Is Fates Warning underrated?

progbethyname wrote: ^ man, your in for a good time then. I can say with all my Prog heart, that Darkness In A Different Light eats FWX for breakfast. It slays it. Happy listening man. Think it'll go over well.

First off, I would like to say Hello. This is my first posting on this forum and likely will not be the last.

To give you a brief synopsis of me and my musical tastes: I am Canadian, was a young teen in the very early 80s and was very well entrenched in my interests of heavy and progressive forms of music from very early childhood, as I was introduced to one of the WIDEST and most prolific music collectors that I had know (my mother of all people!). I was born in '67 and was rocking out to Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Iron Butterfly and Rush (although they were from the middle of the 70s - living in Toronto had me exposed to Rush before they hit the airwaves and commercial success) from the earliest of my memories and kept looking for more music that compared favourably with these bands. Yes, my sister and I also grew up enjoying an ecclectically wide variety of music, too - going through the pop of the 70s and early 80s from Yes, the Cars, Teenage Head all the way through to Blondie, Sugarhill Gang, Styx, The Ramones and everything in between.

My life took a dark turn at the end of the 70s and at the beginning of the 80s which really pushed me into the darker and heavier sounds of music at that time: Iron Maiden (with Paul Di Anno on vocals), Anvil, Razor, Voivod, Celtic Frost, Omen, Fates Warning and Queensryche all by 1984. I had always been a Metal/Thrash/Punk fan but the driving force of my appetite was the pure musicianship that I have enjoyed with early Fates Warning, Queensryche's 4 song demo (Queen Of The Ryche), Omen's Warning Of Danger (although I was into them with Curse Of The Dragon when that record was released), Iron Maiden's Killers and Metallica's Ride The Lightning, Anvil's Metal On Metal and especially Forged In Fire albums and Finally Razor's Evil Invaders albums. These are still the seminal albums that I enjoy to this day and they play frequently in my daily life.

Honourable mentions go out to Infernal Majesty for their metal assaulting brilliance and Type O Negative for their heavy goth stylings that swept me up and the end of '89 and the beginning of '90 - when I first heard Black No 1. They are also part of my seminal collection that gets played regularly.

As to the topic of Fates Warning being underrated: Hell yeah! I have ALWAYS felt that they deserved more attention than they have been given, just like Anvil (the Godfathers of Thrash), Omen (the Godfathers of operatic metal) and Razor (pure out technical aggression thrash). But unfortunately, the masses of humanity don't dig heavy stuff, so they have been glossed over by the more commercially accessible pap-smears from Queensryche post demo stylings and Dream Theatre (which I can't sit through still as it is all BORING!).

Five years ago, working with a friend of a friend and hanging around a fair bit together, we started checking into some prog rock and prog metal bands that stimulated our tastes (my friend being just a little less attuned to heaviness than I am); we have come to explore bands like Mogwai (although I have liked Mogwai since the late 70s or very early 80s from a tv show called New Music on CITY tv), Porcupine Tree and Spock's  Beard. My friend has been a subscriber to another prog rock review site and has far more knowledge and access to bands than I have reached out for. I still look for new bands that raise my eyebrows and get my feet tapping, head rocking and hands drumming along - you know the REALLY good bands make all three happen simultaneously, whereas maybe the decent bands will get one of those to happen depending upon mood/activity.

It's just like the tv shows: The Voice and American Idol - if it ain't country, none of the country bumpkins will endorse it or give it any attention and the whole entertainment industry buries it. I kind of shake my head and walk away from the idiots that only drink the kool aid that the mass media pushes. There is soooooo much more out there that is way BETTER to enjoy, you just gotta look a little harder. I promise!!!!!

I just checked my last.fm account and FW was sitting at 8th place in the alltime charts. I used to look at my so called neighbours at last fm and I rarely saw FW very high on anyones list. So I´d say yes they are underrated. And I guess it also shows a lack of intrest for the band in Finland that they haven´t played here as far as I know. I really love this band. FWX is my favorite by them and I also don´t really get all the hype about Pleasant Grey.

Also I hear there´s a new FW album coming in the first half of next year! At least that´s what it says on their facebook page.

To a degree yes and their drummer Mark Zonder is most certainly woefully underrated. He is rarely ever mentioned among the best of metal and progressive rock drummers and he certainly should be. He is very bit as if not MORE talented than a Scott Rockenfield (Queensryche) for example.

^^^  More the Jon Arch line up though.  The Mark Zonder lineup seems to fall in a sort of no mans land, with neither the prog crowd nor the metal crowd taking after them.  Fun fact:  Arch auditioned for Dream Theater and claimed they tried to get him to sing in ways he disliked. 

I think this post is full of FW fans.  I only have one FW album: Parallels.  It is decent, but when I first got it a couple years ago, I couldn't get into it much, preferring instead Voivod, Karnivool, (Some) Queensryche, Riverside, Pain of Salvation, and (some) Dream Theater (bands that I was also collecting at the time).  Parallels has since grown on me slightly. So, with that limited exposure, I don't think Parallels is underrated as a "prog" album (but perhaps as a metal album).

Prog-jester wrote: Fantastically overlooked band, but mostly due to their own apathy in the 00-10s, too. Three albums in like 17 years? C'mon guys, how do you expect them people learn about you, when you're ignoring your own Facebook page for months and don't have an Instagram account ().

well, Matheos and Alder especially were quite busy: Alder had a side project called Engine, two albums plus he is the vocalist of Redemption (new album to come  this year)

Matheos was busy especially with OSI (4 albums) plus Arch/Matheos and some guest appearances that I know of (he's got some solo albums as well).

zwordser wrote: I think this post is full of FW fans.  I only have one FW album: Parallels.  It is decent, but when I first got it a couple years ago, I couldn't get into it much, preferring instead Voivod, Karnivool, (Some) Queensryche, Riverside, Pain of Salvation, and (some) Dream Theater (bands that I was also collecting at the time).  Parallels has since grown on me slightly.  So, with that limited exposure, I don't think Parallels is underrated as a "prog" album (but perhaps as a metal album).

verslibre wrote: Where Fates Warning's Parallels is concerned, Queensryche (a band I do like up through Empire) never indulged the textures/themes present therein. The sole exception might be "Silent Lucidity" (which suffered from much FM overplay). To reiterate, I feel No Exit, Perfect Symmetry, Parallels and Inside Out are all stellar recordings.

I have to echo these sentiments. It has been a while since I listened to them, but Parallels has always been my favorite Fates CD. I enjoy their newer stuff but I feel like the sound they created on Parallels and Inside Out was their best.Maybe it's time to relisten to them.