I was just perusing my iTunes library and I discovered something astonishing: I have more tracks by Porcupine Tree (173) than by Rush (172). And I have every Rush studio album (plus the new single) in my library. The time on my Porcupine Tree music is more, too… an astonishing three hours more. In total I have over 18 hours of Porcupine Tree music in my iTunes library. Granted, much of it is live, so I have plenty of duplicate tracks, but their live performances are so blistering and so perfect, that in some ways they’re superior to the studio originals.
I decided to honor this rise in prominence of Porcupine Tree by featuring them today on the blog, and what better track than “The Sound of Muzak”? Steven Wilson went through a protracted period where he was bitterly angry at the music industry (gee, I can’t imagine why), and for a while there every Porcupine Tree album had at least one track devoted to criticizing the bland, soulless commodification of music. The tracks are all good (are there any real duds in the Porcupine Tree catalog?), but this one probably says it best, and is worth quoting in its entirety:
The Sound of Muzak
Hear the sound of music
Drifting in the aisles
Elevator prozac
Stretching on for miles
The music of the future
Will not entertain
It’s only meant to repress
And neutralise your brain
Soul gets squeezed out
Edges get blunt
Demographic
Gives what you want
One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no one cares
No one cares enough
Now the sound of music
Comes in silver pills
Engineered to suit you
Building cheaper thrills
The music of rebellion
Makes you wanna rage
But it’s made by millionaires
Who are nearly twice your age
Soul gets squeezed out
Edges get blunt
Demographic
Gives what you want
One of the wonders of the world is going down
It’s going down I know
It’s one of the blunders of the world that no one cares
No one cares enough
This is a bit of a departure for Hall of Prog: not a performance of a specific song, but a trailer for what looks like one of the best prog rock-related documentaries ever made. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is an award-winning documentary that is going to be screened across the U.S. on June 10. I’m not quite sure why there are two sites; I think one is for the movie itself and one is for its U.S. distributor. At any rate, both are worth checking out.
Since I always have to have something snarky to say, let me latch onto this highly selective statistic cited in the trailer and other promotional materials for the film: seeking to emphasize the band’s influence, they note that Rush is ranked third all-time for most consecutive gold or platinum albums, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It may be true, and it’s not an insignificant fact, but, really, it’s pretty heavily qualified: most consecutive albums certified gold or platinum. It may help to explain Rush’s longevity, but it seems intended to suggest that they’re the third most popular rock band of all time behind the Beatles and the Stones, and I think it’s pretty hard to make that argument. Geddy Lee’s own assessment is probably more accurate: “I always like to consider us the world’s most popular cult band.”
Eight years ago, when I lived in Atlanta, I turned a coworker friend on to Porcupine Tree. Today on Facebook he shared this video I had not previously seen. Awesome.
Porcupine Tree is one of the few bands whose intense, precise, meticulously-produced playing in the studio is not only matched but surpassed in a live setting. Plenty of bands feed off the energy of a live crowd to create a performance that is more “alive” than their studio albums, but it’s rare that a band’s playing is, if anything, more tight on stage, and mixed as well to boot. I can verify that this isn’t (entirely) post-production cleanup work making the band sound so great here; when I saw them live in 2003 in Athens, GA I was blown away by just how great they sounded, especially in a venue like the 40 Watt Club.
I regret that I haven’t had the opportunity to see the band live again since then, but artifacts like this video and the 2005 live DVD Arriving Somewhere… capture that live energy.
Fear of a Blank Planet was the third in a string of back-to-back masterpieces by the band, beginning with 2002′s In Absentia. And they just keep getting better.
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!
Clearly, this is the most apt song title in the history of progressive rock. Ironically, it was given to one of the shortest tracks in the history of progressive rock, clocking in at just over two minutes.
The development of this track is a rather interesting story, and an excerpt from the “making of” documentary that accompanied the DVD-A version of Snakes and Arrows is also available on YouTube:
Led Zeppelin, as if you were not familiar with them, are generally categorized as hard rock or perhaps (early) heavy metal, but their wide dynamic range, extensive use of traditional instruments and traditional English folk styles, and complex, extended arrangements, all place them well within the parameters of progressive rock.
Led Zeppelin’s catalog features some obvious choices to highlight here, perhaps too obvious: “Stairway to Heaven” maybe, or “Kashmir.” And then there are the slightly more obscure extended tracks like “No Quarter” or “When the Levee Breaks.” But I’m going to bypass those and go with my gut. “Ten Years Gone” has been my favorite Led Zeppelin song for… well, maybe ten years. Quite a while, anyway. What can I say, I’m a sucker for major 7th chords. But I also love the way the band recedes to a delicate interplay between Jimmy Page’s lead guitar and Robert Plant’s voice, and then John Bonham comes crashing in in his inimitable way and the band charges through a heavy section, and then back to the delicate stuff. No one else does this like Led Zeppelin, period.
And let’s not forget the multitalented John Paul Jones. Probably one of the biggest influences on my bass playing style, plus he laid down some awesome electric piano and Mellotron parts for the band over the years, and here he plays a three-necked monstrosity of an acoustic guitar (I believe that’s 6-string, 12-string, and mandolin, but don’t quote me) that has to be seen to be believed.
And finally… I usually try to avoid calling attention to this site itself, especially to design attributes that are likely to change over time (thus making anything I say here absurdly out-of-date), but this is a big thing: as of this post I’m introducing a new WordPress theme, still not complete, but far enough along that it’s not an abomination to roll it out. It’s supremely simple and bare-bones, but it’s loaded full of HTML 5 and Blueprint CSS goodness. The goal is to have my own clean baseline theme to use in creating custom themes. You’re likely to see this evolve into something with a richer design over time, but now you’re seeing the skeleton. The “big” thing I mentioned, though, is the videos themselves: the new layout is much wider, allowing me at last to substantially increase the dimensions of the inline YouTube videos. Enjoy!
“The Analog Kid” by Rush
From the 1982 album Signals
20 years ago, in the summer of 1989, I had just finished my freshman year of high school, and I was deeply immersed in the music of Rush… specifically, the two albums I had bought on cassette at the end of the school year: Signals and A Farewell to Kings.
“The Analog Kid” seems to capture the essence of being a 15-year-old kid idly passing the hours of the seemingly endless days of summer. It helps, too, that the song was literally the soundtrack of my own experience of those days.
This video is from the Counterparts tour, in 1994. The ’90s were sort of Rush’s “lost decade.” The band started the decade a bit adrift stylistically, releasing some albums that were mostly filler and suffered from brittle, over-polished production that would instantly become dated-sounding upon the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in late 1991. The band bounced back with 1993′s grunge-tinged Counterparts, undoubtedly (to my ears) their strongest album of the decade. But they struggled to find their identity and began to run out of steam, and after 1996′s weak effort, Test for Echo, and Neil Peart’s devastating loss of both his daughter and his wife (to a car accident and stress-induced illness, respectively) within a year of each other, it seemed like the band might be done for.
They weren’t, of course, but I’ll save that discussion for another day. Here we see the band carrying on after releasing Counterparts, and they deliver a pretty solid performance, but they seem tired… burned out.
Pardon the poor quality of both the audio and video in this selection, as well as this blog’s increasingly Rush-heavy bias, but seeing as it’s July 14, there was only one possible song to feature today.
This is a really sketchy recording of a blistering (as was characteristic of the band at the time) 1976 performance. Despite both the deteriorated video and the artifacts of digital compression, and the fact that the entire band seems to have been recorded from Geddy’s vocal mic, it’s worth suffering the limitations of this recording to hear this young band on stage with all of its raw exuberance intact.
I’m sure the band would just as soon forget this extremely early material, but for some reason this particular song remains in fairly heavy rotation on KQRS here in Minneapolis. (In fact, I was really annoyed a couple years ago when Snakes and Arrows was released and they still insisted on playing “Fly by Night” instead of giving “Far Cry” some airplay.)
Regardless of the band’s opinion, it’s not a bad song — classic mid-’70s hard rock, not really progressive at all, but with Neil Peart’s arrival on the album, the band’s prog tendencies were beginning to emerge. And it is simply amazing to be able to see the guys this young, and to think about everything they’ve accomplished, but hadn’t yet when this was filmed.
Incidentally, what I really wanted to share here was the hilariously quintessential early-’80s video for “Body Electric,” but I can’t find it on YouTube. It is on the VH1 Classic website though, if you care to check it out.
The sound here is disappointingly bad, but this is nonetheless a rare treat: these days you just don’t see this kind of unkempt mayhem on a network talk show, even Letterman. The band’s blustery intensity and dazzling skill shine through despite the fact that the cymbals drown out just about everything else in the mix. And Cedric’s white microphone is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a while — but the way he waves that white cord around looks pretty cool.
If you’d like to hear a better version of the song, the music video is also available on YouTube. (Embedding disabled by request.)
