The Trunk 29/4/2018: From the Vaults - Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed

Welcome back to From the Vaults, the semi-regular feature where we dive back into the BEM archives to revisit some of our older releases. This time around, we're going back quite literally as far as we can, to July 2013, almost five years ago now. With new music from Shineback in the works and expected later this year, now's the perfect time to take a look back at the project's first stage, and the first album ever released on Bad Elephant Music. That's right, it's Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed, which I'm going to start referring to as RUFRD for brevity.

Superman shows up every time we show this image, due to an administrative error.

Shineback is the brainchild of musical polymath and BEM regular Simon Godfrey, who's done everything from progressive rock with his old band Tinyfish to singer-songwriterly stuff as himself and eclectic pop with recent project Valdez. RUFRD was his first work as Shineback, a name adopted for his more electronic work, described as "intelligent dance music". It features lyrics by our very own Robert Ramsay and contributions from a plethora of guest musicians, including another fellow BEM alum, Matt Stevens.

RUFRD is a lot more story-driven than its dancey vibes might imply. The dark, psychological tale of Dora and her breathless exploration of her own psyche is told not only through the lyrics and Simon's excellent written execution, but through the dark, slightly unhinged synths and pounding migraine-but-in-a-pleasant-sounding-way beats. I can't think of a better expression of this than the title track. It's a long 'un, but worth the time.



It's tense, it's chaotic but composed (especially with things like the mind-melting layered vocals towards the end), and it's a masterpiece of atmosphere as well as composition and headbangability, which Chrome is telling me isn't a real word but Chrome can sod off.

This is a tight album in a number of ways. It's the right length with the right arrangement of tracks and just the right amount of variety to keep things interesting and the story progressing without sacrificing consistency. The design work, by BEM maestro Brian Mitchell, is striking, with that red and yellow on black colour scheme tying the package together. It's not just a great album, but a great artifact.

Critical responses to RUFRD are sadly a little thinner on the ground than we'd like, but people generally very much enjoyed it. Liveprog's video review expressed gladness that Shineback had made music "a bit more interesting again". A hefty, sometimes bewildering review from Gigging Forever came together in resounding acclaim for the album, and Ivor from Metal Storm called it "[an] impressive work of art that still feels like a proper prog album".

Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed is available now from the BEM webstore, at our usual discounted back-catalogue price of £5 for the CD or just £2 (£2!) for the digital version. If you like this, there's also the excellent Minotaur EP, which is free on digital!

Status Update

The hills, such as they are, are alive with the sound of Reformat! The Singularity is available right now from the webstore, and well worth checking out if you haven't already. It's especially worth a look if you enjoyed the electronic bent of Shineback. (What a segue. I might be a little too proud of that one.)

And the countdown to The Euphoric continues. Only about three weeks left. Preorder now.

Review Roundup

Indie Buddie got their hands on The Euphoric this week, and reckoned it was "cool, well crafted and one wild ride", which sounds about right to us. IB also reckons it's going to sound incredible live, which, again, we heartily agree with.

Meanwhile, Polish prog site MLWZ reviewed both The Singularity and The Euphoric this week. We can't actually read Polish here, but those who can have reliably assured us that both reviews are extremely positive.

The Trunk 22/4/2018: The Return

After a brief hiatus while The Author finished his dissertation, The Trunk is back in action!

It's a little like this, but with 100% less Steve Martin and slightly more synth.

We have a few important orders of business. First things first:

The Singularity

Yep, as of two days ago, Reformat's The Singularity is finally out! That means the full album is available to stream or download from Bandcamp now, and that we can share all kinds of spicy tracks you've not heard yet, like this one:



I can definitely imagine this song as the soundtrack to some fiendishly difficult boss battle in a 1990s video game. That's exactly what I plan to use it for, in fact - a couple of tracks from The Singularity have already found their way into my gaming playlist.

Even if you're not a nerd like me, though, there's a lot to like about this album. There's been substantial critical acclaim for it already (check below for some of that), but we really do recommend it. Give it a spin on the Bandcamp page (it's free), and, if you like what you hear, pick up your copy today!

Stream and buy The Singularity here.

Review Roundup

I mentioned just a couple of weeks ago that reviews wait for no man, and, thus, despite the frankly epic review roundup I conducted then, we still have more reviews. That's just how it goes.

Reformat have unsurprisingly been in the spotlight. The Prog Mind gives The Singularity 8.5/10, noting that "Reformat have impressed right out of the gate". The album also got a bit of coverage on Heavy Blog Is Heavy in their Unmetal Monday feature. "Turn on your implants, hook into the web, and let the mechanical yet somehow human sounds of Reformat take you away." We're definitely using that one for press copy. And a recent issue of DPRP gives Reformat an 8/10 from Patrick McAffee, praising "an impressive debut from a compelling new musical ensemble". That same issue also reviews Murder and Parliament!

Fractal Mirror have been back in the reviews too, first at The Progressive Aspect (the very day the roundup went out, no less - truly the tide is inexorable!) with a strong recommendation from John Wenlock-Smith, who reckons it's "a very fine album... that will repay diligent listeners". Another review for Close to Vapour came in from Music Waves, and, while I'm a little rusty on my French, I remain fluent in the universal language of High Numbers Good. 4/5 ain't half bad, we reckon.

Dead-tree publications haven't been quiet, either. The Wire's Clive Bell gave The Divine Abstract an excellent writeup which is just a little too tall and skinny to fit here, so click through to give it a read. A slightly more blog-shaped review popped up in the latest CRS magazine for Tonochrome's A Map in Fragments, too, and you can take a look at that one right here:

And More To Come...

Without wishing to be too much of a tease, we have a big announcement to make soon, something new and exciting which we think will excite plenty of you. But, to maintain a sense of mystery, that's all we're currently prepared to tell you.

Woo, so mysterious!

Keep an eye on the Facebook page, watch the skies, and consult your whimsical music-themed ouija boards for more information coming very soon indeed.

For now, though, this is The Trunk signing off. Catch you all next week!

The Trunk 8/4/2018: Review Roundup Special and Six Questions, Twelve Answers

Reviews wait for no man.

Oh, no, sorry, I'm thinking of time. Time waits for no man. Easy mistake to make, you can see how I got that confused. Time, reviews, both inevitable, both accessible from your PC or web-enabled device... you get the idea. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm fine!

We have some reviews, is the point. This week's Trunk is mostly just going to be a whole bundle of them.

Let's start with the latest - The Euphoric. It may not be out until next month, but the preorder's live now. The band also recently released their second music video, an uncanny 3D-rendered odyssey set to the fabulous "1991". You may have missed it, but don't worry, you can catch it right here - you don't even need to leave this page!

And, if you've been on the fence about preordering, you're in luck, because we've a veritable bumper crop of reviews for The Euphoric...

• We kick things off with Lee Davidson of Prog Metal Madness, who praises a "beautifully written and paced album" that "takes no prisoners" - a very strong start!
• Progradar's Jez Denton notes that the band are "happy to confound, confuse and surprise in composition and performance".
• A lovely video review from Classic Album Review on Youtube concludes that The Euphoric is "worth hearing again and again, repeatedly" - well, that's our hope, too.
• Real Gone warns that you should "be prepared to work hard to reap the best rewards", but those rewards are "the best Fierce/Dead record to date". Definitely worth the effort.
• And Scraggly Bones doesn't like cake but he does like The Euphoric. Make of that what you will.

But it's not just The Euphoric that's been reviewed of late! Oh no! That's right, we have more reviews!

• Roger Trenwith at The Progressive Aspect gave us his take on Mothertongue's Where the Moonlight Snows just yesterday, promising something that'll "put a spring in your step and the zazz in your pizzazz". (Be advised: BEM is not responsible for your pizzazz. Please zazz responsibly.)
• Another one for Mothertongue from Phil Weller at Manchester Rocks, who reckons the new album has both "greater cohesion" and "greater longevity" than Unsongs before it.
• Progradar gave us two other reviews besides The Euphoric - one for Fractal Mirror's Close to Vapour, also by Jez Denton, who "urge(s) you to search this album out"...
• ... and one for Reformat's The Singularity, by none other than former D-Ream keyboard player Professor Brian C- nah, only joking, it's the inimitable Jez Denton again, calling the album "a sonically challenging journey into the unknown and exciting".

And, last but not least, a couple of print reviews from the latest PROG Magazine, one for Mothertongue and one for Reformat. If you're having trouble reading them, click through for the full-sized versions - but we do recommend grabbing a copy of the magazine too.

That's about it for reviews, but we do have one last order of business to attend to.

Tim Smith, vocalist of the Cardiacs, is currently fundraising for rehabilitative care following his cardiac arrest and stroke in 2008, and, to contribute to the cause, we've a strange gem of a piece for you. Back in 1999, the brothers Godfrey - Simon (of BEM's Tinyfish, Shineback, and Valdez) and Jem (of Frost*) - produced an experimental instrumental album of twelve tracks, six tracks each responding to the same list of six abstract questions. Long thought lost to a catastrophic hard drive failure, it was recently rediscovered in one piece by Simon, and they've put it up for sale for just £5, with all proceeds to be donated directly to Tim Smith's JustGiving.

So, if you've enjoyed Simon and Jem's work, or you'd like to give your support to a musical legend in need, we highly recommend that you pick up Six Questions, Twelve Answers from the webstore. Great music from great musicians for a great cause.

That's all we have for this week! The Trunk will now return to its scheduled radio silence for another two weeks while our author's mind turns to old-timey people with funny names like Simon Fish - but we'll be back very, very soon.