LALU : A Mythmaker’s Demise

August 2nd, 2026 by brianmc

Frontiers Music [Release date : 31.07.26]

Looks like Progrock supremo, Vivien Lalu’s got the band back together for his fifth album.
In fact today’s Lalu is a lot like yesterday’s Lalu, both in compliment and style, with Mekong Delta’s Martin LeMar on vocals, Joop Wolters on guitar and bass, Toto’s Simon Philips on drums, and Jens (Malmsteen/ Stratovarius) Johansson guesting keyboards on three tracks.
Yet, it’s very 2026.

Some will argue that albums like this are rooted in nostalgia, but there’s a transformative quality to A Mythmaker’s Demise that makes that argument seem redundant.

The album’s clever construction – tracks with wonderfully loose arrangements alternating with tight as a drum production numbers – is immediately apparent on opener, ‘Tears Of The Muse’.

This track shares both, by alternating processed vocals with the natural kind. In itself a compact, shorthand history lesson in the development of the Progrock genre’s shapes and forms.

It’s pretty clear that Lalu worships at the altar of Yes, hear it on ‘I Am The One’. With Marillion flavours too, spicing up ‘Learning To Fly’. But what genre is free of influence and emblematic touches?

The two very different instrumentals, ‘Mayacama’ and ‘A Drop Of Water, are elegant and expansive in their own way. The first is a bold fusion of Prog and jazz, the second an unabashedly romantic acoustic track, with a muscular arrangement that serves to stop the song’s lightweight structure from drifting away.

‘Prince Of The Swift Warning’ (a reference to Watership Down) makes no attempt to soften the moral complexities of the situation the characters find themselves in, and that’s undoubtedly a good thing. But the impenetrable track title, as with others, like the album’s title itself, might be enough to put off all but the most dedicated of Progrock fans. ***

Review by Brian McGowan

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SWEET GORILLA Feels Like I’m Still In Love (5000 Records)

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