With "Icy Skies" FINALLY GEORGE confirms his artrock ambitions and qualities

In 2018, he came out of nowhere. Georg Hahn aka Finally George surprised the art rock community with his debut album "Life Is A Killer". The then 52-year-old advertising musician, who also called himself a "noise maker" at times, appeared so abruptly in the scene that the eclipsed interview on the release turned out to be his very first ever. From then on he was "infected" - a word that has taken on a new meaning in the course of the three years that have passed since then - by the idea of staying on the ball. And he has stayed on the ball - with his new album "Icy Skies". Georg Hahn: "It was absolutely clear that I would record a second album, because it was really a lot of fun. I was really happy about all the praise for the first album. I was really surprised. But that also created pressure for the next one. With everything I redid, I thought, can I do this as well as I did on the first album?"

CREAMCHEESE - Undiscussed music

"One Man Band since 1998. The nice guy with the great music. Still getting stronger...", that's how Marcel Besner describes himself on his Bandcamp site. How great the music really is and if it's still getting stronger can be checked by everyone himself with the six albums provided there. eclipsed talked to the musician who calls himself a big Pink Floyd fan and bought his first own record already at the age of five.

eclipsed: You've already released various albums digitally on Bandcamp in recent years. How did it come to the first physical release on CD?

Prog veterans Jeff Brewer and Robert Hutchinson convince as THE FAR CRY

"It's not easy being a prog band in the U.S.," moans Robert Hutchinson, drummer for The Far Cry, who have released an imposing first album, "If Only ...," bursting with ingenuity and playfulness. "Prog is more of an obscure niche market with us. Anyway, you don't get offers from clubs or bars like other rock bands." Hutchinson should know, because although "If Only ..." is the first album from the formation he formed a few years ago with singer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Brewer, both musicians are well-known veterans in the American prog world. Already in the 80s they played together in the band Holding Pattern, which was commonly counted as neoprog, even though the musicians had no idea what that was supposed to be at the time: "We saw ourselves as a classic prog band. That was long before the internet, and we had no idea that a whole scene was growing up in England, whose music was then called neoprog. So there were no contacts there ..."

On his album "Stitches" Nils-Petter Molvær makes peace with himself

Since his 1997 debut album "Khmer", Norwegian sound painter Nils-Petter Molvær has fought just as many inner battles in numerous editions of his music. With sometimes painful directness, he revealed the contrast between his gentle and his aggressive side, which often clashed abruptly. This personal conflict was expressed differently on each album, sometimes subliminally, sometimes offensively. On his new CD "Stitches" the trumpeter seems to have made peace with himself. Sure, there are moments here, too, in which things get mighty, but these are peacefully embedded in a continuous maelstrom that gets by without harsh breaks.

The MANIC STREET PREACHERS have finally recorded another outstanding album

By his own admission, one of the primary sources of inspiration for the new Manics opus "The Ultra Vivid Lament" was the Swedish quartet ABBA, whose melodies songwriter James Dean Bradfield has always held in high regard. He thinks there's hardly a better setting than this to package the band's socially critical messages in a way suitable for the masses ..

eclipsed: You recorded "Even In Exile" last year, a solo album about Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, for which lyricist Patrick Jones, the brother of your Manics bandmate and lyricist Nicky Wire, wrote the lyrics. Did the album pave the way for the new Manics work?

For TRIFECTA the fun is in the foreground on their debut album "Fragments"

That soundchecks serve to try out and jam together is nothing unusual. However, the fact that a band develops from these, including an official record release, is the exception. This is what happened in the case of the three Steven Wilson musicians Craig Blundell (drums), Nick Beggs (bass) and Adam Holzman (keyboards). We talked to the latter about the background of Trifecta.

eclipsed: The roots of Trifecta lie in Steven Wilson's band. How did it all start back then?

Irish project VILLAGERS declares war on the algorithm blues

Beatles or Beach Boys? Or maybe Gil Evans meets Alice Coltrane meets Todd Rundgren meets Burt Bacharach meets Bright Eyes? Villagers aka Conor O'Brien has created a surreal world on new album "Fever Dreams" that brings back many memories of the familiar and the familiar, and in the end amounts to a wonderful island of sound on which to rest from the stresses of reality. "I just wanted to have a good time myself with the band I had been touring with continuously for the previous three years," recaps the Irishman. "My main goal was to turn half-finished songs into something enjoyable together. More important to me than the concept for the final result is the social aspect of playing with real people in a real space."

HOT'N'NASTY "dying" to perform live again with their new album

Winner of the "German Blues Awards 2020" in the category "Band". And rightly so! "Burn", the recently released new album by Hot'N'Nasty, is more than impressive proof of this - and they should actually get the 2021 prize right away. "We've received awards before, but you can't buy anything for that, it's something to be proud of, though," is how Malte Triebsch, the band's Dortmund-based guitarist and songwriter, classifies honours of this kind. Unfortunately, the formation (like almost the entire rock scene depicted in eclipsed, of course) was slowed down by the pandemic live, but for a blues-rock troupe of thoroughbred musicians like Hot'N'Nasty, who have been active for almost 30 years, the stage is even more of an elixir of life than it is for many other acts: "Since we come from all different corners of Germany, I also often use the soundchecks before concerts to try out new song ideas."