DPRP.net: 30 Years, 12,000 Album Reviews, Part 2
...And Still Counting
We're not exactly sure, but many years after the fact, it was deduced that it must have been October 1995 that Martijn Albering and Jerry van Kooten founded the Dutch Progressive Rock Page.
Some time before that, Martijn had started an Arena fan page but had started to include information on other bands as well. He asked Jerry to help, and together they decided to make it about progressive rock in general. Although "Dutch" is part of the name, the site has always been in English. It was just set up by a couple of people from Holland.
Within a couple of years the site had grown to welcome up to 350 visitors per day. More and more bands were covered, and in 1998 the very first DPRP album review was published.
DPRP.net has continued growing and is now one of the biggest websites specialising in this genre of music, with 1.3 million annual page views and 18,000 unique visitors per month. We hardly ever do advertising, and when we do, it's related to the music: a band, album, tour, concert. We cover the costs (servers, postage) ourselves.
We currently have 25 reviewers from 12 different countries. We publish around 500 reviews a year plus interviews, special features, a new releases blog and a podcast.
To celebrate the publication of our 12,000th review (and our 30th anniversary year), we take a pause to look back on some of the highlights.
Our year-by-year summary includes one landmark album review from every year in our massive archive. The second of this three-part special feature is below and covers the years 2006 to 2015.
Don't forget to check out the first part, covering the years 1998 to 2005.
Andy Read
2006
By now we had already built up an archive of more than 2,500 reviews. This year we added another 64 issues, offering our reviewers' thoughts on 457 albums.
You can read the full list of albums that we reviewed in 2006.
Quidam, the 10th anniversary remaster edition of the debut album
At this time DPRP shared a special bond with the band Quidam, not only because DPRP founder Martijn married their original flute player Ewa but also because the band headlined our one-off prog festival, DPRS (Dutch Progressive Rock Stage), back in March 1998. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, the band released re-mastered editions of their first three albums. And since Quidam fans were seemingly swimming in cash, they threw in a special unplugged CD as well! So we published a Quidam Special with Ed Sander revisiting these three albums and reviewing the acoustic release.
2007
Voila! We had hit a new level of consistency. This year we again exceeded the 400-review mark (469) and published 74 editions.
Check out the full list of albums that we reviewed in 2007.
To make DPRP a little bit different, one thing we have always offered readers is our concept of Round Table Reviews. The idea is to give the same new album to several reviewers, allowing readers to have different perspectives on a release.
Glass Hammer — Culture Of Ascent
This year must have offered the greatest number of RTRs in DPRP's history. Flick through some of these classic albums:
- Glass Hammer — Culture Of Ascent
- Ritual — The Hemulic Voluntary Band
- Quidam featured again, with a RTR of their Alone Together release
- Dream Theater — Systematic Chaos
- Rush — Snakes & Arrows
- Sylvan — Presets
- Marillion — Somewhere Else
- Neal Morse — Sola Scriptura
- Blackfield — Blackfield II
- Gazpacho — Night
- Pain Of Salvation — Scarsick
- Alias Eye — In Focus
- Riverside — Rapid Eye Movement
Rocket Scientists — Revolution Road
And we even began the year with an RTR. For our very first edition in 2007, Revolution Road, the fourth of the six albums released so far by the Rocket Scientists, came under the DPRP microscope. The Scientists was a progressive rock band formed in the late 1980s by keyboardist Erik Norlander and vocalist & guitarist Mark McCrite. The album received a rather luke-warm verdict from our three reviewers. How to you feel their comments have stood the test of time? Read the Rocket Scientists review here.
2008
You can read the full list of 442 albums and 58 issues from 2008 here.
While DPRP has always concentrated on reviewing new releases, we do like to take a look back every so often and revisit some of prog's classic albums from the past.
Not from 2008, but in the year leading up to the end of the millennium, we had a series called Counting Out Time that did just that.
DPRP founder Jerry recalls that it was a hugely successful series of articles. "When I interviewed Mike Portnoy in 2000, he told me his mother printed out all the issues under Counting Out Time for him to read while on tour. When we were brought backstage with several other interviewers, Mike really wanted to talk to us, jumping from the back when we announced ourselves."
Jeff Wayne's Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds
This was the edition that revisited a true prog-rock classic and one of the first prog-rock-operas: Jeff Wayne's timeless The War Of The Worlds.
2009
This was our tenth anniversary and we marked the occasion by hitting the 500-review point for the first time. We had become very consistent in the number of issues (just over one a week - 60 this year). But the overall number of reviews rose to 527.
The full list of albums that we reviewed in 2009 is here.
Red Star Revolt — Red Star Revolt
It is a little hard to count exactly, but by my reckoning, this was the 500th album reviewed on DPRP. The self-titled released by US band Red Star Revolt was described by Tom de Val as "modern rock with an intoxicating dose of 70s prog".
2010
We were on an unstoppable roll with another new high of 567 reviews, spread across 68 issues. Read the full list of albums that we reviewed in 2010 here.
Believe — World Is Round
One of my favourite albums from this year was the fourth disc from Polish neo-proggers Believe. Alex Torres also liked it, stating in his review that The World Is Round was "near perfect music" that would definitely make his top 5 albums of the year.
2011
Another 60 issues and once again we were comfortably in the mid-500s, with 550 album reviews published across the 12-month period. See the full list of albums that we reviewed in 2011 here.
Highlights included more Round Table Reviews including views on Glass Hammer — Cor Cordium, Agents Of Mercy — The Black Forest, Opeth — Heritage and Yes — Fly From Here.
Arena — The Seventh Degree Of Separation
One of the bands who emerged around the same time as DPRP, were UK neo-proggers Arena. (DPRP was founded based on a website on Arena.) As a result, we have been able to cover pretty much all of their albums as they have been released. This time our three reviewers had very mixed feelings about The Seventh Degree Of Separation, with scores ranging from 5 to 9. How do you rate this album in the Arena discography?
2012
You can read the full list of the 442 albums that we reviewed across 54 issues here.
Not in 2012, but after the highly successful Counting Out Time series, we should also mention another series in which we paid attention to some more of the greatest albums in prog history. The Milestones series saw another shift from DPRP's focus on new releases. Take a look at our opinion of ELO's Eldorado.
2013
Check out the list of the 532 reviews that we published this year across an impressive 80 editions.
Aural Innovations was a magazine and website on space rock and related genres, offering reviews, interviews, and general articles. It ran from 1998 to January 2016. The website is no longer active, and all articles are being imported into DPRP in 2025, to keep everything available for everyone.
Time Lords — Convergence
A good place to begin would be the Aural Innovations staff picks for the best albums of 2013. Convergence by The Timelords is one selection that I have rather enjoyed, having taken it from the list put together by Aural Innovations' writer Keith Henderson. Check the album out yourself on the Time Lords Bandcamp site.
2014
This year we notched-up 74 issues with a total of 582 reviews in 2014.
We have never put together a list, but we can be certain that the number of writers who have contributed to DPRP over the past 30 years runs well into three figures. Most of our current team of 21 writers have been involved for more than five years. One of our longest-standing and most prolific writers has been Mark Hughes.
Zip Tang — Das Reboot
This was one of his recommendations from 2014. Mark described Das Reboot, the fourth album from Chicago's Zip Tang as "an interesting and enjoyable album that pays rewards for repeated listening". Try it for yourselves here.
2015
2015 was a record-breaker. We don't know how or why, but we do know that all DPRP records were shattered with 95 issues and 805 reviews published across this year. It is very, very unlikely that we shall publish that number of reviews ever again.
Read the full and very long list of albums that we reviewed in 2015 here.
Now and then we take a look back at one of the reviews from our ever-growing archive to see if the album has stood the test of time. We did a series of this in 2015.
The Mars Volta — De-loused In The Comatorium
It was also the year that DPRP celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, we did a series entitled The Archives Of Prog where reviewers revisited some of their favourite albums from the past 20 years to see if they had stood the test of time. One of them was Roger Trenwith's verdict of the Mars Volta's De-loused In The Comatorium, first released in 2003.