Arjen Lucassen’s Supersonic Revolution will release their debut album, Golden Age Of Music, on May 19 via Music Theories Recording/Mascot Label Group. They recently released a lyric video for the first single "SR Prelude" / "The Glamattack", and Lucassen has checked in with the following update:
"I just released a videoclip of my new band Supersonic Revolution about the rise of glam rock, including one of my favorite glam bands Sweet. So, you can imagine my joy when I just got this lovely comment from long-time Sweet guitar player Andy Scott:
'A fantastic track, musically, technically, reminds me of bands like Dream Theater crossed with Focus (Dutch, I guess). Arjen must already be a rock star in Holland surely.'"
Sweet is one of the bands namedropped in "The Glamattack". Check it out below.
You think you know Arjen Lucassen? Towering Dutch prog rock polymath? The man behind the super successful prog rock conceptualists Ayreon? Not to mention his prog metal of Star One and Guilt Machine? Enormous overarching concept albums about space and time, packed to the hilt with special guests that read like a who’s who of modern day progressive rock? Arjen Lucassen? Well, think again…
Supersonic Revolution, the band behind Golden Age Of Music, are simply five men: Arjen on bass, long-standing keyboard player Joost van den Broek, guitarist Timo Somers, drummer Koen Herfst and singer Jaycee. Five men rocking out and having one hell of a time doing it.
The whole project grew from a request to provide a track for a cover CD for the German music magazine Eclipsed. “They asked if I had any cover versions lying around,” he recalls. “I said, ‘No but I’ll happily record one for you.’ So, they gave me a list of bands and I saw a ZZ Top song ‘I Heard It On The X’ that I really like. I said I could record it for them, but then they told me it had to be ready in one week...”
“I was like ‘Oh my god!’. I contacted my favorite musicians in Holland via WhatsApp and literally within 30 minutes I had assembled five people. A band basically. From there the seed was sown in Lucassen’s mind. ‘I want to form a band. And I want to simply have fun!’.
“I’m a perfectionist as you know, so I’m always sending musicians their parts back and asking them to change stuff,” he acknowledges. “But this was all brilliant. We were having fun, calling and WhatsApping all the time, and within a week we had a complete product.” He continues, “Also I wanted to have an up-beat, positive project.”
“I was like, let’s form a band and let’s write songs in the style of the 70s, and have the lyrics be a celebration of all the memorable things from that time, because those were my formative years,” he enthuses. “But I didn’t want it to sound like the 70s because that’s already been done, and I can’t do it any better than ‘Stargazer’ or ‘Kashmir’.”
“The guys are all younger than me - around 30 - so they weren’t even alive yet in the 70s. So, it was a great way for me to make 70s music with lots of Hammond and blistering guitars, but to update it to this time.”
The end result is 11 tracks of high energy, progressively inclined heavy rock that swings with the kind of groove Deep Purple rocked with in the early to mid-1970s. “This album is not a typical prog album. It’s not YES or Genesis. But it’s not a metal album either. There’s a track called ‘Burn it Down’,” Lucassen notes, “it’s totally based on ‘Smoke On The Water’ but written from the perspective of the ‘stupid with a flare gun’ mentioned in the original lyrics.
The album also features covers of some legendary songs given the Arjen Lucassen treatment as bonus tracks: T-Rex’s "Children Of The Revolution", ZZ Top’s "Heard It On The X", Earth Wind & Fire’s "Fantasy" and Roger Glover’s "Love Is All".
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the real Arjen Lucassen. Job done. Having fun.
Available formats:
- Artbook
- Transparent Blue 2LP
- Pink Marble 2LP
- Purple Marble 2LP
- Yellow Marble 2LP
- CD
- Digital
Pre-order here.
Golden Age Of Music tracklisting:
"SR Prelude"
"The Glamattack"
"Golden Age Of Music"
"The Rise Of The Starman"
" Burn It Down"
"Odyssey"
"They Took Us By Storm"
"Golden Boy"
"Holy Holy Ground"
"Fight Of The Century"
"Came To Mock, Stayed To Rock"
"Children Of The Revolution" (Bonus Track)
"Heard It On The X" (Bonus Track)
"Fantasy" (Bonus Track)
"Love Is All" (Bonus Track)
