I made it through the first song and a half before getting bored. Mars Volta’s last album was very strong, I thought, though it also abandoned the craziness that pretty much defined them in the past. That’s about all I can listen to now — maybe the first album and EP, once in a great while. Everything else, I just [...]

Turns out, Transatlantic is a modern-day prog-rock supergroup in the most complete sense of the word: That means bass pedal solos.

Random Touch, perfectly named, is an accidental neo-prog music collective. Even better, they’ve issued a double album called Tributary, a 23-track, two-hour project, that — again, perfectly named — couldn’t be further from the mainstream. Comprised of found sounds and improvisational asides on whatever instrument is at hand, Random Touch has constructed something that recalls, at times, space music, and [...]