You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Do you remember Bill Forsyth’s wonderful, whimsical 80s movie Local Hero? If so, you’ll surely recall Mark Knopfler’s timeless music. And if you do, then this album will make sense.

The latest offering from this enduring British prog outfit could easily be used as the soundtrack for a similar feelgood, Celtic-flavoured film or TV series, and that’s not to suggest for a moment that this isn’t enjoyable and fulfilling in its own right. Having reconvened after a long hiatus in 2006, the band have strived to bring new influences and ideas to their neo brand of prog. The PledgeMusic campaign for their latest album earned them 129 per cent of the target amount, and its charm will reward those who contributed in spades. Abel Ganz offers a pleasing combination of folk and Celtic ideas, and these work best when allowed to roam free, as on the exhaustive The Drowning and Thank You, which features notable guest appearances from Fotheringay/Fairport guitar hero Jerry Donahue and Runrig’s Malcolm Jones. Here you can hear the distinctive musicianship that helped give the band a cult following when they first broke on the scene in the early 80s (they’re now without original member Hew Montgomery). The five-part suite Obsolescence wouldn’t sound amiss on a good 70s TV show. Like the album as a whole, it has bags of appeal.

Via Abel Records

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.