Welcome to Prog's Tracks Of The Week. Eight brand new and diverse slices of progressive music for you to enjoy.
A much tighter race this week, that ended with Tarja's festive frolic through Frosty The Snowman taking top honours, pushed all the way by young German prog metallers Unprocessed, and with Exploring Birsdsong's cover of Deftones Diamond Eyes in third.
The premise for Tracks Of The Week is simple - we've collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?
The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier could it?
We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week we'll update you with this week's winner, and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.
If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo and biog to us here.
So get watching. And get voting at the bottom of the page. We share the winning video every Friday afternoon on the Prog socials.
THE ANCHORESS - ENJOY THE SILENCE
Taken from her acclaimed Versions album of cover songs, The Anchoress has hit upon the novel idea of creating a similar video for her cover of Depeche Mode's Enjoy The Silence that mirrors the 1990 original in which director Anton Corbijn referenced the themes and storyline of the philosophical children's book The Little Prince. And then release it in a side by side style!
"The concept behind the album was for me to flex my production and arrangement skills and revisit classic songs to challenge the listener to think about them in a new way so when JJ suggested to me that we attempted a recreation of the original video for Depeche Mode's Enjoy The Silence it seemed like the perfect fit for the intentions of the project," explains Catherine Anne Davies. "The original video had a much more impressive travel budget than we had but with the ingenuity of director JJ Eringa we were able to pretty much approximate every shot from Anton Corbijn's original video. Half was shot on a DIY green screen in my manager's living room while the other half was shot guerilla style around the local countryside. I might have gotten a few strange looks as I pranced around in a full velvet robe and crown all day!"
STEELEYE SPAN - THE GREEN MAN 2023
Proggy folk rockers Steeleye Span have just announced their usual run of live dates for November and December and have also announced the release of The Green Man Collection, an album. that collects six tracks from recent abums Dodgy Bastards and Est. 1969 with six new tracks, Jack Hall, New York Girls, Hard Times Of Old England (featuring Status Quo's Francis Rossi), Ship Building (the Elvis Costello song made popular by Robert Wyatt), Hey Nonny Violence and Green Man.
The band. have released this new lyric video for the latter, a song penned by Bob Johnson, guitarist and vocalist with the band from 1972-77, from 1980-2000 and again in 2002, and responsible for many of their classic ballads from the era. Previously lost for 40 years, the song addressed the issue of climate change long before it became such a widespread topic. The band have included both the original version and this, a newly recorded version of the song.
MARIUSZ DUDA - I LOVE TO CHAT WITH YOU
Riverside and Lunatic Soul man Maruisz Duda explores the many different aspects of AI on his new solo album AFR AI D. I Love To Chat With You turns the gaze to the possibility of having a relationship with artificial intelligence and what that might look like. Using ChatGPT as it’s protagonist the track was inspired by the cult classic sci-fi romance story of Theodore Twombly from the film Her.
"The title I Love to Chat with You is obviously a reference to ChatGPT which, in 2023, put artificial intelligence in mainstream," explains Duda. "Musically, I wanted “AFR AI D” to have its own… electronic love song. The main inspiration for it was Spike Jonze’s 2014 film called Her. Perhaps you can call love by different names but it’s a little frightening when it is called AI."
GREEN LUNG - HUNTERS IN THE SKY
London retro occult rockers Green Lung have just released their third album, This Heathen Land, their most diverse collection of songs yet, to rightful acclaim. Packed full heavy rock and 70s style Hammond organ, it seems certain to catapult the band further up the ladder of success. "The album draws upon vintage occult rock and psychedelia, but the sound os as fresh as a daisy in an abandoned graveyard," said the Prog review.
"Hunters In The Sky was inspired by the Right To Roam movement, who protested the banning of wild camping on Dartmoor last summer," the band say. "It's a song about standing up to the English aristocracy's attempts to control our common land, and a celebration of the beautiful Dartmoor landscape, from Wistman's Wood to Crockern Tor. We'd always wanted to write a song about the Wild Hunt, one of the most dramatic European folkloric motifs, and hopefully we've done it justice. We hope you enjoy it - and huge thanks to Billy Price for directing this and all the other videos for this album, and to Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk for dancing in the video and supplying some incredible folk costumes, especially a truly majestic replica of the Dorset Ooser, who you might see on stage with us soon.."
THE CHRONICLES OF FATHER ROBIN - OCEAN TRAVELLER
Norwegian prog rockers The Chronicles Of Father Robin feature members of Wobbler, Tusmorke and Jordso and create a sound that blends prog, folk rock, vintage rock and psych. The ambitious band will be releasing their triple debut album, The Songs & Tales of Airoea, a full blown conceptual prog rock trilogy 30 years in the making.
The second instalment of the album, The Songs & Tales of Airoea - Book II "Ocean Traveller - Metamorphosis" will be released through Karisma records on December 8, from which comes The Chronicles Of Father Robin's brand new single Ocean Traveller.
