I don’t know for sure where I first heard about Transatlantic. It was either on Portnoy’s twitter, or in relation to Neal Morse’s departure from Spock’s Beard. Either way, considering I was familiar from the collaboration of the two from Morse’s solo Christian rock albums, I kinda knew what to expect.

One certain song is the reason I care about Anathema at all: Pulled Under from their album A Natural Disaster. In general the band’s music isn’t something I could listen to for extended periods. It’s what I call “sad music” (for lack of a better term) – it’s great for evenings spent thinking about life, the universe and everything (and I can totally imagine it as the OST of some drama movie).

At first I had no idea what was I supposed to think about Haken’s The Mountain. It was mostly slow, just way too slow even for a progressive rock album. Then I realized where the trick was: just consider it avant-garde.

After the letdown that IQ was, I didn’t have high expectations for Syd Arthur. And then Sound Mirror blew me away with the first notes and it didn’t get any worse later on.

The name of the band itself gave a very pretentious impression. “This is intelligent music!” Well, there is some depth to it, I must give them that, but I still couldn’t grow to like it.

I only found out about Slipknot’s percussionist Clown coming to Tokyo on “an emergency visit to Japan”. I figure he had to come to sort out some details about their November Knotfest in Makuhari (an event I’ll be very sure to attend). There was a “talk show” with him in Roppongi this night, but it was quite the letdown.

I never heard anything from Fish before this album. I looked into what and who Fish is, and listened to a few songs he did as the vocalist of Marillion back in the ’80s (and I wasn’t impressed). That was a bit of a surprise, because A Feast of Consequences is very different.

Bigelf’s new release, while not a concept album, focuses on the central element of sci-fi, with space and time travel showing up at every corner.

Last year I wasn’t really paying attention to anything music, so I must admit I didn’t realize that Helloween released a new album. While Straight From Hell didn’t impress me much at first, it’s by no means bad.