Smart, yet intoxicating riffs travel through the speakers as an easy brush of arpeggios lift one into another world where all things are neatly and perfectly packaged into sonic bites of progressive wonder. Charleston, West Virginia is the homeland of Astraeus. If you can’t already tell, they are excellent. Continue reading
Moonlight Prophecy is:
Lawrence Wallace: All instruments and composing
Mika Mage: bass
Being that we are covering the great state of Pennsylvania in our State of the Art series this month and it being International Guitar Month, I ran into a band in my search for talented, lesser known gems that I instantly fell in love with that needed to be covered outside of the normal Monday cycle and they have a brand new release set to drop on April 15th. From Philadelphia comes Moonlight Prophecy to abuse your ear drums with the, much anticipated, release of Eternal Oblivion!
Bands form for a lot of reasons and have limitless paths to success. Growing up surrounded by musicians and naturally forming a band, churches or other like groups that need music, studio players or substitute band members that are taken on tours with bands they have recorded with and kept for one extenuating circumstance or another; the list goes on and on. Sometimes a band’s story is as good as their music. Such is the case with a completely sick band called Psychoprism out of New York/New Jersey.
Today I bring you something special to me. As you all know, I love solo guitar work and have since the inception back in the early days of the Neo–Classical, shred guitar craze. Uli Jon Roth, Yngwie Malmteen, Cacophony (Marty Friedman and Jason Becker), Joe Stump, Andy Timmons, Vinnie Moore, Steve Vai, Satch, Dream Theater (I know, not solo, but Petrucci has to be in this list) and many others. These were my heroes when I started playing guitar and bass when I was in my mid-teens. I could not get enough of them and still listen to all of the same music more than 35 year later. It never gets old and never gets boring. Needless to say, with this pedigree, it is hard to impress me when it comes to this form of music. This is a very, very tough form of guitar skill to play and play well. I don’t say that to be a guitar snob, but just stating the fact that this is a hard row to hoe when these are still the go-to artists for shred.
