25/11/2018: 2018 In Review, Part 2

Welcome back to this whistlestop tour of the year that was. Climb back aboard and hold onto your hats - here's another four albums BEM released in 2018.

20th April: The Singularity

Wow, I knew Fallout 76 was a new direction for the series, but...

The Trunk's author is, at heart, a nerd. Say "electronic rock heavily influenced by retro gaming" and I'm already scrabbling for my headphones. But this impressive debut delivers on the hype I felt and possibly even surpasses it, with a collection of hard, driving synths and powerful riffs that I still play from time to time as gaming music - it's difficult to listen to this album without picturing the kick-ass boss battles it could accompany. The Singularity is vibrant and unexpected, a true feast for the imagination as well as the ears.

(The album was also released alongside a working text-based adventure game! Play it here.)

18th May: The Euphoric

I feel sorry for air traffic control.

What's this, another instrumental rock album with "the" in the title and gaming-inspired visuals? Spring was definitely the season for headbanging, but The Euphoric is a very different beast, all about unstoppable waves of guitar and bone-shaking drum lines. TFATD have had a very good year all round and this is their best offering yet, critically acclaimed and boasting a surprising amount of cross-genre appeal despite (or perhaps because of) a distinct shift towards metal. Plug in and prepare to have your face comprehensively melted.

15th June: Suite for Piano and Electronics

Wash your windows, mate?

Matt Baber's had a pretty busy year as far as releases go, between this solo project and the more recent release of Now We Have Power (but let's cross that bridge when we come to it). Suite for Piano Electronics was a welcome change of pace after the double threat of Singularity and Euphoric, offering something calm, measured, and perfectly handcrafted. Baber's style as a soloist is rather different from his band offerings, but the compositions here are assembled with the kind of skill and vision that sometimes only comes from a genuine one-man army like him.

18th June: Exo-Oceans

That is clearly not an ocean. I want my money back.

Okay, so this isn't technically a BEM release, but it's hosted on the webstore so we're counting it anyway. Exo-Oceans is an album of "Musical Sci-Fi" from The Tangent's Andy Tillison Diskdrive, and definitely one of the proggier offerings on our store this year: three tracks, between 15 and 42 minutes, about otherworldly oceans. This is another solo work, pulling in styles and influences from all over the musical sphere under a single watchful eye with a strange, coherent vision. And, from Tillison, the synth work is, of course, second to none.

Status Update

Cyclonic 5 or 6, increasing 7 to severe gale 9, occasionally storm 10 for a time in central areas, then becoming westerly 5 or 6 later. Moderate or rough, becoming very rough or high for a time except in north. Rain or thundery showers. Moderate or poor, occasionally good.

18/11/2018: 2018 In Review, Part 1

God, is it that time already? The end of a long, exhausting year is finally on the horizon, and, as we all look ahead to what fresh horrors 2019 might visit upon us, we must also spare a moment to look back at BEM's progress this year and some of the music we've unleashed on the world. This has been a slightly quieter year than last, but we still have plenty of albums to get through - let's get to it!

2nd February: A Map in Fragments

All these moments, like tears in rain...

As is traditional (kinda), the BEM year started in the early days of February, this time with art-rock outfit Tonochrome and their first new music in almost five years. With an impressive array of guests - both strings and brass! - and Charlie Cawood, by now a BEM veteran, on guitar, the bar is set high, but A Map in Fragments surpasses it with easy, genre-melting aplomb, delivering a characteristically unclassifiable collection of songs with elements of everything from grunge to jazz. The big challenge of writing for BEM has always been in describing music with very few clear points of comparison, and... well, "damn good" feels like a bit of a cop-out. But there it is.

23rd February: Close to Vapour

This is what Amazon delivery drones looked like in 1850.

Dutch duo Fractal Mirror have been releasing music since 2013, but they climbed aboard for their fourth album this year, and it was a delight to host and to listen to. This is one of the best albums I've heard in a long time for relaxation - there's enough subtlety to the arrangements that you can tune in and dissect them to your heart's content, and enough depth to keep the songs alive for multiple listens, but Close to Vapour doesn't demand that kind of close examination, and is equally effective as a chill-out album for a long, slow afternoon such as the one on which you might be reading this.

23rd March: Where the Moonlight Snows

"What's that noise? Why's the ground shaking? Is this a volcano?"

"Um... kind of?"

Mothertongue made a huge impression on us, and on the listening public, with their BEM debut two years ago, and Where the Moonlight Snows is a truly worthy successor. You wouldn't expect a band with three guitarists and complex vocal arrangements to be this good at sharp, carefully crafted moderation, but they pull it off. More so than many, this is an album that feels like a genuine collaborative effort, everything working in concert towards a magnificent, harmonious whole that'll have you humming the hooks for days to come.

6th April: Six Questions, Twelve Answers

This is what passed for a professional recording studio back in '99.

Our fourth major release of the year was actually a charity effort: a collection of unreleased tracks, almost twenty years old, by brothers Jem and Simon Godfrey, compiled and sold in support of Tim Smith, legendary frontman of the Cardiacs. These twelve instrumental pieces, six apiece composed in response to the same set of six very vague questions, are a fascinating insight into the musical development of these two great names, while also being smart, eclectic, and downright listenable in their own right.

Status Update

BEM continues to wind down for the winter and hatch plans for the year to come. Be cautious and watch the skies.

Review Roundup

Kev Rowland's hotly anticipated review of Dial is out now! Like Kev, we can't quite believe that it's been five years since Shineback's debut, but he seems to agree that it's been worth the wait.

And The Great War has picked up another review. Unfortunately for us, it's in Polish, but I've enlisted the help of a Polish friend of mine and, according to him, it says the album's an appropriately difficult listen for appropriately difficult subject matter, and well worth the effort.

11/11/2018: From the Vaults - Flightless

Welcome back to From the Vaults, the semi-regular feature where we dive back into the BEM archives to revisit some of our oulder releases. This week, we're going back the furthest we've ever gone, because today's featured album, while technically released in 2017, is a reissue - not merely a reissue, but one from 1989, before some of this article's readers (and indeed its writer) were even born. So gate your snares, dust off your neon pink knee socks, and then put them away again because this is definitely not that sort of album. This is Flightless.

blublublublublub

I'll have to eschew my usual rundown of the band, because this is a one-man show: Rog Patterson contributes "guitars, basses, vocals, and lunch". Patterson was a veteran of the so-called "heavy wood" scene, appearing as one half of Twice Bitten (whose album Late Cut was also reissued by BEM a couple of years earlier) throughout the 80s. Originally engineered by Dave Hadley and mixed by Chris Walker and Dave Chang, the 2017 release of Flightless is a remaster, guided by the able hand of Daniel Bowles of Seren Sounds.

So what exactly is a Flightless? What, for that matter, is "heavy wood"? Have a listen and find out. (This track wasn't actually on the original release - the remaster includes some demos



So we have our key elements: sharp, focused guitar work with bass backing, and thoughtful, often bitter lyrics. It's no coincidence that we chose to rerelease this album at the time we did: it may be nearly three decades old, but Rog's "characteristic bleating on the subject of human stupidity" feels almost painfully timely. I chose this track for a reason. "It Can't Happen Here" is also the name of a satirical novel from the 30s which sees America brought under the yoke of a totalitarian demagogue. At the time it was a response to those Americans who dismissed fascism as a uniquely European phenomenon, but how many times did we hear variations on this theme repeated after November 2016? Is the shoe perhaps on the other foot now?

Saying that a piece of music "makes you think" is perhaps most common nowadays as a sarcastic jab at those who fancy themselves visionaries, but Flightless does, in fact, make you think. Stylistically, it's the perfect fit, heavy enough to carry weight but spare and restrained enough to give you space to reflect. Patterson wrote in 2017 that "I suspect that the worst is yet to come", and the sense of foreboding still burns strong as the last notes of the album fade. This is quite an intense album, and I don't listen to it very often - it demands time, space, and above all thought, and all three of those are becoming harder to come by. But isn't that, in a way, the point?

Flightless is available now from the BEM webstore.

Status Update

On this, the centennial of the armistice that ended the First World War, it's only fitting that we release The Great War - available now on CD and download. Pick up a copy if you can, and have a read of my writeup from last month if you'd like a slightly closer look.

Review Roundup

Two for The Great War this week: a 9/10 from The Prog Mind, awarded for "all the edge and grittiness that is needed for this subject matter", and another strong writeup from Phil Lively of The Progressive Aspect.