unlike Mastodon or Gojira, and then blessed it all with a breeze of East […]

Dynahead is a band that has inspired some buzz in progressive metal over the past few years. Not unlike their fellow Brazilians in Mindflow, they play music that takes in influences from all across the prog metal spectrum, most notably Dream Theater, and Opeth. Although it’s safe to say that this more eclectic approach is […]

Save for your factory-produced, target market-oriented teen pop sensations, all bands are ‘underground’ at some point or another. Doing some research into this band from Boston, it seems like quite a few people have high hopes for Protean Collective  breaking out to a wider audience, and after hearing their self-released album ‘Divided‘, I can see […]

Germany’s Dark Suns are a band that are nothing, if not ambitiously eclectic. Although I would feel secure recommending them to a fan of adventurous metal or prog rock, it will be difficult to nail down their sound in just a few words. Regardless, over the past decade, the band has released a slew of […]

Oh Stéphan Forté, if thou art female, I’d be swooning all over you right now (and you’d probably be the best girl shredder out there). Seriously, how did this album escape the radar of countless popular metal websites and blogs last year? The guitarist of French progressive neo-classical band, Adagio, Stéphan Forté has finally and […]

As a longtime Opeth fan (my favorite band for almost 14 years), I can’t say I was that surprised when Mikael Akerfeldt announced that the new album would be a completely prog rock affair. No growls, no thick, distorted guitars, no death metal at all. Yet it’s a natural transition for a band that, from […]

Correlation does not equal causation, but I’m going to say what everyone is thinking anyway: that Mike Portnoy’s departure from Dream Theater has let the band take a big, deep breath of fresh air. Now look, we can’t fault the guy for wanting to experiment over the years. Dream Theater is a progressive metal band, […]

I absolutely hate it when a band releases a top notch debut album and soon after they break up. It’s a total mind fuck I tell you! But at least the bands that break up present us with something worth remembering before they vanish into oblivion. Bring Me Solace–a progressive metalcore band from Portland, Oregon–did […]

From the band’s 2004 The Miseries Never Cease EP to their self-titled, self released 2007 debut album, I’ve long championed The Living Fields as one of the most criminally unsigned bands in metal. Well, the unsigned part was rectified with the band signing with Candlelight Records, and though this album took its sweet sweet time […]

Kauan’s Aava Tuulen Maa received (and will continue to do so) so many spins in my player that it’s borderline ridiculous. The album simply drilled a straight phone line—through my thick bashed skull—into my psyche. With that in mind, and it always is, it was hard to angle myself when I put the group’s latest […]

This is a tricky one. Stillife‘s Requiem leaves a bit to be desired initially, but upon further listening, its appeal starts to break through. The Michigan group known as Stillife has its own unique approach to heavy metal, one that won’t willingly be confined to genres. They sample progressive, traditional, doom, modern and then some […]