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.
Today I was listening to the new Tortoise album, Beacons of Ancestorship, when a strange, dissonant track came on. It immediately reminded me of Koenjihyakkei, the Japanese Zeuhl band. When I switched over to iTunes and checked out the song’s title — “Yinxianghechengqi” — it seemed even more like Koenjihyakkei. So I jumped over to YouTube and discovered a video of the band playing the song live last month in DC. Cool, but the sound quality of that bootleg video is pretty weak, and besides, I was much more intrigued by the second video that led me to… this featured clip of an entire set by the band, professionally recorded, at the 2004 Rock Werchter festival in Belgium.
I first learned about Tortoise in 2001, when what is arguably their best album, Standards, was released. (I actually discovered them through Amazon’s recommendation system.) It was a revelation to me. That a band out of Chicago, in the present day, was playing this kind of instrumental, experimental, prog-tinged music, and was having a modicum of success doing it, completely transformed my opinion of modern music, and it set the tone for me for the entire decade: after having grown up on early ’80s New Wave music, then soured on current trends during the “hair band” era of the late ’80s, and spent most of the ’90s living in the past with progressive rock from the ’70s, I was suddenly interested once again in new and exciting things happening in the contemporary music world.
