Prog Rock

Post-Duke Genesis is pretty cool, but the prog fan in me just likes the Gabriel era way better, you know? That's not to say I don't like their pop music, though, not by a long shot. The keyboards in "Dodo/Lurker" are nothing short of fantastic, We Can't Dance is a treat from beginning to end, and even Invisible Touch makes for a great guilty pleasure. Nothing quite beats Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot for me, though.

I've been trying to get into some more current bands lately, since all of my favorite prog bands are either old or defunct. I've found that Glass Hammer is pretty neat; they've got a real Yes/Genesis feel to them, with prominent keyboards and noodly song structures. Lots of fun. Spock's Beard seems like it's got some potential as well, but there's something about them that's not really appealing to me too much, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Thoughts?

Post-Duke Genesis are alright, but they're almost a completely different band. By that point, they were more Pop-Rock or Soft Rock than Prog. Not really a bad thing, per se, more of an apples and oranges-type deal. Similar kind of thing happened to Yes when 90125 came out- they were still good, but for the most part they weren't Prog anymore...

Glass Hammer and Spock's Beard are good Neo-Prog band... Also, check out Porcupine Tree and (for some slightly older examples of such), Marillion and IQ. Also, if you're in the mood slightly more aggressive, maybe The Mars Volta will be to your liking, though they're more of a Progressive Rock / Post-Hardcore hybrid, dunno how you feel about that...

I see you came dressed for the occasion.

Regarding the first post saying the Big 6 are Emerson Lake And Palmer, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, and Jethro Tull, I am a bit disappointed to not see Rush there. Is there a reason for that?

Well, feel free to add them by all means. To my ear, they've always been a hard-rock/progressive kind of centaur, with heavy Zeppelin influences from the very beginning. Their musical dynamic has usually had a kind of creative tension between prog expansiveness and metal/rock tightness, even though most of their albums err to one side or the other (not forgetting their new-wave forays in the '80s).

So great though they are, Rush maybe isn't the first example I'd bring up when someone asked me who best exemplifies what prog-rock is like.

To me, Rush always seemed a bit harder-edged than most other 70s-era Prog bands, bordering on Proto-Metal fairly often (hell, they pretty much WERE a pure Heavy Rock/Proto-Metal band on their first album, and they gradually got Proggier...). Still, one of the greats for sure, and a big influence on the later Progressive Metal genre for sure... They're a fave of mine.

You've described Rush very well- and why they're not typical of the genre, if there can truly be said to be such a thing as typical Prog...

Ya noticed, eh? Floyd's my favorite band...

So, names and immediate reactions:

1. Soft Machine
2. Quiet Sun
3. Henry Cow
4. Gentle Giant
5. Aksak Maboul
6. Metabolist
7. Caravan
8. Shub-Niggurath
9. Univers Zéro

• 1- Interesting, jazzy stuff. More about the instrumental interplay and improv than songs, but that's not a bad thing when you're as good as these guys... These guys pretty much founded the Canterbury Scene. Awesome...
• 2- Wasn't this the band Phil Manzanera was in in before Roxy Music? Very different from them, and, as I recall, a Canterbury band, with all the good stuff that entails...
• 3- Very jazz-influenced prog here. Lots of improvisation, which I'm a big fan of. WIN.
• 4- The most immediately notable thing's the vocalist- I forget his name, but he's very proficient. The music's good jazz/folk/classical-influenced stuff, as I recall.
• 5- I've honestly never listened to these guys. Or even heard of 'em before now...
• 6- There's a band called Metabolist?! I need to check some of this stuff out!...
• 7- Perhaps THE Canterbury band. Straddles the line between Psychedelic Rock and Prog a lot, but in the best possible way. Whimsical and weird, and pretty jazzy too.
• 8- Obvious Lovecraft-referencing name is obvious. That said, these guys are one of the better "Zeuhl" bands (probly just behind Magma). Pretty dark, but I like that...
• 9- Very classically-influenced, almost chamber music-y stuff. Rock In Opposition, I think? They've got all sorts of odd/unconventional (by rock standards, anyways) instrumentation going on, or they did early on.

edited 31st Jul '14 1:26:18 AM by sharkcrap11

Am I the only one who finds it weird when people talk about how hated Progressive Rock is? Pretty much everyone I know IRL and online either likes it on the whole, likes some of the bands selectively or doesn't care either way. I don't know anyone who actually mocks me for liking it or looks at me sideways over it... Maybe I don't know the right (or wrong) people?

Hasn't the genre been Vindicated by History yet? The whole Prog vs. Punk Rock thing seems stupid to me, since I like both, and so do a lot of other people. Also, there are a ton of bands who combine the two genres in one way or another (The Mars Volta, Coheed And Cambria, pretty much every Math Rock band and a decent number of Post-Hardcore bands as well...).

edited 27th Aug '14 6:52:27 PM by sharkcrap11

On the one hand, I think that the progressive rock idea as a whole has been vindicated with time, but on the other... it's not a hate of that kind of music in general as what it could be at its worst. Many prog bands, modern and vintage, can be very self-indulgent in a way that quickly became cliché—bombastic classical interpolations, long-winded feats of virtuosity, sudden stops and starts for the sake of showing that you can rather than any real effect, and so forth. Making rock music look like serious business that requires a deep vocabulary to understand and should be left to the professionals is a pretty presumptuous message to send, even if that is not at all the intention.

Which is, of course, where the more experimental end of rock music comes in, particularly post-punk and Krautrock and RIO, but that is a different discussion maybe...

@177 — Did someone say "IQ"?

I agree that Prog-Rock has its excesses, but then, so did Punk- and so does every other genre, potentially. Hell, the genres you listed have their share of shit to go along with all the great stuff... Almost any kind of music can be done well (or not), IMO...

And let's not forget, when it comes to genres sending messages, you could make the argument that Punk either sent the message that too much musical talent is a bad thing, or that not putting any effort into playing well is to be admired. That's just an example, incidentally, not anything against Punk, really- generally, I approve of the whole DIY spirit that Punk created, and the overally confrontational attitude...

I dunno, I enjoy the better stuff in the genre(of which there is quite a bit, truth be told), and my knowledge of musical theory and such, while not entirely nonexistent, certainly isn't complete, by any means (while I know the basics, i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, time signature, major and minor keys, etc, I couldn't tell you what exactly a mode is, for example, and I can't tell you what note is being played at any given time like some people I know, either...).

Music criticism is a funny thing; not only is it acceptable to pilot a Bias Steamroller, but virtually every influential music critic pilots roughly the same model. I've yet to encounter one who doesn't, on some level, want to be Lester Bangs, which makes the job rather self-selecting and self-limiting.

Long story short: for various reasons, music critics tend towards aesthetic/intellectual lockstep in a way that music listeners don't, so some entire musical genres are automatically, almost monolithically musica non grata among the sort of people who end up penning music criticism. One of those genres happens to be prog. Lots of prog and proggish music is well regarded, even widely so, but it's never been the sort of thing one would know by reading a major music periodical or website.

Hmmm. You make a very good point.

Lester Bangs could occasionally be very insightful, but, like most critics, he deliberately acted like kinda an asshole. Unsurprising, really, since negative criticism is often more fun to read (at least if sufficiently over-the-top/funny) and thus more likely to be liked...

Here's something that's been on my mind since about lunchtime:

What draws the line between Progressive Rock and Progressive Metal?

Interesting question- it's kinda arbitrary in some ways, since bands like Rush, Jethro Tull, Kansas, Wishbone Ash and Uriah Heep, among others, all combined Progressive Rock with Hard Rock, Blues Rock and/or Proto-Metal or Heavy Rock (whatever you wanna call it). It's easy to say which bands are which in some cases (Opeth and Dream Theater are definitely Progressive Metal, Genesis or Yes are definitely not), but there's a lot of borderline stuff...

Ratio of metal riffing to non-metal riffing sounds like it's simple enough to understand.

edited 28th Aug '14 8:55:38 PM by StillbirthMachine

@Jhimmibhob: Ian Penman? Paul Morley? Simon Reynolds? The post-punk tradition spawned a lot of people who were opinionated in a very different way than that. And of course you have the modern "everything is unoriginal" reference-mongers versus the more... well, tolerable sorts.

A very fine line. Also, what on earth is "metal riffing," really? I know it when I hear it, too, but that's not much of a criterion.

Everything IS nonoriginal. But that doesn't make it bad... And I agree- I'm not so sure Metal has a single, easily defined style of riffing. I still maintain that the border between Rock and Metal is fluid at best, but then again, I consider Metal to be a subgenre of Rock (like Punk or Alternative, or indeed, like Progressive Rock), so what do I know?

There's also the fact that "non-Metal riffing" is even more vague and hard-to-define than "Metal riffing". Basically, it's like dividing music in its entirety into Metal and "everything else"...

A huge oversimplification, IMO...

JHM: Sure. But for all the real diversity of opinion we can point to, there's an uncommonly large—nearly monolithic—degree of critical overlap about certain genres. Prog Rock just happens to be one of those.

To state it very broadly—and noting the anecdotal exceptions to be found—there's long been an overwhelming critical bias towards the visceral, the rough-hewn, and the counter-establishment (or at least, counter the "establishment" of one's parents' or grandparents' days). With its emphases on craft, its artifice (not inherently a bad thing), and its willingness to engage with traditional Western canons, prog runs against the grain on all those counts.

Exactly what it says on the tin - riffing derived from the assorted metal genres. Of course I will agree this can get rather vague so perhaps a better criteria is how metallic riffing is integrated into the compositions and the extent to which it is. Basically the overall compositional importance of the metal elements - are they a central element to the composition or just one piece of the puzzle?

That's actually not a bad way of putting it...

That is fair.

I just think that the line gets blurry when you take into account how diverse and diffuse metal can be. I guess we can say that dissonant, minor-leaning progressions with lots of distortion and a lack of swing tend to be metallic in nature, but whither RIO, noise-rock and math-rock? Or how about all those major-key, vaguely High Romantic harmonies in power metal songs?

I think metal tends to get defined as much by its heritage and the culture surrounding it as its sound, but while that's all well and good for bands that call themselves metal bands, it really isn't one kind of music at all any more. Camelot, Pig Destroyer and Darkthrone share a common ancestor, but that's like saying that dogs, bears and walruses are all caniform carnivores.

Oh yeah, later metal and metal-related styles have a somewhat unsteady footing where they stand but most metal riffs stand out in general by nature of often being very dense and rigid or otherwise quite acerbic and almost reductively raw. Compared to RIO, math, and noise rock, metal in most cases tends to emphasizer lower register power chords and staggered riffing but in some later cases more dissonant and spacier riffing is common but even then, often not so much floaty and weightless as discordant and thick.

I can see that, yes. There are some noisier bands that emphasise or emphasised low-end, dissonant riffing or grooves—Swans' Filth and Skullflower's Xaman spring to mind—but in the wake of Sonic Youth and Polvo there's more of an emphasis on high-end guitar sounds and weird harmonies. There are a few heavier modern bands that are fairly un-metal, though, White Suns being particularly noteworthy.

But then, modern prog tends to draw more on the quicksilver darting end of noise-rock/math-rock and on various metal subgenres than it does, y'know, "Half-Life" or "Slaves".