* Music *
>> In this final episode of Metal Evolution,
I'm exploring metals most unusual
and experimental sub-genre; Progressive Metal.
Some of my favourite modern metal bands like
Atlanta's Mastodon have expanded the sound of metal by adding
odd time signatures and atmospheric passages to
their music but I actually don't know what the term
Progressive Metal really means and so the question for
this final episode is; what is Progressive metal and
what does it tell us about the evolution
of Heavy Metal and the future of the genre.
* Music *
* Intro *
* Music *
>> Progressive Metal is a sub-genre that encompasses
a huge range of heavy bands from over the past 30 years,
from Rush in the '70s to present day prog metalers
like Mastodon, but before I get into the specific contributions
of these bands I'm meeting with the Mastodon guys
to get a sense of Progressive Metals musical roots.
* Music *
Sam: So with Mastodon, who were your big influences?
Brann Dailor: Genesis, Yes, King Crimson all that good stuff.
I got deep into metal early but prog rock was always there
you know, it comes up and we're playing it as a kind of
free-spirit thing you know we are always trying to do it and
I think the progressive music is something that that speaks to.
Bill Kelliher: Prog Rock that's just where we all come from.
It's the kind of stuff I would listen to and just be
like what the hell just happened, what is that?
Is that music or is that coming from another planet?
It's very alien.
It kind of gave me the knowledge that you can do stuff
like that and get away with it and put it in a song.
Brann: Especially with a lot of the Genesis stuff they had this
weird corky like almost circus like aspect to them.
* Music *
Brann: So that appealed to me as well, as the really heavy dark
deep stuff you know that they were able to achieve,
so I think Genesis really had the best of both
those worlds you know they definitely collided.
It was the full spectrum of emotion in their music.
* Music *
Sam: So I'm doing a series on the history of heavy metal,
I never imagined that I'd be exploring British prog rock.
I mean this music to me is more connected to flutes and
mythology and distorted guitar but it turns out a lot of metal
musicians were influenced by bands like King Crimson and Yes
and Genesis and so I've come to the studio of Steve Hackett who
was the Genesis guitarist back in the '70s 'cause I want to get
a deeper understanding as to what really is the relationship
between British prog and heavy metal.
Sam: From your vantage point does it make sense that
contemporary metal bands would be inspired
by the Genesis records of the '70s?
Steve Hackett: Yeah, I think so.
I take off my cap to heavy metal because what you normally find
is guys playing it in their spare time and they were
listeneing to many different kinds of music including what is
now known as progressive, so you know somewhere between heavy
metal and progressive there is a meeting place in music.
* Music *
Steve: For instance, think of technique.
In '71 I did my first album with Genesis; Nursery Cryme.
I was trying to play a line out of 'Toccata et Fuga' and
I thought the only way I could do it would be all on one
string you know if you wanted to make that stretch
and that's when I came up with tapping.
* Music *
Steve: And I found that you could do that phenomenally
fast on one string and then skip from one string to the other and
it would look like you weren't really moving, it's the economy
of energy, minimum movement maximum distribution.
Sam: Of course it ended being an essential tool in the toolkit
of heavy metal guitar and still to this day kids
are trying to perfect this technique.
Steve: Yeah.
* Music *
Chris Welch: It's quite fascinating and almost baffling
in a way, that later generations of heavy metal bands
would be inspired by progressive rock bands.
I suppose it's because although they weren't playing
heavy metal music the stuff they did play had
tremendous vitality and tremendous energy.
What it was really was a coming together of all
the better class of musicians, guys who had studied and
maybe undergone for classical music training.
They wanted to be part of the rock music scene as well.
* Music *
Sam: In your own musical upbringing to what extent
was classical music part of your influence
in where you were coming from?
Chris Squire: No yeah mainly English carl music was part
of my background, hymns anthems and things.
I loved church organ stuff 'cause it was
so powerful and umm yeah I'm sure I tried to
translate some of those ideas into Yes.
* Music *
Bill Bruford: The whole point of Yes was so that we
could be a small orchestra.
However that was in the DNA of the day,
that's what rock and pop was all about.
All we wanted to do was sound a bit different.
You know you can come all these art school guys from
universities and colleges which was exploding, fueled by ideas
of other aspects of art, surrealism particularly Dahley,
Herman Hesse all the books of the day.
All that stuff is being brought in by the so-called intelligencia.
Chris: You know we were quite intellectual as people in
different ways and so all of those talents
kind of combined into what Yes became.
* Music *
>> The British prog rock bands made an enormous impact
in the early '70s by expanding the instrumentation
and sonic palette of rock music and this has been
influential on many contemporary metal bands.
But metal is also dark and heavy, so I'm meeting with
Michael Giles, the original drummer for King Crimson
to try to understand if there's a connection between
the heaviness of prog rock and heavy metal.
Sam: I was reading some archival reviews.
Words like overwhelming and evil were coming up.
Michael Giles: I remember the word evil being used.
Some of it does sound evil I must admit myself
but musically we wanted to do something different,
to play music we had never heard before.
In terms of progression you could say that the Who in the
early '60s, Led Zeppelin were all doing there thing,
what's the point of copying them or doing anything similar,
the dark side is always attractive isn't it?
* Music *
Jerry Ewing: There was a very hard-hitting side to
what King Crimson did, it is proto thrash metal.
It is so heavy and brutal that is why I think they were such
an influence on Metallica, I mean you speak to guys like
Kirk Hammett and these guys are still in awe of these musicians.
Kirk Hammett: King Crimson were the first to really explore
things like odd time changes and weird long arrangements
that didn't rely on the classic first chorus
first chorus bridge sort of thing and a lot of the chords
they used were chords that you weren't really hearing too
much back then, they really went out on a limb.
* Music *
I suppose the power of dark hard edged music would be
something that both progressive rockers and
heavy metalers would want to get into. It's mostly about power
and volume and scaring the life out of people. (laughs)
* Music *
>> British progressive rock bands like Crimson were clearly
heavy for their time but still these bands were not heavy metal.
So now that I have a better understanding of prog rocks
overall sonic contribution, how did the sound of
progressive music find it's way into heavy metal?
* Music *
Sam: When I was a teenager I was obsessed with the
really heavy styles of metal like thrash and death metal,
but there was one band that started to expand
my horizons beyond those styles and that was Rush.
* Music *
They had the heaviness of metal but they also had all of
these other sounds I had never really heard before.
So I've come to Cleveland, the city that broke Rush and
I wanna ask them why were they inspired to combine
heaviness with other more progressive elements.
* Music *
Sam: Hi there.
Geddy Lee: Hi Sam.
Sam: I wanna start with your progressive rock influences,
tell me about how these bands influenced you.
Geddy Lee: Well I think it kind of began with Yes and Genesis,
they were not afraid to put challenging influences in their music.
There were these complex melodies, there were these
time changes, you know not just texture not just melody
but drama but that's the way it appealed to me
and that sent me on this kind of journey trying to emulate
that as a young musician for sure. It's interesting because
even though we love progressive music we also love to rock.
* Music *
Alex Lifeson: I admired those progressive bands,
I certainly listened to them and got stuff from them
but for me it was more of those
heavy hard rock bands that really appealed to me.
For example, when the first Zeppelin album came out,
you know it had the weight and the riffs were great
and the playing was loose and free you know.
That's always been a thing that's knocked me out about
Jimmy Page the way he just played so freely.
Neil Peart: We came together at that nexus where all liked the
same music so that was an easy thing to combine specifically
those early years we were trying things and learning things,
experimenting as broadly as we could such that that whole
'74 to 1980 period was really our kindergarten.
Jeff Wagner: They were kinda toying with the new sound
of the day which was this ultra really heavy
hard rock that doesn't have name yet,
and they're also grabbing from prog rock so it's probably
the first real significant bridging those 2 worlds,
and then bam you've got Rush and got maybe prog metal.
* Music *
>> In the mid '70s Rush set out to combine hard rock and
progressive music in a totally new way and beginning
with the alums 'Fly by Night' and 'Caress of Steel'
they created there first prog rock epics.
* Music *
Sam: That transition from the first record 'Caress of Steel'
how was the bands sound shifting?
Alex: Well you know I think we started writing longer pieces,
more complex arrangements so there were greater
dynamic shifts where you could do something
that was a little out of the ordinary I suppose.
Terry Brown: 'Caress of Steel' was a dark sounding record
and subject matter was a lot darker,
it was complex and the story line was quite long.
For me it was a step forward I mean it was a challenging
piece to do, it was almost like a rock opera.
* Music *
Jeff: Caress of Steel just had this story book quality to it
in terms of it was like you were reading a book by chapter,
so that was to me was mastering the art
of writing the long form epic.
Geddy: Ultimately even though I liked the music a lot,
the style was still too experimental but somehow all
that imagining what we should sound like all came together
with 2112, it was very much felt like our first record.
* Music *
Sam: Is 2112 the record that it is because you had to
some extent harnessed and improved on what you had been
trying to acheive on the previous 2 records?
Alex: With 2112 I think we felt more confident with the format.
Doing a whole side dedicated to one concept,
so for me that's the first record I really feel like
we were getting our own sound.
Neil: It's the anger in there the people responded to,
we were so frustrated with the whole music business trying
to tell us what to do, urging us to be more commercial and all
that and it was all about no this is what were going to do.
The music is visceral and it's demanding to be heard.
I think there's a real commitment to the sound and
that reached our first real audience of any size.
* Music *
Sam: In 1976, how is this album different from everything
else that was going on in rock music?
Jeff: I think because if you listen to the Genesis records
or Yes records from that era, all of these prog rock bands
were sort of at a peak or were peaking out,
and Rush were not only continually climbing,
I think they sort of provided a heavier take on what
these bands were doing so that the people into Zeppelin,
into Sabbath had this other place to go.
Jerry Ewing: In the same that Sergeant Pepper did, to Yes and
Lincoln Palmer in Crimson, 2112 was the album that showed metal
bands had an interest in exploring a more progressive
side they could sonically, and because Rush had that hard edge
to them it opened up a whole new world to the metal heads.
* Music *
>> The Rush albums 2112, Farewell to Kings and
Hemispheres firmly established Rush as one of the
all-time greats of Progressive music, but by the late '70s
the bands sound started to change.
* Music *
Sam: In the classical definition of progressive rock
an album like Permanent Waves seems to be a step away
from that much more traditional approach.
Geddy: Yeah. To me that was becoming a stereotype.
So I said it's much more interesting to try and take
that idea of being progressive and not do it in a way
that people expect you to be progressive.
We thought ok lets do individual songs and
each one can be a mini concept unto itself.
To me that was Rush progressing and not just staying
in the same mold we had cast on 2112.
Neil: We were just trying to find greater economy in
our music, still have a bunch of parts in there and
some hard playing but in a shorter format.
So we went from 12 minutes down to 8 minutes down to 5.
Hard to get much more below that for us.
Jerry: The thing about Rush is even when they wrote shorter
material, the way they did it, the way they clearly thought
about putting it together, it's still progressive.
So this is why they occupy this a very unique
sonic position in the bigger scheme of things.
* Music *
Sam: And yet there was a bit of a backlash, the fans that
had loved the expansive songs weren't necessarily
all on board with say the Spirit of Radio.
Geddy: You know, I guess what I'm saying is there's lots of
reasons that fans have turned away from us at certain points
in our career and there's nothing we can do about that.
* Music *
>> By the early '80s Rush and the British prog rock bands
had abandoned their iconic heavy sound
so with the forefathers of the genre having moved on where
would the next generation of progressive metal come from.
* Music *
(Fans cheering)
* Music *
>> In the early eighties as Rush and other progressive bands had
moved away from their heavy sound, heavy metal was exploding.
Bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Van Halen were
pushing music in a more aggressive direction and
a metal culture was being born and the first band from
this new generation of heavy metal to embrace
progressive music was Seattle's Queensryche.
* Music *
Sam: So I've come to suburban Seattle and I'm standing
outside a roller rink where many bands in this area
used to play back in the eighties because
I want to find out how did Queensryche
metalize progressive music?
Sam: What was the kind of band you wanted to create?
Where were you at that time?
Geoff Tate: Well we didn't really have a model in mind.
We more or less had a philosophy which was no limits, you know,
whatever we could imagine that's what we will do
and we won't let people dictate to us
what we should be or what we shouldn't be.
Chris Degarmo: We knew what we wanted to be but we didn't
really know how to be it necessarily yet.
I don't really know that innovation had arrived in the
Queensryche story necessarily yet at that time but the
British wave of heavy metal was definitely making an impact
and I would also draw back even to groups like
Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, so there was kind of a
progressive pop angle that influenced us.
Geoff: We brought in everything from classical to jazz to pop
to rock, you know, everyone would bring in records and say,
"hey listen to this, can you relate to this, look what he's doing here"
and so that was our starting point.
* Music *
Jeff Wagner: What they were was a very traditional metal band
who sort of became progressive, in the same way as Rush did
and they really have visionary kind of ideas that
made them stand out so much from the rest of the metal pack.
They were certainly a bit of intelligencia leader in that sense.
Jerry Ewing: Just remember Queensryche's early stuff was
still very very heavy, I mean it was only when they really went
conceptional with 'Operation Mindcrime' that they went from
being like just another American metal band to like,
wow, they've done something quite pivotal here.
* Music *
>> In 1988 Queensryche released 'Operation Mindcrime',
a record that was heralded as the most important
progressive metal album since Rush's '2112'.
So I'm meeting with the album's producer Peter Collins to find
out what was so significant about the sound of this record.
Sam: When it came to hearing Queensryche's music
for the first time, what were your impressions?
Peter Collins: I loved the musicality of it,
it stood apart from just sort of basic headbanger stuff to me,
also the fact that this was going to be a concept record
caught my imagination, the story of a young guy that gets
caught up in a terrorist type movement and how he's initially
excited about being and tries to get out and can't, I mean
the whole concept had a kind of magic to it, it was extremely
cohesive well put together and a lot of kids could relate to it.
Geoff: The thrust of the exercise really was to create
a concept record, you know, one that was modeled
after what had come before.
'The Wall', 'Tommy', 'Quadrophenia', taking those
albums as models and kind of giving it our twist.
* Music *
Sam: What was the reaction to 'Operation Mindcrime'
in the rock community?
Derek Oliver: I think it sent a shock wave through the heavy
metal genre, that record was the peak in Queensryche's history
and development, although commercially obviously
they enjoyed far more success later on.
* Music *
>> On the heels of 'Operation Mindcrime'
Queensryche began to streamline their sound and started to
appeal to a broader audience leaving a void for a band
to pick up the progressive metal mantle.
* Music *
>> So I've traveled back to Boston to meet Dream Theater's
founding member Mike Portnoy to talk about their musical roots
and how they contributed to the evolution of progressive metal.
Sam: Tell me the story of how you came to Berklee and
why you wanted to do it in the first place?
Mike Portnoy: Well when I was around 16 or 17 I just became
immersed in Rush's music and then from that point started
backtracking and discovering the rest of progressive rock and
I just wanted to be the best drummer I could be, I wanted to
learn as much as I could about music, theory and harmony
and Berklee College of Music was 'the' music school.
John Petrucci: But soon as you go to Berklee you're immersed in
an ocean of musicians, everybody with a gig bag strapped over
their shoulder but it's a jazz school really so you definitely
notice a divide, like you got the rockers and the jazzers
and the rockers were out numbered for sure.
Mike: You know I definitely stood out like a sore thumb and
then once we formed Dream Theater with John Myung and
John Petrucci, there we were in this practice room at Berklee
while everyone else was playing jazz standards,
we were jamming metal and prog tunes.
* Music *
Jerry: In simple terms if Rush were Led Zeppelin
meets Yes, Dream Theater was Metallica meets Yes.
John: Yah Metallica meets Yes, it's like Yes' instrumentation
and types of songs, the different lengths and stories
but it's Metallica's metal, you know sensibility and fast beats,
hard drumming, heavy guitar riffs, all that good stuff.
* Music *
Sam: This is the early nineties, this is in the middle of the
grunge explosion, virtuosity, complex arrangements,
couldn't be more out of fashion.
Why did you want to sign this band?
Derek Shulman: They were amazing actually, there was something
that I hadn't heard musically for a long time, they were
fantastically arranged tracks, well played so even though at
the time it was grunge and it was all lumberjack shirts
everywhere, I knew that when a movement and the people who
follow that movement go one way there becomes a huge void in the
marketplace for a kind of music that still very popular and
Dream Theater led fans of metal, fans of progressive music
to come together and understand that
they weren't mutually exclusive.
* Music *
Mike: It opened up the floodgates for a whole new
generation of like progressive metal muzo oriented bands,
you know for better or for worse, I don't know.
* Music *
>> In the wake of Dream Theater's success, there was an
explosion of bands in the 1990's that helped establish prog metal
as a recognized musical style but there would be one 90's band
that would completely transform the development
of the progressive metal sub-genre.
* Music *
>> In the early 90's grunge became the world's
most popular hard rock style and grunge bands created a sound
that was the furthest thing from progressive metal and then a
band came along that was embraced by both the progressive
and the alternative crowds however Tool is notoriously
elusive and I wasn't able to secure an interview
with the band so to get some perspective on Tool's place
in the prog metal story, I've tracked down their
Grammy award winning producer David Bottrill.
Sam: So even though Tool played Lollapalooza, they are outsiders
enough to be completely different than everything else
on the Lollapalooza bill and to be completely different
than anything else that's going on around them.
David Bottrill: I think in every generation there is a band
that's able to do things by their own rules and not have
to do the same kind of promotional techniques
as other bands and they get away with it.
Tool's that band for the alternative generation but at
the same time they were never for me an alternative band.
Sam: What do you think is unique about Tool 's music
in this story of progressive rock?
John: I mean Tool you listen to it and it's something that
you're drawn into by the darkness and the mystery of it
and that's something that a lot of progressive music has in
common but whereas Dream Theater and Queensryche it's about that
majesty, the over drama and Tool is doing it in this
sort of dark intense way that in so many ways is a
hundred million times cooler than the other way.
David: With what Tool does it's less about look at the musician,
what the musician's ability is, it's look at the sculpting of
the piece of music that we have written and played.
Like they're virtuoso players but they're virtuoso players
in that it's not so much how many notes they can do or
even the order really, a lot of it is the tone
and the character of each note.
Jerry: They were hugely important in terms of
progressive music because they opened up the left field side
the indie side of music. That whole strand of progressive
music, the kind of indie stroke left field post rock side,
it now falls under the prog banner and it would never
have happened if it wasn't for Tool's success.
Sam: They opened up another side of the brain.
Jerry: They opened up another door.
* Music *
>> While Tool was taking prog metal in a distinctly
darker direction, metal bands in the 1990's started to combine
brutality with a progressive sensibility and it was
Sweden's Meshuggah that turned prog metal
into a rhythmic metallic juggernaut.
Sam: So the kinship you share with Tool is that
one of the key elements for your adventurousness
in the music is rhythmic. Can you give me a sense
of why creating interesting rhythm was so important?
Tomas Haake: It's just, I don't know, when you find that really
cool rhythm, it's almost like a tribal thing, if you hear a
cool beat most people will pick that up even if they don't
like the song or whatever so regardless of what's going on,
you still got that thing, that's just kind of keeping
it going you know, you can actually dance to it.
* Music *
John: They've taken the whole idea of rhythmical
adventures beyond anything that anybody has done.
The stuff is going by that's just so interlocked and complex
rhythmically that these guys have to be math geniuses.
Tomas: All the instruments basically in this band are
percussive instruments even down to the vocals which are also
very kind of charted out because it's not a melodic instrument,
it's just basically full out screaming.
* Music *
Sam: And the guitar approach of Meshuggah with the
sort of floating jazzy dissident lines is a very signature part
of their sound, can you tell me about that?
Jon Weiderhorn: Meshuggah have a strong foundation in jazz but
not the conventional jazz of a Charlie Parker or even a
Miles Davis, it's more like an Ornette Coleman slap to
the jaw, it's more of his free form insanity, who knows where
it comes from exactly but there is this interest in presenting
music in a new way and approaching metal in a new way
and you have players who are able to do it.
We definitely felt we were on to something that intrigued us you
know and of course the music has changed over the years but we
still see ourselves as a niche band like we're never gonna sell
a million records we know that for a fact because we don't
wanna write the kind of music that usually does that, but yeah
it only took 20 years for people to star digging our music.
* Music *
>> Meshuggah wasn't the only '90s underground metal band
that was infusing progressiveness with extreme metal.
New Jerseys' Dillinger Escape Plan was creating a sound
so complex it was labeled math metal.
* Music *
Sam: I remember the first time I saw them back in 2000,
not only did they not sound like metal to me
but they barely even sounded like music.
What inspired them to create this insane sound?
* Music *
Ben Weinman: Well Dillinger itself was us giving up
on being musicians for a living.
It was us giving up on caring what people thought.
We really stopped trying to appeal to a market
and a certain fan base.
It was really us saying we're never going to fit in,
we're never going to musicians for a living so
it's really just one situation where someone is doing
something they love and it happens to work out because
they love it it's a perfect example of that.
Jeff Wagner: The level of aggression they play with
makes them instantly appeal to metal fans.
They kind of take what Meshuggah is doing
but they went farther as a progressive band.
They create an art out of utter aggressive insanity.
* Music *
Matt Jacobson: The first time we saw them play we drove
to Redding, Pennsylvania and Dillinger Escape plan
performed in kind of a basement kind of a garage.
They were just losing they're minds you know they were they
were moving around and swinging the guitar in the air.
The singer would jump into the audience and scream
in your face, it was totally extreme and charged with energy
so we walked out of there and one of my co-workers said
'what'd you think?' and I said 'we have to sign that band.'
I mean that was... pfft.
I remember the first time I had ever seen Dillinger
live and it looked like they were really trying
to deliberately hurt the crowd with the guitar you know
smashing the heads and necks of the guitars into the people
in the front row and kind of poking it in there
and I had never seen anything like that before.
I think Dillinger is probably one of the worlds most dangerous bands.
* Music *
Not only did we make things hard for ourselves
physically, technically however you wanna put it but we were
making things challenging and difficult and uncomfortable
for the people who are experiencing it as well.
We wanted to take people out of there comfort zone, we wanted to
take ourselves out of our comfort zone
'cause no great art ever comes from comfort.
* Music *
>> By the early 2000's progressive metal had
become so extreme and complex that it's links to pioneers like
Genesis and Rush seems to be lost, but this all changed with
the arrival of Atlanta's Mastodon who reconnected metal
with the sounds of early prog rock.
* Music *
Sam: So you guys formed in '99,
what was the climate like for metal and heavy music
when you guys when you guys started out?
Brann: As far as metal was concerned I think it was still
sort of a bad word you know what I mean.
Like grunge was still sorta popular but it had been
completely watered down it was suffering from the same thing
hair metal was suffering from in the late '80s but there was a
lot of like grindcore and there was a lot of like really crazy
death metal bands that were out, we really come from that late
'80s early '90s technical metal you know, we knew
we wanted to do a little more, really progressive.
Bill: What I really wanted to achieve with Mastodon
I guess was just to play music that was
challenging in the right way and I was completely in control of.
I wanted all of us to be a collective, make sure every note
and every riff fit and sounded good together and
kind of throw a curveball in here and there
just to put like an ode to prog rock in there.
* Music *
Sam: What does Mastodon bring to progressive metal, how are
they different from everything that has come before?
Mike Portnoy: Mastodon are like the Black Sabbath
of modern progressive music. With a twist of
King Crimson thrown in there too.
It's all about the riffs with them, riff after riff after
riff, crunching and so heavy but at the same time
there's this unbelievable musicianship I mean
Brann's drumming he's like the Bill Bruford of metal,
what he does with his hands are so incredible.
* Music *
You control the parallel with the Dream Theatre thing
because Dream Theatre brought in the Metallica side you know,
the thrash metal thing but Mastodon they were always
received as like sludge metal bring that into the mix,
and again (beep) the rule book we don't care
if people think Yes and King Crimson are not hip,
we love them we're going to throw that into our music and
you're gonna hear it and be damned with the consequences.
* Music *
>> Breaking from many of their metal contemporaries in 2004,
Mastodon created the first prog rock metal concept album of
the new millennia; Leviathan which was inspired by the
American classic adventure story Moby Dick.
Brann: I had like this really long flight, and I met the guys
in London and we were starting a tour and I was like we gotta do
the record about Moby Dick, so I had like this big shpeal and
just talked about the big whale and all this stuff
and everybody was excited about it so I was like
ok cool sounds good let's go record it.
Bill: The book Moby Dick in the whole story was so much
how we felt inside at the moment because we had
this white van that we would leave all our families and
say so long we're going to take off into the unknown
just like the guys on the boat. We really just personally
related to it I think until that record came out.
A lot of people might have just thought of us as another
heavy metal band and it's like 'ooh, these guys are a little
intellectual if they're reading books'
so I think people just gave us a second glance.
Matt: Leviathan made a huge impact to make a concept album
about Moby Dick with a whale on the cover, it was taking things
to the next step and people pretty much freaked out I mean
they were suddenly getting glowing reviews everywhere.
They were getting the cover of magazines, the likes of Spin and
Rolling Stone and people like that were starting to pay
attention so we weren't surprised that it did well but
it did resonate on a larger scale than we anticipated,
which was fantastic of course.
* Music *
>> Mastodon has grown to become one of the most
successful metal bands of the 2000's, but Mastodon
isn't alone in carrying prog metal into the future,
some of the founders of the genre are still going strong.
* Music *
>> Over 40 years into their career, Rush has set aside their
keyboards and returned to their prog metal roots.
So why does progressive metal remain
one of heavy metals most vital sub-genres?
* Music *
Sam: Why do we see kids at Rush shows today,
air guitaring, air bassing, air drumming
what do you make of that?
Neil: I pretty much try to stay in touch with that kid
as much as I can and it certainly drives my drumming.
I play stuff that I find exciting, so there couldn't
be anymore genuine style than that.
We make songs that we like, we try to make them better and
then we play them for people. That is the progressive urge.
Mike: The key characteristic of progressive music
is musicianship, and there is always going to be young kids
who are picking up a guitar or a pair of drumsticks
for the first time and want to see a drummer
with a 400 piece drum-set and a guitar player
that can play a million miles per hour.
There's always gonna be an audience for that.
Tomas: Interesting music doesn't have a due date on it.
You can play a Rush song 50 years from now and it's still
going to be something viable and you'll need that,
and you'll need to want to challenge yourself.
Geddy: I think there is always a portion of the fan base
that are more intrigued by conceptual music
because it's a little more complicated and harder.
Whatever preposterous term you wanna give it and the other
thing is there's a lot of empty calories on the radio so there's
going to be a need for people always to listen to something
interesting and I think young fans when they can't find that
on the radio are gonna find it in Genesis, they're gonna
find it in Tool, they're gonna find it in Rush.
* Music *
>> I set out to explore what the term progressive metal
means and what it says about the future of heavy metal music
and I've seen that dedication to creating adventurous and
challenging music is the defining characteristic of
progressive metal, but what I've also learned in this
final episode is that this characteristic
is not exclusive to progressive metal.
Whether it's metals new emerging bands or the legends of the
genre it's the same commitment to pushing boundaries
and the spirit of one upmanship that drives heavy metal as
a whole so it's evident to me that heavy metal will remain
relevant and continue to evolve for decades to come.
* Music *
*