Metal: good! Prog Metal: Blagh!

I like some artists classified as progressive metal, but I generally find that scene to have a worse signal-to-noise ratio than straight-up progressive rock or metal. A lot of prog metal groups just feel like outsider approximations of one of their parent genres, and when listening to band like Edge of Sanity or especially Opeth I just don't find their song structures anywhere as well put together as the 70s prog rock groups they're influenced by.

On the other hand, there are groups like Voivod who manage to take that kind of "outside perspective" on their inspirations and actually make it work to their favour. I'm not sure how they manage to pull it off, but somehow they do. Maybe it's because Voivod have a more "deconstructionist" approach to music composition than those other two groups, and coming from more of an eccentric punk background in the vein of Killing Joke and Die Kreuzen they're outsiders to both metal and prog?

Then again, by the token of the premise I threw out earlier that'd mean they'd screw up even worse.