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PENGUINDF12

Dex F.


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PROG REVIEWER

Member since: 9/20/2004 • Forum posts: 830 • Last visit: 6/7/2016 7:16:55 PM EST
Location: United States

Progressive Biography

I am a college student currently in 16th grade, at the University of Oklahoma, studying composition. My interests are anime and music. Nice to meet you!

I was introduced to progressive rock by an accident, mostly. I had heard a few Pink Floyd and Rush songs coming from classic rock stations (mostly my Dad's doing: I listened to a lot of 70s stuff), and I always liked music with a deeper meaning to it. However, I didn't know that there was an entire genre that represented the handful of songs I enjoyed.

The first CDs I owned were fairly standard for a nerdly 10-year-old: Dr. Demento, Weird Al, and Linkin Park. I had always hated blatant radio pop (recently I sort of enjoy it, but that's another story...) But I failed to notice the black album with the prism on it in the CD shelf until the spring of 2004...

It's an odd story how I came to listen to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." In my creative writing class at school, we were making an anthology of the class' writings for the year. Somebody suggested calling it "The Dark Side of Words." I never found out who it was, but I told them my Dad had that album and I brought it to school for the class to hear. It blew me away. I listened to it over and over again that summer. Then, one day, I heard "The Wall." I became even more obsessed; I listened to nothing else for months; my family soon came to cringe at the very mention of the name "Pink Floyd." Such is the way of an obsessed teenage nerd.

From that point on I knew that I liked Pink Floyd better than anything I had ever heard before; but I still did not know of the existence of so-called "progressive" rock. I discovered Pink Floyd's "progressive" categorization when I looked them up on my dad's "School of Rock" DVD; I decided to look up more "progressive" bands, and my search led me to this site.

My first experience outside of the Floyd was Alan Parsons Project's "Tales of Mystery & Imagination," followed by the threesome of Yes' "Fragile", Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick", and Roger Waters' "Amused to Death." And from there I found more bands, more albums, each one more mind-blowing than the last. They inspired me to learn bass guitar and take up once more the old piano lessons. I've been struggling to get a band off the ground ever since. This is sounding increasingly cliched, no?

Anyway, enough about ancient history. My progressive rock albums I need not list here. Every album I have I will review after I feel I have heard it enough times to truly comprehend it. (July 2007 note: or so I say here - if I'm telling the truth, then I don't comprehend 75% of what I own...) I will often research the album endlessly before reviewing, so there's usually a big gap between when get an album and when I review it. Concept albums, especially, require intense study online. Either that, or I'm just being lazy and forget to review. Usually, it's just the latter.

A major problem of having been a young person is that every year my tastes seemed to change radically. At 14, I listened mainly to Linkin Park, Weird Al, anime soundtracks, and Dr. Demento. At 15, I listened mainly to Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis (as well as other classic prog). At 16, I got into weirder American sounds such as Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. At 17, I listened to The Residents and Thinking Plague profusely. At 18, I branched out into some non-prog, including Devo, Oingo Boingo, Tom Waits, and Daft Punk. Since college age, I've been open to listening to music of any genre, including much 20th-century classical music, although what we call "progressive rock" still holds the most dear place in my heart.

Reviews distribution by sub-genre


 Sub-genreNb of reviewsAvg rating
1 RIO/Avant-Prog743.78
2 Symphonic Prog293.97
3 Eclectic Prog264.08
4 Crossover Prog124.00
5 Heavy Prog93.33
6 Canterbury Scene94.22
7 Psychedelic/Space Rock73.86
8 Proto-Prog74.57
9 Prog Folk64.50
10 Progressive Metal42.75
11 Post Rock/Math rock24.50
12 Krautrock24.00
13 Prog Related15.00

Reviews and Ratings

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