Field Music themselves eschew the label “prog rock” but I’ve heard strong similarities between them and Gentle Giant ever since their 2006 self-titled debut.
This new album sees the band returning from hiatus with a renewed sense of purpose and a reinvigorated muse. They’ve never sounded better, and they’ve never produced such an expansive, yet cohesive, body of work. The Gentle Giant sound is still there, for me, with the primary difference being that I would not be embarrassed to play Field Music for non-prog-loving friends.
“Mr. Pink” by Level 42
From the 1982 album Strategy (The Early Tapes)
Level 42 is a strange band. Immensely talented, but perhaps a decade too late on the scene, they’re best known for their huge 1986 pop hit “Something About You.” That’s a great song, much better live than in the studio (where Mark King’s bass was so processed and restrained that it’s hard to believe it’s not a synth), but the band’s legendary instrumental “Mr. Pink” is where King (along with the rest of the group) really shines.
Like Geddy Lee, Mark King dazzles not just with his bass playing, but with his ability to play intricate bass parts and sing at the same time. But he’s arguably a better bassist (in fact I’d say it’s hard to argue that he’s not) and unquestionably a better vocalist. So why has Level 42 languished in obscurity? This performance from 1984 may hold the key: even at the peak of New Wave synth mania, in a live setting Level 42 sounds almost nothing like it does on record. In fact, if it weren’t for the clothes and hair, I’d say this recording sounds almost like mid-’70s Return to Forever.
The band apparently released a number of albums over the years in the U.K., but failed to make much of a dent here in the U.S. Of the band’s original albums, only World Machine, which contains the hit “Something About You,” is readily available today. A number of low-budget live recordings from the later years are available though, and they show off an immense talent. But if that’s still not enough for you to welcome them into the prog pantheon, consider this: future Porcupine Tree drummer Gavin Harrison toured with the band briefly before their initial breakup in 1994.
My engagement with this blog has certainly fallen off, and I apologize to those of you (if you exist) who are disappointed by my lack of ongoing enthusiasm for it. There are multiple factors involved: 1) I stopped finding interesting things on YouTube (partly because I wasn’t looking); 2) too many of the best videos (especially any involving Robert Fripp) were pulled; and 3) the summer ended and life got in the way.
The Hall of Prog is not dead, just hibernating. Yes, winter is upon us. And with our first real winter snow storm having hit us here in Minneapolis yesterday (a few unseasonable fluke snows in October, which quickly melted, notwithstanding), I am thinking back, as I always do, to December 1992. I was a freshman in college, and thanks to Usenet newsgroups like alt.music.progressive (this was in pre-Web days), I was learning about more obscure prog bands than I had ever been able to discover with the limited resources available to me at the pathetically understocked (and now long-since closed) Musicland in the dying mall in my hometown.
Interestingly, the band I was just getting into in December 1992, and the band I always think about when the first real winter snows hit, was a band I did not learn about from the nascent Interwebz. It was a band I found scouring the pages of my well-worn copy of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. The guide gave Gentle Giant’s The Power and the Glory a bullet — their worst rating, not worthy of even a single star. (Even Tales from Topographic Oceans mustered that much.) I was convinced that any prog band willing to offend the fickle Rolling Stone reviewers to such an extent must be worth hearing, and I was right. Luckily, a slightly less-pathetic record store existed in a neighboring, slightly less-pathetic city, and they had a few Gentle Giant CDs in stock. I cleaned them out over my Christmas break from college, and spent most of the rest of the winter immersing myself in the bizarre (even for prog) intricacies of their work.
The most intriguing element of Gentle Giant’s music, for me, is its brevity. While every bit as complex as any prog you’ll find, Gentle Giant’s music crams as much intricate arrangement and virtuosic instrumentalism into 4 minutes as most prog bands managed to fit into their requisite side-long epics. In fact, aside from live performances, Gentle Giant’s longest track barely cracks the 9-minute mark, and that’s on their first album! Over the years they recorded a few other tracks in the 7- to 8-minute range, but the vast majority of their songs are under 6 minutes.
Anyway… perhaps Gentle Giant’s brevity is a lesson I should take to heart in writing these blog posts.
This is a pretty cool video, even if the band is lip-syncing to the studio version of the song. I honestly didn’t realize they weren’t playing live until Derek started singing in the rock part halfway through the song. Maybe I was too distracted by John Weathers’ Oakland A’s uniform.
I know I’ve pushed the limits of what constitutes “prog” here before, but perhaps never so far as this… and yet… not as much as it may seem at first.
Seals and Crofts are best known for the title track from the same album, “Summer Breeze.” I’ve loved that song since I was a kid, along with a few of their other hits like “We May Never Pass This Way (Again),” but it wasn’t until just recently that I actively started exploring their surprisingly extensive catalog. It’s a good time to do so: some of their CDs can be had on Amazon (click the link above) for as little as $5.99.
“Hummingbird” starts off with a very Beatles-esque introduction before settling into a classic Seals and Crofts groove. But the thing that really makes this song transcendent for me is the wondrously circuitous chord progression that occurs between 3:13 and 3:46 in this stripped-down live recording. It’s almost like I can see the storm clouds parting and the rays of sunlight streaming through. A little cheesy, perhaps, but I love it regardless, and I think this song goes a long way to show how Seals and Crofts are far more than the AM radio/soft rock lightweights they’re often taken for. Jim Seals is a skilled guitarist, Dash Crofts (yeah, there’s a name that could only be a rock star in the early ’70s) is perhaps even more skilled as a mandolin player, and their songwriting and arranging skills are first-rate.
Wow. I really don’t know what happened to me on this one. I am usually all over the latest news about Porcupine Tree. I’ve been anticipating this album for most of the year, and yet somehow I completely brain-farted on its Sept. 11 release date. Granted, a lot has been going on to distract me from it but still… I’ve been following new releases. I suspect the album has — most unfortunately — not been given adequate promotion.
The only reason I remembered it tonight, even, was that there is finally some promotion, in the form of this video as a free iTunes download. I got it, and I enjoyed it. Porcupine Tree rarely disappoints me, and Lasse Hoile’s visuals are, as usual, a perfect complement to the music. Well done boys! Now I need to go out tomorrow and track down the album on CD because this is one I am not going to settle for as an MP3 download!
I was first introduced to Phish back in the summer of 1992. I had just graduated from high school, and my best friend and I took a day trip up to Northfield, Minnesota to hang out with some guys who were a year older than us. My friend had been the drummer in a band with them the year before, and now one was a student at St. Olaf and the other at Carleton.
This was a time of extreme prejudice for me personally against any music recorded after 1980. So I was blown away when the guys popped in a bootleg cassette from a recent Phish show. There are bands playing music like this? Now? Later that day when we returned to our hometown I stopped by Musicland (remember those?) and picked up a copy of the latest Phish album at the time, A Picture of Nectar. I played the hell out of that CD that summer, and over the next few years I became a loyal Phishhead… minus the cannabis and the driving around the country in a beat-up Vanagon selling homemade burritos to scrape together the cash for a concert ticket.
But over time, the luster wore off for me. Maybe it was the fact that their later albums… well… sucked. The last good Phish album, as far as I’m concerned, was Farmhouse, and even that was an anomaly among their later works.
And yet, I still can’t resist buying the latest Phish album whenever one comes out. I stumbled upon their latest album today at Target, not even aware they had a new one out (and only barely aware that they had reunited).
So far I haven’t listened to all of it, and what I’ve heard has not impressed me much. It’s probably their best since Farmhouse, but that is weak praise indeed. But among the first few tracks, “Sugar Shack” seems to be the standout, and so I’m featuring it here for your… enjoyment?
Since today’s “Beatles Day,” I felt I needed to do something Beatles related here. Even though Sgt. Pepper was one of the seminal albums that ushered in the prog rock era, it’s hard to argue that the Beatles were ever prog themselves. Perhaps the suite on side 2 of Abbey Road is as close as it gets.
But I didn’t even bother to search for any Beatles videos on YouTube: if there are any, and they’re official, embedding will probably be disabled; if they’re not official, they’ll probably get yanked if they haven’t already. So, post-Beatles solo tracks it is.
If any Beatle was prog-minded, it was definitely Paul McCartney, and some of his later solo work definitely had tinges of prog, especially tracks like “Band on the Run” and “Live and Let Die.”
Here’s another proggish track, from McCartney’s 1971 debut solo album.
After spending much of the summer obsessively digesting the electronic perfection of the Kraftwerk catalog, Grizzly Bear is a striking change of pace. Contemporary, low-key and low-fi, the only characteristic these two bands really share is a willingness to experiment.
I first heard Grizzly Bear in the same way I hear almost all new music these days: on The Current, the Twin Cities’ outstanding indie rock station from Minnesota Public Radio. While I enjoyed the one song that’s been getting airplay on The Current (even though I’m not sure I can identify which song it was), my efforts to muster enthusiasm for the album as a whole went nowhere. I listened to all of the samples on iTunes and Amazon MP3 several times and just could never convince myself to make the purchase.
Then, last week, something clicked (besides my mouse button, but ultimately that did as well) and I bought it. I’ve listened to it probably a few dozen times since then, and I would say it’s beginning to have as much impact on me as the Kraftwerk albums, or the new Decemberists album before that.
There’s a haunting, ethereal quality to Grizzly Bear’s music. It’s music that demands that you meet it on its own terms. But if you let yourself go, it takes you on a fascinating journey. And it’s all a lot less douchey than that sounds.
There are parts of “Southern Point” (and much of the rest of the album) that remind me of Trespass-era Genesis. The cavernous studio sound reminds me a bit of Sun Ra. And for their sheer experimentation, the band is bound to draw comparisons to Radiohead, if only because there are so few other commercially-successful (or approaching it) bands that are willing to let their experiments go this far afield.
Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 10 days since I last posted here. Sadly it’s not that I’ve lost interest (though I guess that actually would be more sad), it’s just that I’ve been too busy. It’s an odd fortnight, but I’m 3/4 of the way through it, and life will return to normalcy (or its usual approximation thereof) on September 1.
Anyway… for now, here’s the official music video of a single from a sort of prog-related (math rock, to be specific, though maybe this is more “math pop”) band I really got into about a year ago but haven’t listened to much lately, until I metaphorically dusted off Planet of Ice today. (How do you dust off an MP3?)
Some might argue they’re not prog, but I disagree… it’s not just the prominent Mellotron, though that certainly doesn’t hurt; it’s the angular, interlocking guitar lines and strange yet strangely enjoyable rhythmic complexity. Maybe it’s not that complex, but it’s pretty complex for something you might actually hear on commercial radio.
Planet of Ice is a great album. I actually learned about it from a superlative review it received from the Onion A.V. Club, and bought it immediately on iTunes. The album starts off strong but there’s an intriguingly mysterious, subdued suite of tracks in the second half. It’s not really a concept album, and not even really a formal suite, but the songs flow together in an organic, effortless way.
More vintage Beefheart. The quality of the video here is somewhere between bad and terrible, but still, you get the idea. Beefheart is a mad genius, and the band just barely manages to stay with him, but when it’s on, it’s magic. Hence the name.
And lest you think it’s just random noise, listen to how tight the band is in the instrumental section of “Bellerin’ Plain” between 11:15 and 11:38.
