Bored of angsty and schizoid guitar-driven post-hardcore? Maybe you should try the piano flavour as offered by French three-piece My Own Private Alaska.

If you think the title The Rising Tide (Part 1): Corsa Al Ribasso is pretentious and clunky, wait until you hear the music Djevera put on the album of that name.

Promising young Scots proggers A Torn Mind have the skills to pay the virtuoso bills, but the Barriers EP suffers under its wilfully retro pallet of tones.

I don’t know what precedent there is for it, but Crime In Stereo’s new album I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone gives hardcore a good hard kick in the arse.

Accessible Aussie proggers Karnivool may sound a lot like the antipodean A Perfect Circle on Sound Awake, but that doesn’t make it a bad album by any stretch.

Follow The Never Ending Way of Orwarrior deep into the wind-swept dunes of Middle Eastern power metal with progressive Isreali dramatists Orphaned Land.

The Sections EP is the self-funded opening salvo from Young London tech-metal extremists The Safety Fire; I get a feeling it won’t be the last.

Calgary metallers Divinity bring down The Singularity, a maelstrom of hooky and progressive technical metal that sounds like the end of everything you know.

Pisa is best known for that infamous leaning tower, but if there’s any justice it’ll get extra kudos for housing epic and proggy post-metallers Watzlawick.

Mike Vennart of Mancunian post-prog stalwarts Oceansize takes some time out to answer a few questions about touring, releasing an “ambient” EP, and Una Stubbs.