By Jim Rowland
London progressive rockers The Osiris Club have kept themselves busy recently, inking a new deal with Bad Elephant Music and preparing to release not one but two new albums this year. Ahead of the label releasing the band’s third studio album ‘The Green Chapel’ later this year, BEM have taken the opportunity to release ‘Blazing Worlds – Live At Roadburn’ first.
The album goes back to the time of the band’s debut album ‘Blazing Worlds’ in 2014. To promote it they played a series of incendiary live performances, with the band donning robes and plague masks to enhance the mood, culminating with an appearance at the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands in 2015. Although mostly thought of as a doom and stoner festival, Roadburn also programmes a good number of prog and cinematic-flavoured acts, among other genre-adjacent picks, and The Osiris Club fitted right in.
The sound quality of the recording is top notch, and the set features seven of the eight tracks from the ‘Blazing World’ studio album, taking a journey through dark and quite sinister progressive rock territory, with tight and intricate time signature changes, punchy, angular and aggressive guitar work and tasteful, atmospheric and spooky keyboard sounds. None of the tracks are the kind of overlong epics sometimes associated with prog, but it all adds up to journey that would very much appeal to the discerning fan of the darker side of progressive rock.
To a certain extent, the band would move away from the progressive rock style with their next album ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’ in 2018, and the robes and masks would disappear as well. Here, the band started to fuse the best parts of 1970s progressive, 1980s post-punk and 1990s extreme rock to create the sound they are associated with now. We won’t have too long to wait to see how that sound has developed on the new studio album ‘The Green Chapel’.
‘Blazing Worlds – Live At Roadburn’ is released exclusively on Bandcamp as a strictly limited edition compact disc, and digital download. The download edition (which CD buyers also receive) includes two cover versions – Random Hold’s ‘Meat’, and ‘Leaf Scrapings’ by Cardiac Arrest, who later became the legendary Cardiacs. Dubbed ‘Twicefold Of A Kind’, both are shortish instrumentals and do fit in quite neatly to the overall sound of the album.
- ‘Blazing Worlds – Live At Roadburn’ is released tomorrow (Friday 3 July). You can get your copy HERE.
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