It’s only been a few days since we last came with something Progressive, but we like the stuff and so we’ve got one more today, thanks to motig, who sent us the suggestion. And a real fuckin’ gem too, but we’ll get to that later. First about the band: I’m talking about a group called Long Distance Calling here, and they make some super sweet Metal – though their name could’ve easily meant a white-men hoodie-wearing hip hop posse with thick black glasses and rapping about bad-ass themes such as social class-bridging love and fuckin’ text messaging.

Thankfully they’re not that, but a five-headed German Instrumental band operating on the Progressive side of the spectrum. But, and we quote, “rather than baffling the masses with a wall of odd time signatures and syncopated rhythm – the proclaimed formula so many bands use and abuse when claiming to be progressive – Long Distance Calling’s new outing serves up seven tracks written from a traditional song-oriented perspective in spite of the extended arrangements.” That’s right, they’ve got something new coming up too, and we’ve got its first serving lined up for you today.

[Today we've got another contribution by our German fellow purpetrator CroOZza. He likes to delve into the depths of Melodic Death Metal and anything that comes close to it, to give us more (usually) unknown bands with high quality material. In the One Man Show series he focuses on bands that aren't bands at all, but lone rangers, single individuals, that put up the racket of a whole horde of long-haired Metal musicians.]

As already said in Pt. 2 of this series, I wanted to include one particular artist in that post, but unfortunately the guy’s album release was postponed. In the meantime, being since February 21^st, the record was finally released. So, now I can clear up all the mystery: I was referring to Paul Wardingham’s debut release Assimilate Regenerate, and if you ask me, it already deserves the award for Instrumental Metal Album of the Year!

Mr. Wardingham’s not the only artist we feature in today’s post though, as we’ve also got another Australian solo guitarist in stock for you.

In October of last year, my Metal buddy CroOZza first reported on an American bed-room instrumental Metal artist called Dan Dankmeyer. Six days after that we reviewed his then latest album X, his tenth overall. We mentioned Dankmeyer’s excessive release rate, as X was his fourth album in 2010. “If he hurries he might even make five” we said. Well, he juuust missed it. His eleventh record Arcologies came out on January 1^st, which lines him up perfectly for perhaps making five released this year.

Today, however, we’re only interested in Arcologies. Our main criticism on X in our review, was that it lacked some in terms of diversity and delivering climaxes. It featured awesome, deep riffs on seven- and eight string guitars, however, which kept us interested in this guy’s progress. Let us take a closer look at how Arcologies is doing!

So far, we’ve had one, two, three posts featuring Metallic Progress: music from bands with a clear Progressive angle of attack to their (Death) Metal. The first eight bands covered in those three posts were suggested by Zodiac. However, he isn’t the only one droppin’ in suggestions for Prog Metal bands, as today we’ll introduce you to a couple suggested by Kyle.

We’ve got in store for you today some highly freaky instrumental Death Metal from Spain, that’ll require your full concentration. After that, we’ll move straight to some very mellow Soft Jazz-like Prog Rock stuff, and after that a Proggie Folk Metal group with a very easy intro but loads of loud bits throughout the nearly ten minutes of the song, both from the US. Seriously, we’ve got three times high quality lined up, but all three of them require a keen ear, so be sure you give ‘em that!

It has been quite a while since I posted the first issue of this series. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the opportunity to do so after all. The reason for the long pause is an album that I’ve been waiting for and one that I wanted to include. It was supposed to be released in early November, but problems postponed the release and it wasn’t until December that it became clear that it wouldn’t make it anymore in 2010. So, we’ll do without it for now. I won’t tell you more, not even who’s album it is, but you can be sure that you’ll hear from it later!

So, on to the actual post for today. In this second part we’ve got another three solo-artists, all making purely instrumental music. Stylewise they all fall somewhere in the range of Progressive and Math Metal.

Quick heroic sweeps on an eight-string guitar, supported by ferocious drumming and heavy staccato, syncopated eight-string rhythm guitars. Superb string tapping opening up a whole new world of emotions. A song that lasts nearly seven minutes and can make time bend and loop and twist and turn. Sounds interesting? Well it should. ‘Cause it is! I’m talking about Animals As Leaders – or AAL in short – the three-headed American instrumental Metal group fronted by Tosin Abasi.