Progressive Rock Focus

I can understand anyone who (a) doesn't think the 80s King Crimson albums are progressive rock or (b) finds them really difficult to listen to. I've only discovered these albums recently. Pure laziness probably. I find myself getting less and less interested in the first question as I continue to write these blogs. If you're the sort of person who only listens to music based on whether someone has labelled it progressive rock, rather than because someone has recommended it to you, you're probably missing out on all sorts of things. Sting's album the Soul Cages for example. https://progressive-rock-focus.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-soul-cages-by-sting.html This album follows on chronologically and stylistically from King Crimson's Discipline album. I reviewed that here: https://progressive-rock-focus.blogspot.com/2024/04/king-crimson-discipline.html I could pretty much cut and paste my comments from that review in here. Adrian Belew is still in David Byrne territory...

Today we're diving into the world of Jadis, who is of course the wicked witch of the Narnia books. Jadis have been around since the 1980s and were part of the neo-prog scene back then. I'm going to start with their 2016 album No Fear of Looking Down  for the very good reason that it come up first on Amazon. So, are they always winter but never Christmas, or are they turkish delight? Their songs generally seem to be in the 5 to 7 minute category. Experience leads me to expect extended rock songs rather than suddenly changing prog epics. The first song, Listen to me , bears this out. We're in Steve Hackett territory, I think - strong vocals, good melodies. Beautiful guitar sounds. I'm not so keen on the use of the Korg synth preset throughout the song but that's not going to bother you if you're not a total synth nerd like I am. Later on the same riff emerges again on guitar, and it works well. This is a strong opener, though it's firmly in neo-prog territory ...