Artist Page: Various Artists

An interesting collection of contemporary progressive rock with tracks of varying quality, a bunch of them being very, very good, fortunately, albeit perhaps a tad too melancholic at times.

I received this sample with a copy of Progression magazine. It includes 14 songs from 14 different artists who released albums on the Inside Out Music label in 2003. This is a phenomenal lineup. Each of these songs is magnificent, and I was encouraged to purchase all of the related albums except for the Devin Townsend Band album, but this song sounds promising.

This album is the soundtrack to the Wes Craven movie Scream 2. I purchased it used because it had a decent lineup of alternative and pop artists including Dave Matthews, Collective Soul, Foo Fighters, Tonic, Everclear, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. As with most soundtracks, some of the music is pretty good and some of it I could do without. All in all this is an OK album.

This is a sampler album created by ProgRock Records to promote their excellent stable of unknown modern progressive rock bands. This is easily one of my favorite compilation albums of all times. This "free" CD did cost me tons of money however, after I went out and purchased most of the albums featured on it.

An excellent live compilation album from Progfest '97. Includes performances from The John Wetton Band; Le Orme; Arena; The Flower Kings; Spock's Beard; Big Elf; and, Sinkadus.

I bought this album because it had a remix of Tom Sawyer on it. There are actually some good songs on here, but the re-mix versions have little added value to the original songs.

This movie soundtrack album to the movie Armageddon features songs from Aerosmith, Journey, Jon Bon Jovi and the theme music from ex-Yes man Trevor Rabin. For me, this is one of the better movie soundtracks that have been created in the choice of songs and bands fit my tastes quite well.

24 songs from 24 different prog rock bands for a good cause. You have to check out the roster of artists on this compilation!!!!

A Who's Who of Heavy Metal and Prog Metal got together on this Century Media tribute album to Judas Priest. Like most tribute albums, this is a good listen for curiosity sake, but there is no improvements on the originals.

This collection of Battle Metal (a weird and wonderful blend of Power Metal, Black Metal, Folk Metal, Symphonic Metal, Classic Heavy Metal, Dio era Rainbow, oiled up and battle-ready Manowar, Iron Maiden, Skyclad and many other larger than life things in Metal) illustrates how the genre balances on the border of being wonderfully larger than life and being totally ridiculous. It also documents how something typically associated with progressive rock - namely genre transgression - has paradoxically enough been used to develop a rather rigid but very entertaining genre within Metal. The noteworthy tracks are typically by artists who display virtuosic skills while obviously not taking themselves too seriously.