One and Done?

patrickq wrote: Anyone run into something like this? I’m really not into prog metal. At all. But I think Operation:Mindcrime is absolutely fantastic and better than many albums by groups I do love. OK, there’s one Dream Theater song and one by Angra that I think are really good, but that’s it. Just curious if you have any personal five-star albums in prog subgenres you otherwise aren’t a fan of.

siLLy puPPy wrote: If i click on anything other than a link on any of the PA or MMA sites it takes me to this link: https://www.oath.com/advertising/publishers/ad-server/ This has only been happening in the last week or two

I'm not that fond of Gong's catalog, but "You!" drives me bananas!!  Amazing LP, five stars in my book.

If i click on anything other than a link on any of the PA or MMA sites it takes me to this link:

siLLy puPPy wrote: Not in the slightest. I love everything from cheesy pop to the most extreme metal and farthest out trips possible. The secret is to tune in to the frequency of the music at hand and hone in to where the specified genre's peak points are. Everything is beautiful just like every element on the period table is gorgeous where its atomic principles reign supreme.  And BTW, WTF is this crap where this Oath page pops up if you happen to click on all the invisible space on this site?

verslibre wrote: patrickq wrote: Anyone run into something like this? I’m really not into prog metal. At all. But I think Operation:Mindcrime is absolutely fantastic and better than many albums by groups I do love. OK, there’s one Dream Theater song and one by Angra that I think are really good, but that’s it. Just curious if you have any personal five-star albums in prog subgenres you otherwise aren’t a fan of.   If you like O:M, I strongly recommend QR's first full studio album, The Warning.

Before Operation:Mindcrime there was this guy who raved endlessly about their first EP (which I always thought was called Queen of the Reich. Haven’t heard any pre-Operation:Mindcrime Queensrÿche since then (probably 1987). I wasn’t impressed then, but that was 30+ years ago. I’ll give The Warning a try. Interesting, this dude was a Fates Warning fan too.

Can't think of a one.......done.

I don't like how Symphonic Prog is used either, or many neologisms (if not new now, they once were). Having grown up with classical music (or more accurately Western Art Music), I found the term Symphonic Prog rather misleading. That said, once something has come into common parlance, and assuming that enough people will be able to understand what is said so it's not that confusing, I'm generally fine with such constructs. Neo-Prog is one that bothers some, and it has been suggested that that should be revised. Perhaps Symphonic Prog should only refer to ones that fit classic symphonic definitions. Revisionism is something that does often get my goat, and I do like terms to be understood in the context of a fairly comprehensive history.

I dislike in most restaurants here that when they say entrée it just means the "main" rather than the starter course. French and English are Canada's two official languages so I would even more expect it not to be used that way than, say, in Australia. Perhaps somebody got it wrong somehow and it stuck. I also dislike the politicised, rather than coming from psychologists, forms of phobia as a suffix -- meaning bigotry generally rather than as a diagnosed mental disorder that involves an irrational fear, which is not to say that one needn't be a bigot and have an irrational fear, of course (height and open spaces bigots are the worst!) ;)

"I would like to see the "progressive" genres and definitions, be more up to par with the history of music, and thus make these things CLEAR and less confusing. AND, right after that make a point that this is about the "composer" and "compositions from that group" and not just one song."

Of course once can classify on the song level, and one song is a composition. A composer may focus on a different musical genre for each album, and in an album each song may be of a different genre. An album can be very eclectic.

What I find worrisome is the general lack of rational scepticism amongst many, even among many people thought of as geeks... and climate change is scary, so are tsunamis and terrorism, and well, actually I find a lot of stuff very scary, but I digress. EDIT: What else is worrying is that I make typos all too often.

Edited by Logan - June 12 2019 at 15:23

At least when it comes to Prog Archives classification (which I think too limited and limiting), I'd say with most of the albums I like by bands included in categories I don't generally enjoy, the albums are not good representatives of the category, and if we had album-tagging, then the "genre" and "genres" of an album would tell a different or more complex story. I won't have good examples for this topic, so feel free to skip this post altogether.

I'd mention Kayo Dot. Now it is in the RIO/ Avant Prog category at Prog Archives (if we categorised by album rather than band, then albums would be placed differently), but when I joined it was in Prog Metal, later it was moved to Experimental/Post Metal, and then later it was moved to RIO/ Avant Prog. That said, I prefer non-metal Kayo Dot such as Blue Lambency Downward to the metal of Choirs of the Eye, but I do like Choirs of the Eye. Related to it, I also enjoy Maudlin of the Well, and that is included in Experimental/Post Metal. Actually, there are a number of albums in that category that I enjoy.

Of what is sometimes called the vanilla Prog Metal category, I can only think of one band that is included in it that I enjoy, Diablo Swing Orchestra (though I wouldn't describe it as vanilla and it's not really five stars to me). I like the debut The Butcher's Ballroom, which is fairly avant-garde metal meets swing.

While I don't much like metal generally, there are many that have that as a compent (late edit, I meant component) that I do enjoy, such as Secret Chiefs 3, Höyry-kone, Alamaailman Vasarat, Taal..., maybe I'd include Guapo for a certain brutalness (or should I say brutality?) in this list.

Neo-Prog is not a category I'm into, yet I enjoyed one called Discipline (later it was moved out of that category). Right now included in that category I like Marc Ceccotti solo for Sometimes Around Saturn, but then despite any Neo-Prog elements, and his relatedness as an artist, I would not classify the album as Neo-prog (it's spacey, and more experimental). It's not a five star album to me.

I'm also not generally not big on "Heavy prog" or "hard rock", but I can think of quite a number of ones of that ilk(or where that is a quality), especially early ones with psych qualities that would rate five stars for me, and various of those are included in our Heavy Prog category.

Edited by Logan - June 12 2019 at 12:42

I have found some pretty good Progressive Metal on this site listening to bands I hadn't heard of before, even in this current year.  There has been some surprisingly dynamic music come out.  The genre I usually have problems with is the Extreme/Tech Metal genre.  I find that I don't like the growling or screaming vocals that are usually present on that genre, however, if the music is varied enough, I have found some bands that I love, like Opeth, Agalloch, Kayo Dot, and Orphaned Land to name a few.  So I usually try to hear a bit of everything just in case.  Some of the Progressive Metal bands (and the Experimental/Post Metal bands) use dirty vocals, but to a lesser extent usually, and that can scare people off, but there have been some real gems come from those genres that I would have otherwise missed if I ignored them all together.