ACT II: THE MEANING OF, & ALL THINGS REGARDING MS. LEADING

This is a travesty. What I'm seeing here is nostalgia- a mass nostalgia so great that our desire for something new to call classic progressive rock has convinced us to forget what progressive rock is.

We're so affixed to our memories of prog's glory days, with bands like Genesis, Yes, Jethro Tull, and all the others that now define the original movement that we've forgotten that prog isn't a genre. A typical corporate rock group these days like Blink-182 or whatever it is now does the worst thing in the world- it takes something already established and reworks its image. What are called punk bands now are just bands that try to take the same exact sound as the original punk bands and give it a flashier image with more mass-appeal.

This is what Dear Hunter has done. Even the name is pretentious and without merit- a terrible pun on a phrase with little independent connotation. He took the sounds of the classic bands, gave them a new image, took a leaf out of Magma's book and put all of the music in a single story arc (in this case just so it seems more progressive), and then sold it as prog.

What it is is our equivalent of corporate garbage. This guy has completely ignored the essential tenet of progressive music, and that is the approach. All the art, the unity, the connectedness (no, a single story arc doesn't mean it's thematically connected), and the creativity is gone from this music. I might give this a two if I could put up with trying to pick this apart, though I doubt I'd find anything.