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Prog Music is Progressing

By CODY AVDEK
Contributing Writer

Progressive music is an interesting beast, because by definition, it can really be anything. Like any genre, it’s undergone many changes and evolutions throughout its lifespan. What started as rock bands doing their best symphony impressions has now become any band that wants the label, really. As it evolved to different genres and different ways of expression, the lines have become so vague that it’s hard to tell what makes the genre anymore.
But it didn’t used to be this way. Back in the 90s, it was very easy to tell what a prog band was, as they all sounded exactly the same: like Dream Theater rip-off bands. There was variation here and there, and many bands had their own sound, but for the most part, it was very easy to tell what prog was. Your music had to be long, use heavy orchestration, sing about very ethereal, existential topics, and write long, elaborate concept albums with convoluted plots. Bands like Vanden Plas, Symphony X, and Angra soon followed suit.
Sometime around the mid to late 2000s, though, things started to change. More bands came out that evolved and changed the sound of what a prog band was. A band like Gojira sounds wildly different than a band like Coheed and Cambria, yet they’re still considered the same genre.
Part of it comes with the increasingly confusing and arbitrary way we categorize music, but part of it also comes from the fact that we’re currently in a place where the genre is evolving. More bands are taking prog concepts and applying them to different genres, and some bands are purely simplifying it. “First Temple” by Closure in Moscow is a great example of this. It’s an album that is considered a prog album, but clearly has influences of post-hardcore and alternative music and doesn’t have a single song longer than five minutes. A prog band that did that in 1997 would have been accused of selling out.
The Dear Hunter is a wonderful example of what you can do with the progressive genre. It’s clearly prog. It’s a concept discography and contains multiple genres and styles as well as semi-lengthy songs with multiple sections. But it sounds nothing like Dream Theater or any of those other bands. Without any context, it simply sounds like a series of well-written songs. The Color Spectrum is an album that is two and a half hours long and highly conceptual, but contains no long material and every part of it is wildly different.
Another part of it is the fact that communities set their own boundaries and the Internet has made categorizing music almost impossible. People are also now exposed to so much music at such a rapid and easily-accessible rate that everything can influence anyone. Prog is at such a strange point because it can be anything it wants to be yet still maintains an identity through all of this.
However, there is a trend now towards shorter, simpler music. You can still find music in the genre that contains 20-minute-long epics, but for the most part, most new bands are releasing shorter music, focusing on good songwriting over scale. Closure in Moscow, The Dear Hunter, Circus Maximus, Coheed and Cambria, Mastodon, Animals as Leaders, and even Between the Buried and Me are all bands moving toward this direction.
There isn’t anything wrong with either direction. While it’s interesting to see how the genre evolves and becomes more diverse, that doesn’t mean that its roots are irrelevant. It simply means the genre is continuing to grow and flourish, and as a fan of that music, the last thing you want is for a genre to stagnate. Diversity is what makes a community great and I want to see it continue to grow.

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