Ultimate Backward review from Expose Magazine

Finally getting to post the Exposé magazine review of our CD, Ultimate Backward. It's also found on the reviews page of our official site, and of course on our MySpace blog. Here's the review...

Gravity Tree is one of the more interesting progressive bands around, a duo who covers all the instruments of a four piece band, plus vocals; and they do this live too. Guitarist Linc plays a combo-guitar that has both bass and guitar strings, and separate pickups for each, allowing him to play both parts simultaneously. Drummer Alan Nu handles a keyboard with his right hand and drums with the others, as well as using various drum controlled triggers. The result is an amazing full band sound from just two players. Both provide the vocals. Some readers may remember "Aim to Please," their contribution to the Bay Prog Sampler disc that was included with issue #24; in fact that song has gone through further refinement in the years since and appears here on this, their second album, along with nine other original compositions. Their material bears a stamp of currency, yet also features the conceptual ideals of classic progressive rock. Their influences likely include Zappa, Happy The Man, Van der Graaf, and Gentle Giant, which they assimilate well as they explore new musical territory; most of the songs are long and labyrinthine, and rarely settle down into a pattern for very long. In that respect, I am reminded of another current band, The Underground Railroad. Familiarity with Ultimate Backward will require a few repeated plays, but over the haul the listener will be rewarded. This is a solid second effort.

BTW if you find a review of one of our albums, don't hesitate to contact us with the link. Thanks for listening.

Gravity Tree on ReverbNation

Napster and Archiving

Ultimate Backward, still the latest album from Gravity Tree (although that will change this year), can be heard for free at Napster. If that link doesn't work, you can enter this URL into your browser to get you there:
http://free.napster.com/view/album/index.html?id=12406429

Alan has been busy archiving old projects in the main studio to make more room for the ongoing work on the third CD, due out this year. Expect an update on the album right here, soon.

Road to the Next Gravity Tree Album

After a short break (hence the lack of newsletters and not much blogging), us crazy musicians at Gravity Tree are now back to work on new songs, most of which will be included in our 3rd CD release, about nine months from now. But you won't have to wait that long for new prog rock output from us. Gravity Tree is going to try and release a new web-version of each song as it's finished. Hopefully that means you'll see a new mp3 download from us, available every couple of months or so, on the usual sites.

We probably won't release all of the material from the upcoming album this way, mostly because some of them are shaping up to be quite long. But we might release a "part 1" of a piece as a download. Expect the first new release before the end of January. I'll post a specific date once we get close. These also might be a little different mixes or a different form or arrangement than what shows up on the album. So you might find something unique in the download versions.

One more thing: Everyone on our official mailing list or Yahoo group, and all of our MySpace friends will get a message when each song is available. If you're a member of the Gravity Tree street team, however, you'll receive most of these mp3s for FREE.

Until then, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season.

Prog rock on Amie Street

BTW...
These crazy folks are giving away our music for a limited time. If you visit and it's not free, it will still be cheap!

Not much prog in this blog

We'd love to have time to talk prog rock shop. But it'll have to be short, it's way too busy here.

What are we NOT doing? The short list: preparing a couple of songs for release, doing some studio spring cleaning, designing a new home studio for Linc, updating our websites, and of course continuing the work on next year's new Gravity Tree album...

But we aren't too busy to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season!

Any prog rock fans in the house?

What better way to say hello than to mix music genre slang. Except to say, hello and welcome to the OFFICIAL Gravity Tree blog. But wait, why does this blog exist? And who writes this thing?

The second question first: Some of you know me as GravityDrmmr. Other folks call me Alan. I participate in a music group (as there are all kinds of groups, I had to specify it as music in nature) called Gravity Tree. We play a fairly non-commercial blend of guitar-drenched noise many folks call progressive rock, or prog rock, if you will. Some call it art rock, avant-prog, or any number of other things but by now you've gotten the idea.

There are a number of reasons why we decided to come late to the blog party and start one of these things.
One was that I wanted a place to communicate to fans and interested bystanders without all the usual glitter, hype, pomp and what-have-you. So there aren't any flashing banners, pop-ups or swirling advertisements insisting that you buy our stuff or someone else's.

Another reason was that we didn't really have a stand-alone blog. There's a news page on our website, but the site's gotten fairly large and there are other more interesting pages to be found there. We have a blog on MySpace, but we're finding a number of fans just aren't on MySpace or just don't like it up there. This blog is for those folks.

I'll try to keep it up-to-date with any really critical band news. But mostly I'll probably ramble on about music, ours and others. We'll see where this goes.

For now, thanks for stopping by. Talk at you soon.