Prog V3.0 Discussion Thread

I discovered Baron via a recommendation from Wolf People. Those of you into new psych prog, other favorites include Spirits Of The Dead, Syd Arthur, Messenger, Fuzz Manta, Fellwoods, Amplifier, Knifeworld, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Kama Loka, Electric Orange, Atavismo. I did a rundown of Baron and others in my crassly named piece below.

http://fastnbulbous.com/progasms-progressive-rock-rundown/

http://fastnbulbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/proggasms-2015.jpg

xp frogbs, I'm sorry I didn't check out Echolyn before I did my piece. Them being a favorite next to Motorpsycho certainly perked my ears up.

This is a good thread. I've been gradually catching up on modern prog in the past couple years. Favorites so far are Anekdoten, Änglagård and Gazpacho. I have much more listening to go on these, still on the fence -- Kingstom Wall, Riverside, Transatlantic, IQ, Haken, Birds And Buildings, The Pineapple Thief. I like Porcupine Tree, but haven't been feeling solo Steve Wilson so much.

have you heard the new gazpacho, molok? it hasn't quite captivated me yet. there are nice folk vibes going on but sometimes i want the music itself to be more intricate

ah, just clicked on the link now. really interesting run down. i'll give that gazpacho another go or two

So no one is feeling the Baron album? I understand, you're all distracted by the excitement of this release:

http://bravewords.com/medias-static/images/news/2015%20II/wizardsalbumoct.jpg

What do we think about the retelling of very obvious Genesis passages by Big Big Train so audacious that they make early Marillion sound like Neu by comparison?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgRIvcnTeE

Well, BBT vocalist Dave Longdon almost replaced Phil Collins in Genesis, while drummer Nick D'Virgilio played on the Collins-less tour. Shame that Calling All Stations wasn't anywhere near as solid as English Electric (or Far Skies Deep Time or Underfall Yard for that matter.)

never been big into BIG BIG TRAIN or GENESIS but holy shit at NORTHWINDS and ROUNDTABLE! proceed the weedian! haven't spent time yet with BARON but I am looking forward. thanks for the tips!

how do upsilon acrux, eiko ishibashi & mats&morgan fit in here?

yowie, too, come to think of it

Upsilon Acrux album from early this year (I think) is good

Just started listening to Deluge Grander - August In The Urals. Sounds pretty jam packed, which is promising.

Anyone who liked the Upsilon Acrux album should check out Ahleuchatistas latest album Arrebato, it is really good shit.

The couple of Eiko Ishibashi solo albums I've heard are really good, as well as the one with Tatsuya Yosida. Cursory listens to her latest stuff tell's me she's gone more "indie" but it might be worth investigating more.

ok, have been trying to listen to gazpacho's new one, and that brings me to today's complaint about prog rock. either it is instrumental, or it has really bad vocals. i don't mean that they're particularly bad in a technical sense- whoever it is that's singing can carry a tune all right, i guess. it's just that most "mainstream" prog vocals are so totally lacking in personality i can't listen to it for more than five minutes on end. it's like, prog vocals today seem to combine the worst aspects of "classic rock" vocals and the keening insignificance of landfill indie. when you're going to put out a record with a sense of instrumental variety and, dare i say, adventurousness, why kill it with bland and lifeless singing? seems like these days every prog record i listen to makes me just like father damian more.

I'd agree for the most part but I can usually get along with it if the music is good enough.
I feel most metal vocals are pretty uninspired too, but there are plenty of good vocalists partly due to the sheer number of metal bands.

The current v3.0 vocalists I like tend to be outside the core "we are a prog band for prog fans" type.
I adore Mew's ultra sweet boy vocals.

I agree - definitely an issue with modern prog as a whole. We don't really have a lot of "dedicated singers" anymore like Jon Anderson or Peter Gabriel, instead you get a lot of people who are the creative or instrumental center of their band having to sing because no one else is going to. I think anyone can will themselves into being a good instrumental player but if you can't sing, there's only so much that can be done. Luckily most do get better over time, or there are bands like Glass Hammer that just hire singers as their popularity increases.

a lot of prog vocals is europeans singing english in weird accents, like MEW and AINUR. but yes, there are some singers lacking in personality in contemporary prog, like there are in R&B and country etc; not everyone is thom yorke, mary timony, or jim o'rourke, that's for sure

fastnbulbous finally getting around to listening to BARON. good call (and good vocals!). they kind of remind me of BARONESS; people who go apeshit for GHOST (not batoh's) and GOAT should be all over this though it's less kitschy/b horror movie and way more authentically mystical. dude was in DIAGONAL, right? this is lots dirgier, not as much a virtuoso contrapuntal workout sesh

i listened to baron earlier and those comparisons are self-evidently pure word-association

hey you know who MEW sound like? MUSE! and MÚM!

also fastnbulbous you do god's work but i found precious little in that prog list to really excite me. do i just not like prog as much as i used to

MEW sound nothing like AINUR (an italian RPI band) nor MÚM (pronounced "miooyyuujm"), at least to me, though maybe a little like MUSE at MUSE's best?

BARON have more than a bit of the space-dirgey neo-classic rock vibe BARONESS, GHOST (not batoh's), and GOAT are all delivering, at least compared to the straight up intricate neo-prog of DIAGONAL (a band which current BARON members alex crispin and luke foster used to be in), i'd say. maybe though prog (besides CARDIACS and the like) just isn't self-evidently cool enough anymore, and it should be collapsed into one overarching category, like people do with jazz and metal! all hip, even ‎MC dälek (pronounced "die-a-leck"), sounds the same too!

this is gonna be some proper prog wizard harry potter wands out zing war isn't it

CIRCULUS!

Sundays & Cybele is the only neo-prog thing that FnB mentioned tgat really caused me to double-take, but I havent gotten around tovlistening yet

I really don't listen to much in the way of contemporary prog, it all sounds like lame retreads of music that's decades old. I'd rather listen to the real thing at the end of the day. Saying that though one big problem I have these days is that a lot of groups sound more influenced by neo-prog rather than the proper stuff and come across as too polished and insipid. The one hypocritical exception is Anekdoten, who are sort of borderline bland and definitely retrogressive, but they've got the depressing Scandi vibes which I enjoy.

Oddball metal seems to be scratching my prog itches almost exclusively these days. Can't find much in the way of decent avant-prog these days either. OK I'll stop moaning now.

^p much this

deluge grander's 'inaugural bash' is doubly phenomenal when you consider how it succeeds where so much else fails

I liked that quietus article; I've always been a big marillion fan but for whatever reason never checked out Twelfth Night; they certainly are the VDGG to Marillion's Genesis.

Can't find much in the way of decent avant-prog these days either.

Rhùn aren't bad for a Zeuhl act:
https://rhunmusic.bandcamp.com/

I'm glad I'm not in a position of searching for good new bands in whatever genre. It taken me too long to realise that since I hadn't exhausted the earlier classics and high points then there wasn't much reason to look too hard for new stuff. Obviously it's great when there's an amazing new band but it doesn't feel necessary unless they're really brilliant.

To be honest there's a load of older stuff I've never got around to hearing yet. I only started listening to Yes last year!

Rhun are fine, I've heard them before and they colour inside the lines somewhat zeuhl-wise but thanks.

I doubt anyone here has heard all the 70s stuff they wanted to hear.

xelab otm. "power with" could be BATTLES

been thinking about it, and still not exactly sure what I would classify as prog 3.0. If I'm going in for the concept, it helps me to chart out what would constitute prog 1 & 2--

1.0 - Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, ELP -- basically all the first wave of prog

1.5 - stretching out a bit to include stuff like Soft Machine, krautrock, Brian Eno-related stuff

2.0 - prog that either reacted against the first wave, or did something that made it fundamentally different (albeit still prog): Henry Cow/Art Bears, This Heat, Albert Marcoeur, Etron Fou, Univers Zero, Magma, Cardiacs (a lot of this is just commonly called "avant prog" today, or RIO)

2.5 - stuff that extended prog 2.0 (esp incorporating elements of punk) like Ruins/Koenjihyakkei, Flying Luttenbachers, Zorn/Naked City/Mr. Bungle, math rock, maybe Bob Drake

3.0 - prog that either reacted or fundamentally changed prog 2.0. So that means... probably music that arguably isn't even "prog" in the same way as prog 1.0 was. This could include avant metal like Jute Gyte (but also going back to stuff like Gorguts, and also Orthrelm's OV which is IMO way more prog than metal), wonky electronic stuff like the more outrageous Rustie stuff or bands like Knower, noise/prog hybrids like Zs. Others?

This is how I tend to approach this topic, and the development of prog in general. From my experience, most people duck out at some stage of the game, and settle on their brand of prog (the vast majority of prog fans probably not even venturing into the 2.0 area). Weird outliers are people like Frank Zappa, who might conceivably fit anywhere in prog 1-2, or even King Crimson, who seemed to develop w the times well into the 80s.

on Battles -- definitely prog, but almost like neo-prog 2.0, as I don't think their approach is fundamentally different than what lots of avant prog bands were doing in the 80s (or even 70s, with This Heat)

Where do you include late '70s/early '80s arty pop-rock (frequently made with the help of prog-aligned musicians)? Thinking specifically of Bowie's Berlin albums and Talking Heads' Fear of Music and Remain in Light.

i don't think genres "die" as such. i think they just diffuse. i think that's what's happened to prog- all of the different things that made up "prog rock" in the '70s have gotten chopped up and reconstituted by all kinds of different bands, from uncle acid to death grips. most of the bands who openly identify as "prog" seem to have gotten stuck with the worst bits- "see, we're prog, here's a 20 minute song with a guitar solo in 5/4!"

xpost

imo Bowie and Talking Heads are particularly important for prog, but not because I consider them prog per se, but as major influencers. (If we were doing a pop 3.0 thread, I might consider Bowie some kind of pop 3.0 figure, after Elvis (1), and the Beatles (2)). Some of Bowie's records aren't prog at all, while others might arguably fit in the prog 1.5 -2.0 bunch. Talking Heads less so, but obv a big influence for any forward thinking rock band playing in the 80s and beyond.

i'd bet most people into ORTHRELM would appreciate some STEAMHAMMER and vice versa, same with say MAGMA and OPETH?

or SUFJAN STEVENS and PETER HAMMILL even

oh fie!

oneida!

COMUS and MOMUS

except, brave threadslayer, while both culturally appropriate the theonyms of hellenic godlings, MOMUS (unlike) COMUS is a practitioner of analog baroque, not prog, while COMUS recorded some of the best acid prog-folk of the 1970s, up there with FAMILY, AUDIENCE, BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST, and the STRAWBS, blazing trails for more recent acid-prog folk jams by the likes of SPIRES THAT IN THE SUNSET RISE, AKRON/FAMILY, and CIRCULUS

The new Aluk Todolo is aggressive instrumental rock that I wouldn't call metal; also, the album (called Voix, out in February) is one long piece divided into six sections. Pretty prog if you ask me.

reggie don't take this the wrong way but it seems like all of your posts consist of you name-dropping completely random bands with no further explanation.

i hear affinities among the names being dropped. in disagreement with tuesday's (false binary) complaint "either it is instrumental, or it has really bad vocals" i pointed out that a lot of prog is being made by europeans whose english isn't native, like the danish band Mew and the italian band Ainur. names -- yorke, timony, o'rourke -- were dropped as counterexamples of native english speakers who have recorded excellent prog and whose vocals don't suck. i brought up Baroness, Ghost, and Goat as examples of bands who like Baron are making a kind of proggy neo-classic rock; Diagonal's name was dropped because two of the Baron guys used to be in Diagonal (a more trad prog band). i mentioned the Cardiacs (spazz prog) and Dälek (prog hop) sort of to affectionately mess with louis (sorry louis), because i've noticed he likes both. i mentioned Battles because i appreciated xelab's suggestion to listen to Ahleuchatistas (as i had fastnbulbous's suggestion to check out Baron) and the song "power with" on their latest album sounds exactly like Battles, for the first few minutes at least. moving along, mention was made of Steamhammer because i hear an affinity between how extreme they were for their time and how extreme Orthrelm is for ours, same as i do between Magma and Opeth, in a way that qualifies dominique's smart attempt to come to terms with 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.0 / 2.5 / 3.0. i suppose GOBLIN would have made for a better affinity with Opeth, since there's a song called "Goblin" on the recent Opeth album in direct homage, but dominique brought up Magma so i went with that. i also hear an affinity between Peter Hammill and Sufjan Stevens as extremely ambitious prog / orch pop dudes from different decades, so that's why they came up. Comus, Family, Barclay James Harvest, the Strawbs, Spires That in the Sunset Rise, Akron/Family, and Circulus are all bands that in some way shape or form play an acid prog folk that can be celebrated for how out it is (or derided for its ren faire overtones, depending on the ear of the listener). i hope that this guide to my recent posts helps! again i think it's interesting how resistant people are to discussing prog and how the stigmas associated it with foster suspicion. compare for instance the discussion in the tompkins square thread, where no one would ever complain that everyone sounds like john fahey and robbie basho. it's almost impossible to imagine a similar congeniality here. i'll even blame myself, take the fall for wanting the discussion to stay as wide-ranging and inclusive (rather than exclusive) of reference as possible, if that means there can be more posts like fastnbulbous's, xelab's, dominique's, and 誤訳侮辱's that mention bands i've never heard that i would like to check out, rather than the endless loop of the past however many decades of how horrible or at least dated all prog* is

*except the prog "i" like

I'm totally glad you liked that Ahleuchatistas album reggie, the math rock tag will probably put a lot of people off but no doubt they are a fearsome band.

late shout out to Robert Adam Gilmour for linking the José Luis Fernández Ledesma tracks earlier. I checked out the Nirgal Vallis album because I've read about it in passing and it's really great, very much on the prettier side of the genre, almost as if there's a big Popol Vuh influence in there somewhere. I definitely recommend it.

According to Discogs the first half of the album is actually from 1985. Shame nobody was paying attention.