Anglagard

Overall I have an ambivalent relationship with them - for a long time I felt their music added up to less than the sum of its parts, then eventually it seemed to gel for me, and I came to feel that their compositions are actually rather brilliant. But even now that I have grokked them, it's an on/off thing. Sometimes they hit the spot like nothing else, other times I put them on and have to stop almost immediately - it can feel like the aural equivalent of being force-fed a kilo of marzipan.

 

Live they're incredible too, a real crazy explosion of everything.

IMHO they only got better after that. I was especially pleasantly surprised by Viljans Oga. A third album a good decade or so after the second one is not a recipe for success, and gives the impression of something that's just being churned out because they want some money. On the contrary, I think it's their best album yet, and their most fiercely inventive one. Where Epilog distanced them from the clear 70s influences, Viljans Oga seems to have seen them shed it entirely and they're operating with a voice that is distinctly and uniquely theirs and theirs alone.

That being said, the marriage of strong Genesis and KC influence with more contemporary approaches was one of the things that made Hybris so fun to listen to, and it's not about to leave my prog rotation any time soon.