progressive rock finally gets its own chart

WTF is Amused to Death doing on there?

apparently it just got reissued

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/07/roger-waters-amused-to-death-reissue-review.html

i've still never heard it

kinda surprised that Symphony X is on that list. they're at the least proggy they've ever been in their career on the last three-album arc. not even doing 20-minute songs anymore!

also is that Satch a reissue or is that motherfucker actually still shitting out fetid note-clouds of guitar suck?

looks like a new one

http://www.popmatters.com/review/195742-joe-satriani-shockwave-supernova/

to make this about me again i've never heard a single satriani song all the way through. and on that list above, i've never heard nightwish, or even heard of public service broadcasting. because i am thrall right now to the amazing new IRON MAIDEN album i'm wondering if the powers that be will deem them eligible for the progressive rock chart

also interesting is the top ten bestselling 'progressive rock' albums of the 21st century listed in that BBC article

1.Muse - Black Holes & Revelations
2.Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of the Moon
3.Radiohead - OK Computer
4.Kate Bush - Aerial
5.Jeff Wayne - The War Of The Worlds
6.Air - Moon Safari
7.Sigur Ros - Takk
8.Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
9.Genesis - Selling England By The Pound
10.Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

So Selling England has outsold all later Genesis albums since 2001? Well, I suppose that's encouraging.

did they reissue it?

definitely the right Genesis album to be on top.

i am thrall right now to the amazing new IRON MAIDEN album i'm wondering if the powers that be will deem them eligible for the progressive rock chart

Iron Maiden are a PROGRESSIVE BAND, one of the best ones and they are... oh forget it

perhaps ODD Ss will make a video about this subject

I once said this about the Billboard Alternative chart but it seems even more applicable here:

Tbh, I'm not even really sure what this chart is supposed to represent at this point.

dear fucking christ these poll options

might have to vote faith no more based on previous form. haven't heard the new one

this chart is obviously hideous nonsense

Air, Nightwish and FNM sharing a specialized chart is amusing

None of this is amusing. This is why people hate prog. And if this is prog, they have justification.

Not even Steven Wilson is on the list, and for all that he's a bit crap he's like Mr Modern Prog himself, has Tube adverts and all

btw Drones is one of the worst albums ever made, obv - might be even worse than The Resistance

Public service broadcasting is the biggest pile of nonsense, i would rather vote for necrotic testicles

And I'm not talking about the Latvian spacerock band

I did know that Amused to Death had been reissued and it's by far the best album on this list, so that one. Agree that the absence of Steven Wilson is wtf.

this chart prog is obviously hideous nonsense

Would it be a great loss if I just picture bombed this thread with photos of giant piles of synthesisers y / n

y

I kinda wanted to start a thread (almost certainly doomed) about Prog 3.0 and the monthly Prog magazine that comes out, to see if anybody else scours it to try and extract any good modern progressive/whatever bands. So far, for me, Regal Worm, Kitten Pyramid, Cranium Pie and a few others spring to mind.

I like a lot of Prog and I enjoy reading articles about Caravan and Stackridge, but so much of the new music they cover is poor, the cover mount CDs can be particularly hilarious with amazing sub standard bedroom demo artists.

The announcement of the chart coincides with the annual Progressive Music Awards, at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London on Thursday night.
Among those being honoured is founder member of Genesis Tony Banks, who will receive the 2015 Prog God Award.

lol

last year's winner Peter Gabriel with his Prog God Award:

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9728354.ece/alternates/w620/Peter-Gabriel.jpg

The absurdity of this chart is to be expected given an overly broad definition and the list being based solely on sales figures.

FWIW I like the new Tim Bowness record well enough although not as much as his earlier recordings, either solo or with No-Man. Top prog for me so far this year include Echolyn's I Heard You Listening and Vespero's Fitful Slumber Until 5AM.

2016 Prog God Award - Steve Hackett
2017 Prog God Award - Mike Rutherford
2018 Prog God Award - Phil Collins
2019 Prog God Award - Anthony Phillips
2020 Prog God Award - Ray Wilson

2021 Prog God Award - Jonathan King

I like a lot of Prog and I enjoy reading articles about Caravan and Stackridge, but so much of the new music they cover is poor, the cover mount CDs can be particularly hilarious with amazing sub standard bedroom demo artists.

How much do you have to pay to get a track onto those covermounts anyway? Most bedroom prog guys work in IT I think so they can afford it, however much it is.

MaresNest i could get behind a prog 3.0 thread since this revival has been one of the more interesting musical developments over the past few years. you're totally right about how frustrating it is to sift through the new stuff since a lot of it sucks. (feel the same way about punk rock.) those low points (and there are a lot of them) are dreadful, and the high points are rarely noticed outside of place like progressiveears. it takes work to keep discovering good new stuff, and the mainstream press pretends that 'good new prog' doesn't exist, in favor of detailing every nuance of development in indie rock, metal, hip hop, and dance music, no matter how mediocre or fleeting. somehow unlike those other modes of creativity prog is defined by and dismissed because of its worst elements, or like there's a game of musical chairs going on, and prog can never have a seat at the table, or something. and then an album like the new IRON MAIDEN will come out and it's like come on people, there's something happening here!

I haven't heard any proof that a prog-revival is any good but I haven't been listening. The folk-rock revival that went mainstream a few years ago was sooo bad. There are songs on the radio that I can't picture without the worst hamboning (imagine the shoryuken hand configuration and alternating leg blasts to a beat)

Reading the magazine is kinda interesting as it simultaneously deals with the 70s stuff, the 80s revival and the more diffuse idea of what's going on now, which takes in a reasonable amount of genres from Freak Folk to Cinematic Goth Metal, what's certain is that it's hard to tell if there is any unified kind of revival or dialogue, or perhaps that's not the point and it's just the magazine's own dialogue that is imposed on a bunch of disparate bands.

It would be nice to have a breezy, here-check-out-this-band, youtube thread on Prog V3.0, however like punk-rock, there's the endless möbius loop of discussion about what *is* Prog? are they Prog? what does progressive music mean?

the all-over-the-placeness of 'Prog' is a feature for me, not a bug, as with 'MOJO' and 'The Wire'. but reading 'Prog' is nowhere near the same experience as 'MOJO', 'The Wire', or even 'Uncut' -- the quality of the writing (and editing) doesn't come close to comparing; it's almost more like a lost of press releases strung together . . . but at least someone's finally acknowledging that proggy stuff is being released, and that's there's a lot of good stuff that got overlooked in the past, and collating a lot of this information in one place

i'd be into that thread . . . there've been attempts in the past i'm too busy at the moment to pull up from the archives, but not a dedicated 'rolling prog 20xx' like with psych or tompkins square. i think that would be cool. prog is so stigmatized that acknowledging its existence in and of itself feels like work, so i could very well see that thread facing an early demise of attrition

i think the stigma clouding prog in part fuels the endless mobius loop of discussion of what it *is*. aficionados proceed from a defensive posture because for whatever reason it's one of the few underdog modes of expression it's okay to pile on. just putting together for the sake of discussion a loose canon of neo-prog -- RUINS, MARS VOLTA, MEW, STEVEN WILSON, SIGUR ROS, GUAPO, RADIOHEAD, MOTORPSYCHO, BATTLES, etc. -- is potentially a fraught exercise because even people inclined to listen to prog without prejudice might take offense that a band they feel vicariously cool listening to could be considered 'prog'

Van Der Graf Generator did 9/11

I think it's coming,
All signs are very near, all signs are that
Pain shall come
And change shall run
Down through my heart
And shake my knees
And now it is coming,
All around is the humming
Of the World.

Too late, with my balance gone,
Dead-eyed doll,
I'm falling, falling
Back to where I began...

I'd have a few alterations to that neo-prog canon tbh. Generally I despise canons, though, so maybe that is accurate

Singer Steven Wilson crowned prog rock king

So, based on this list (and especially based on that list of bestselling 21st Century prog albums)...is prog just whatever someone decides to call prog? Because I thought I knew but guess I have no idea what prog is.

i'm with you louis, hence the "loose" in the bad pun "loose canon"

steven wilson is a king of rock period, an ENO of the now, with his own stuff, producing OPETH, and remixing reissues of KING CRIMSON, YES, JETHRO TULL, and GENTLE GIANT. i wonder when he can get any sleep

seems like they're (whoever 'they' are) are trying to pry 'prog' away as a designation for just symphonic prog and classic prog rock -- yes, floyd, crimson, supertramp -- and stretch it to fit contemporary bands who are openly emulating those bands or at least owning up to the influence of symphonic prog and classic prog rock

I'm going to have to post this again, aren't I?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-cKxcUt7X8

^^^this is prog, Old Lunch. This is prog.

THAT is prog! dan britton is a genius (birds & buildings is a pretty great band of his, too). guys like this make awesome music and it just sits there, almost totally unnoticed and unheard; there's no frisson or cachet to discovery, like there is say in the psych underground . . . which i love with equal tragic ardor, hearing the two as very much related

dan britton is definitely at the good-at-composing & forward-thinking end of the prog revival and i will boost him whenever i can. there's a lot of reactionary or unimaginative cheese (or, worse, instrument wank) in the neo-prog canon but if you know where to look there are also brilliant works and stuff that just wasn't being done a while back

but this is limiting ourselves just to prog qua prog - there's all sorts of progressive or modular songwriting going on across the board, whether metal, pop, avant-garde, indie, electronic or all of the above

Yes, that sounds like what I think of as prog. I think I just may have missed the memo that definition of prog had grown to encompass the likes of Air and Faith No More and Kate Bush.

It is kind of hilarious that Black Holes & Revelations is the 'bestselling prog album' of our time when it only has one vaguely prog song on it (tbf, more or less the greatest - and i use that term guardedly - thing that band ever did)

i've never thought of AIR or KATE BUSH as anything other than prog or 'proggish'. david gilmour discovered kate bush, she sings on peter gabriel's 'so', and she's released 40 minute songs!

and louis you are totally right. what i'm saying is the stigma clouding 'prog' limits apprehension and appreciation of the inter-genre modular songwriting going on. all these people coming out of the prog rock closet (so to speak) helps clear up reception, i think

never heard Deluge Grander before and am not overly impressed tbh. far from being "forward-thinking", it sounds like it could have been made at any time since the early '70s. that's why I love Wilson, because he's doing something fresh and exciting w/the prog genre. can't hear anything remotely innovative in that clip.

I just bought that Deluge Grander album this week along with the Birds And Buildings debut.

Where's Frogbs been? Is Algerian Goalkeeper totally gone?

is prog just whatever someone decides to call prog?

If ILM is anything to go by, yes.

Deluge Grander is kind of subtly contemporary. It's like prime-era Canterbury-scene keyboard prog with a hefty dose of metal or indie songwriting. The innovation is in the songwriting rather than the sonics.

And the outro is...well, if you get that far YOU'RE IN FOR A TREAT

But you wanted forward-thinking? You wanted postmodern? You wanted completely fucking demented?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE2ulYKK56U

You got what you asked for.

Prog V3.0 Discussion Thread

We can move over now if we like, can some kind soul cut and paste the last bits of discussion from here? (at work and my attention to the net is spotty)

Is Algerian Goalkeeper totally gone?

― Robert Adam Gilmour

in the head?

Haven't seen him in a while.

Tom d had him silenced

I don't know anything about Tom D or any controversial discussions Algerian Goalkeeper may have had.

check yr webmail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=tfr-h6BaYN8

Public Service Broadcasting - The Race For Space

not to drag this offtopic but I don't know how it is possible that there is a band called this that releases an album called this and yet I find them so very dull. the only possible explanation is that the band is actually me but I don't remember recording this and I am very ashamed if I ever smacked these Biggles-fetishist samples so artlessly on the one every time

mental note: if ever in a pub with a Public Service Broadcasting fan who calls them PSB insist on pretending I think we're talking about the Pet Shop Boys and refuse to back down (not sure if this will work better than the time I feigned continued belief that a Manics fan calling Mr Richey J. Edwards "Richard James" was talking about the Aphex Twin)

I bought Prog magazine once as my coworker's bedroom prog duo had a v short blurb in it; it didn't have a CD though and was very expensive for a CD-less thing with quite poor writing, but I was somewhat intrigued by some of the descriptions and might buy it again if I see one with a free CD. This chart, however, I am struggling to see the point or unifying concept (lol prog etc) behind.

all I know is that this chart has inspired some vintage imago tears, therefore may it have a fruitful life for decades to come

i hope that wouldn't offend the passing spacecadets of the interwebs

sorry, qualmsley. I liked that remix you posted (a lot more than I expected as I've never really worked up an opinion one way or the other about either Soulwax or Tame Impala) and apologise for ranting about something unrelated after it

I also concede that offending the me-s of the internet and elsewhere is probably a pretty good raison d'etre, or perhaps it is too easily done to be worth anything, but either way no need to avoid it

anyway my post may have been too narcissistic to make sense but I just meant that the whole aesthetic of Public Service Broadcasting should be exactly up my street, and yet, it is not. which will not bother them and should not bother their fans in the slightest of course

or if it is DJP's post I am supposed to be offended by then no, OTM I think

you're all perfectly horrid

voted Satch in a Sanjaya type move

There are songs on the radio that I can't picture without the worst hamboning (imagine the shoryuken hand configuration and alternating leg blasts to a beat)

― The Once-ler, Friday, September 4, 2015 5:11 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have no idea what this means but i love it

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/09/18/getting-yes-steve-howe-guitar-wizard-365831.html

Nice start to that piece but it finished a bit abruptly.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Tame Impala is prog?

Not sure how most of these are prog tbh.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The quiet Satriani fans finally speak.

this poll got 21 votes too many

Just listened to Tame Impala on my lunchbreak and I just can't understand how people tolerate this utter crock of shit

for sure. too balearic revivalist, not enough hatfield & the north

is Squeeze considered prog rock?

YES

NO

Well what if they had long hair

Squeeze plays prog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpQO3VF4cDs