Kepler Ten - Delta-V album review

Rooted in 80s Rush, but with an eye on the progressive future.

Kepler Ten - Delta-V album artwork

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.

As soon as opening track Ultraviolet spins into earshot, you can tell this band have cut their teeth in Rush tribute band R2. The way in which the British trio meld the consonants and vowels of their progressive approach has the erudition of people immersed in the vocabulary of the celebrated Canadians.

This is obvious throughout what is an articulate musical statement. Time And Tide displays elements of Dream Theater circa Images And Words, while James Durand’s vocals harbour Steve Hogarth’s imprint. This mix of styles continues on the wide screen vision of The Stone, where Richie Cahill’s guitar work disseminates discipline and imagination. Swallowtail allows the keyboard duality of Steve Hales and Durand to bring harmony to a complex mingling of rhythms, and The Shallows sets Hales free to guide us through a maze of electronically enhanced percussive effects, on a song merging funk rock overlays with some beautifully observed intricacies. This path is confidently trodden once again on In The Sere And Yellow, while the closing Red Skies provides an epic summary of Kepler Ten’s prog divination, swooping through a range of emotions with expertise. An auspicious debut.

Malcolm Dome

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