British proggers THE GIFT aren’t strangers to long pauses in their discography, yet while it’s easy to chalk up an eight-year gap between the band’s 2006 debut “Awake & Dreaming” and that record’s follow-up “Land Of Shadows” to the latter being a proverbially difficult second album, the slightly shorter wait for the group’s fifth platter, a successor to 2019’s “Antenna” should be attributed to other factors. The new offering is titled “Seven Seasons” and scheduled for release on November 21st.
The world “tireless” doesn’t cover Andy Curran’s work ethic, yet there’s nothing surprising about the Canadian musician’s approach to his art; the same can’t be said, however, about the stylistic scope of his endeavors over the course of the last four decades. At first glance, there’s no common denominator between such different, in stylistic terms, entities as CONEY HATCH and ENVY OF NONE, but with Andy in one of both bands’ driver seats, they do share DNA, and following the curve of Curran’s career, which included a few other projects, is an interesting undertaking.
That was exactly what we embarked upon in the lobby of one of Toronto’s buildings where the veteran visited a radio station to promote the latest offerings from the two ensembles, the reissue of the former’s debut album and the release of the latter’s fresh single, although our chat embraced more than this.
As former guitarist with such outstanding ensembles as SPOOKY TOOTH and MOTT THE HOOPLE, as well as supergroup WIDOWMAKER, Luther Grosvenor seemed to possess a lot of gravitas, even though his solo career has brought forth a mere handful of albums. But if the veteran’s first, “Under Open Skies” from 1971, remains a focal point for many of his fans, Luther’s further opuses, such as "If You Dare" from 2011, are criminally ignored – and not surprisingly, given how sparse Grosvenor’s release schedule is. What’s surprising is the fact that he has just followed last year’s “Another Journey” with a fresh work.
There are quite a few books about YES, almost all of them concentrating on the British ensemble’s history, while the striking imagery associated with the collective gets explored, to a certain extent, only in coffee-table tomes created by its original designer, Roger Dean. Yet eventually the Gottlieb Bros., Douglas and Glenn, who not only worked on some of the band’s visual materials but also served as archivists of that illustrative legacy, for years now, decided to curate a series of printed volumes dedicated to it all.
Trey Gunn and David Forlano are masters of the art of creating thought-provoking atmosphere, the former on guitar, most notably with KING CRIMSON, the latter via electronica and samples, both of the musicians bent on improvisation and, when they’re together, on-the-spot interplay. That’s why the two prefer live experience to toiling and tinkering in a studio, and that’s how their first joint album came into existence.
