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maani View Drop Down
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    Posted: March 01 2005 at 15:31

This article appeared in The New York Times this past Sunday:

February 27, 2005

Strike Up the Band in 13/4 Time: Progressive Rock Returns

By JON PARELES

IT'S no wonder progressive rock was nearly laughed out of business when punk rock came along. With its album-length suites and cosmic philosophizing, its quasi-classical pomp and showy instrumental interludes, prog rock was long-winded, pretentious, cerebral, fastidiously technical and decidedly self-indulgent - all of which suddenly became no-nos as punk attacked all the ways rock had grown hifalutin and out of touch in the 1970's. Prog had been nerdy all along, the province of musicians and fans who could get all excited about a meter change or a dissonant guitar line. And punk destroyed any hopes that prog might have harbored of gaining cachet to match its elevated ambitions.

But prog is now resurfacing, not only among the diehards who never let go of it - bands like Rush and Dream Theater, labels like Cuneiform Records - but also for younger musicians and fans. Radiohead's most recent albums brought the grandeur of progressive rock back into the Top 10, while the college circuit supports bands as diversely proggy as Coheed and Cambria, which sounds like outtakes from old Rush albums, and the stately, largely instrumental bands Mogwai and Sigur Ros. This week the Mars Volta, a band from El Paso that is prog-rock despite its members' protestations, releases its second more-or-less concept album, "Frances the Mute" (Gold Standard Laboratories/Strummer/Universal).

Until recently, neither fans nor mockers admitted that progressive rock could also provide some of the same thrills - speed, whipsaw changes, sheer pummeling impact - as punk. That's why many of prog's musical twists migrated elsewhere in the 1980's and 1990's: the odd meters to hardcore and thrash metal, the dissonance to primitivist art rock, the convoluted song structures to indie rock and its proud subset of math rock.

Prog may have been hopelessly uncool, but it was nothing if not alternative. Despite its brainy reputation, at its core it was a rebellion against ordinary pop. By any objective reckoning, it was also deeply demented. Who, after all, would labor over a suite in 13/4 time pondering the meaning of free will when the way to gigs and hits was with catchy love songs?

Dementia reigns, to good effect, in the Mars Volta. The band was formed in 2001 by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler Zavala, two former members of At the Drive-In, a college-circuit emo band that fissioned on the verge of wider recognition. (Three other members formed Sparta.) Its first full-length album, "De-Loused in the Comatorium" in 2003, was conceived as the visionary deathbed fantasies of a comatose man. "Frances the Mute" grew out of a diary, found by a band member, of an adopted man seeking his biological parents, and its five extended, multipart songs are named after characters from the diary.

That's according to the band's Web site. True to prog-rock precedent, the lyrics are both copious and hermetic. The Mars Volta's singer and lyricist, Mr. Bixler Zavala, spews streams of consciousness in English and Spanish. They are not for the squeamish: "Behind the snail secretion leaves a dry heave that absorbs a limbless procreation." It would take more than a decoder ring to decipher a storyline on "Frances the Mute," though there are glimmers: "I won't forget who I'm looking for/Oh mother help me," the singer moans in "L'Via L'Viaquez."

Ancestry matters in the music on "Frances the Mute" - both the band's musical precursors and the band members' mixture of Anglo and Hispanic roots. But as with the adopted man in the songs, inheritance means less than its unkempt present-day transformations. The 1970's legacy defines the opening moments of the album, with 12-string guitar and an echoey high voice singing dreamily about "the ocean floor," proving that the Mars Volta has been listening to Led Zeppelin and Yes. Throughout the album, Mr. Bixler Zavala's high tenor veers between Robert Plant's blue wails and Jon Anderson's eunuch harmonies, and the bottom-scraping crunch of Juan Alderete de la Peņa's bass lines also echoes Yes. But unlike some latter-day prog-rock the Mars Volta won't be mistaken for anything from the 20th century.

The closest it comes is in the album's low point (and single), "The Widow," which may be trying to placate radio programmers by offering three mintes of chest-heaving Led Zeppelin homage. But on the album, the band finishes the track with a tangent: an additional two minutes of woozy, abstract keyboards.

More often, the music combines the kitchen-sink inclusiveness of psychedelia with the swerves and jolts of the hip-hop era, to approach the ravenous eclecticism of Latin alternative rock. The Mars Volta embraces musicianly complexities, showing off virtuosity by revving the songs up to frenetic tempos. But it rejects the compulsive neatness that classically trained musicians brought to prog-rock in the 1970's.

A big part of the difference is that punk and hip-hop have trained rock to look for the vulgar before the cosmic. The Mars Volta's songs are expansive, but they're not ethereal. Technical feats like the ones the Mars Volta pulls off in every song can make music seem like a purer, cleaner realm, an escape from imperfect reality. But not in these songs. As the band's producer, Mr. Rodriguez-Lopez keeps the songs raggedly and aggressively concrete. He uses guitar distortion, horn sections, sound effects and what sounds like the manipulation of old-fashioned recording tape to match the music to the near-toxic atmosphere of the lyrics.

Clashes, mutations and sudden leaps fill the songs, which can linger for long minutes over an (odd-meter) vamp and one of Mr. Omar-Rodriguez's jabbing guitar solos or switch instantly between disparate styles. "L'Via L'Viaquez" moves between two characters, two languages, two voices (a clarion, paranoid wail in Spanish and a furtive whisper in English), and two musical idioms: bruising, accelerating funk behind the Spanish, which warns of death threats and vengeance, and a slow, deliberate Latin vamp behind the English, urging, "Don't be afraid." To scramble expectations further, the Latin stretches feature Larry Harlow, a pianist who was an essential member of the 1970's salsa supergroup the Fania All-Stars.

That kind of willfulness fills the album. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore" starts with a full minute of chirping birds (or crickets) before gradually drifting into a mournful waltz with hints of both early King Crimson and mariachi horns.

And lest anyone doubt the band's affinity for the old-fashioned epic, the longest song on "Frances the Mute" is also the album's tour de force. For most of its 32 minutes, "Cassandra Geminni" hurtles ahead on a tightly wound, breakneck guitar riff; its first section is called "Tarantism," named for the uncontrollable urge to dance supposedly caused by a tarantula's bite. Mr. Bixler Zavala sings about birth, darkness and destruction; guitars and bass work in contrapuntal patterns, strings and horns pile into the mix, the song dissolves into free jazz and reappears. It's wildly, glorious excessive, indulging the prog-rock impulses that are simply too ecstatic for rock to leave behind.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 15:44
Im buying that album today.... That comment enough?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 15:55

I guess I'll be one of the first to rock the boat .

For me prog is dead as a dead horse. I love my albums accumulated back in the seventies and early eighties and continue to listen to them on my old Micro Seiki turntable whenever I get the chance. But prog died back in '76 or thereabouts. I think the only post seventies prog bands I have in my collection are from Anekdoten, Marillion (Fish era) Dream Theatre ( which I don't really consider a prog band) and Primus ( Hey if Rush is a prog band then Primus is a prog band ). I've tried to listen to some of these newer prog bands but they are just not as exciting as the glory days back in the seventies. My latest purchase of a CD was this morning, Ramstien's Reise Reise from HMV. I know I'm rubbing the cat's fur the wrong way but I guess I'm stuck in another decade. Hey I only just got rid of my dial phone a couple of years ago because it was driving my wife nuts. 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 17:00

VB:

I suppose you also continue to use Telex, heat food on a stove, use a typewriter, and have no answering machine on your land line.   However, you are obviously not a complete Luddite, since you have a computer and know how to post to a discussion forum...

That said, although I agree that prog went largely "underground" partly (but by no means solely or even primarily) as a result of the advent of the punk movement, I don't believe it actually disappeared.  Indeed, I believe it was not only "stable," but continuing to find new modes of expression.  While bands like Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Rush "adapted" to a new (admittedly more "commercial") audience, others, like King Crimson, underwent personnel and style changes, but remained prog.  And new bands were finding their feet, including (among many others) Marillion, Pendragon, IQ, Spock's Beard, Flower Kings and Dream Theater (I am an increasingly convinced believer in the "progressive metal" genre).

Most importantly, however, is that this is really only the tip of the iceberg, since we are speaking only of English and U.S. prog.  In this regard, the prog movement was probably even more continuously active in Europe (especially Italy), Scandinavia, Japan, and even parts of South America.  How can one even begin to discuss the prog movement - or claim its premature demise - if we ignore the dozens of prog bands from Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, both those who were early influences to more "recent" groups like Anglagard, Deus ex Machina, et al?

No, prog never died.  Indeed, your cynicism does not allow for prog itself to adapt, much less progress.  Certainly, most of us (especially the "older folk") can be premitted our "nostalgia" for the past, especially those of us who were there, and lived through the advent of prog.  And perhaps there will never be as "cohesive" a prog movement as there was in the late 60s through mid-70s.  However, it is defeatist to believe that prog simply "died."  There is a great deal of excellent - even great - prog out there, in all of its sub-genres.

My answer to the article would be this: Like the tortoise and the hare, punk may well have left prog "in the dust" at first.  However, punk went nowhere in a very short time, and lives on only in a handful of thrash metal bands.  Meanwhile, prog plodded along, calmly and humbly remaining true to its priniciples, and is not simply in a "resurgeance," but is now taking back its rightful place as an important, creative, viable and respectable subgenre of rock music.

Peace.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 17:16

There's really not much debate that prog's classic stuff came out during the time VB mentioned, and many hardcore prog fans can stick happily within the 70s. I sympathize; neo-prog and prog-metal never did much for me, and the new stuff like Radiohead and The Mars Volta is something quite different...made by 'alternative' folks who happen to like certain things about prog, but ultimately belonging strictly to neither genre.

The article's tone towards prog is an odd dance on the line between positive and negative. I suppose music critics are still too keenly aware of mainstream forces to take much of a stand in either direction. It's good to know your history, but it's also good to approach something new without too much baggage. And The Mars Volta has a pretty novel approach, something rare in the music world.

It may be good news for the prog genre that people are becoming less likely to have that kneejerk Lester Bangs reaction.

The writer missed a chance to mention that 'nerd culture' is seeing a recent general surge in the mainstream, so logically the popularity of prog should increase right along with the recent boom in Tolkien, Star Wars, computer gaming, etcetera.

I don't think that this is quite the underground resurgence that maani describes...I think the old days of prog are really as dead as VB claims. What we may be looking at for the future is more artists who are able to draw from the progressive rock influence without as much reservation. Maybe even the birth of a new genre, just as psychedelia gave birth to prog.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 18:08

James:

Your comment re the resrugance of a "nerd culture" and the almost expected concommitant resurgance of a prog culture is quite astute.  You might want to write a short letter to the editor with that thought (I will not have room for it in mine).  I expect you might get published.  You can "toss off" a letter online to [email protected].

You also say that the tone of the article dances between positive and negative.  I don't agree.  I find it unnecessarily denigrating, at least of prog's past.  What is ironic - if not outright bizarre - about this is that Jon Pareles was very much a proponent of, or at least a reasonably reliable supporter of, progressive rock in its heyday.  In that regard, he seems to have tilted way too far toward Bangs, and I, for one, am annoyed at him.

Peace.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 18:29
I do not think Progressive Rock ever went away.It just disappeared from Popular Culture-which is not the same.I remember similar claims over the last 20 years that Heavy Rock had disappeared and "guitar bands" too.How do you make all non-chart orientated music disappear? You read the Music Section in any Daily Newspaper.Dead



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 18:32

Reed Lover:

  Could not have said it better myself...

Peace.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 18:55

After re-reading the article, I still think the writer is (relatively) moderate; I can't argue with most of his descriptions or characterizations. The weird thing is that we're more likely to take his wording as insulting, even though there's nothing fundamentally wrong with being "long-winded, pretentious, cerebral, fastidiously technical and decidedly self-indulgent". Even "helplessly uncool" is only scary to someone who places too much value on being cool... 

Punk was perfect for its time; when you're bored with heroes, you need some interesting anti-heroes to liven things up. Now that everyone in music is marketably cool, rebellious and aggresive, it's a good time for the hopelessly uncool to unleash their pompous self-indulgence again.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 01 2005 at 19:00
Prog is Dead.
Long Live Prog.
Marmalade...I like marmalade.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 00:19

Cluster:

Peace.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 00:37
I think it is coming back. sort of a Neo-neo-prog.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 03:07

I told you Radiohead are prog...

 

/ducks



Edited by Certif1ed
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 06:31

I think that Fripp's comment on the optimum band being a small, mobile, intelligent unit holds more water today than at any time. If you apply this philosophy to a genre, the analogy breaks down a bit in places but it could be said that much like the SST bands in the US during the 80's, prog's smaller size has allowed much more freedom of movement. The fact that you can have such a wide array of musical styles inside a genre is a wonderful testament to its inclusive nature and those that want to be there are there by choice, not commercial necessity.

There will always be intelligent individuals who will look to stretch the boundaries of music in whatever direction that intrigues/excites them and though not always included in the progressive fold, they keep the spirit of bands like the Moody Blues, Crimson, Floyd, etc who looked left when all the others looked right.

Welcome them with open arms.






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- Clement Atlee, on Winston Churchill
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 11:38
Well maani you were right about a few things, I still heat food on a stove, I don`t have an answering machine because I hate getting  answering machines when I make calls so I don`t put others through the same frustration and although I paid for it, the computer it is really my wife`s and I barely know how to use it.
 Anyway I will check out this band, The Mars Volta and write an objective review on one of their albums in the archives, keeping in mind a story from my childhood, " Green Eggs and Ham ".
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 11:40
Vibe : Leave your beep after the message !!!!!!!!! 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 11:41
Headradio ???????? 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 11:52

Can you stop puking on my front porch LV?Confused




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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 11:54
OK I´ll try..........................BARF .......Sorry 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 02 2005 at 12:34
Obviously, prog isn't dead.

(The punk-adoring) media all 'round the world know that one must not speak bad of the dead or the ghost may come and haunt them.


Cheers

-Beau
--No enemy but time--
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