progressive rock

Record #964: Baroness – Stone (2023)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’m a relative newcomer to the Baroness faithful. After falling in love with Purple it took me until Gold & Grey to consider diving deeper into their back catalog. Red Album and Yellow & Green were the first and last records I bought in 2020, and that long digestion process convinced me that they were one of the best metal bands going today, offering a confounding blend of sludge metal, progressive rock, psychedelic, folk, and good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that is above reproach. The phrase I kept using in those reviews were “they can do no wrong.”

I’ll admit, Stone is the biggest challenge to that assertion that they’ve offered. My first few listens—which I undertook while distracted—were a little underwhelming. I added them to my year end list out of necessity—I only had twenty-three and needed two more to round it out. Whether that was a self fulfilling prophecy or not, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I ordered it right after publishing that list, thinking, “how bad can it be? It’s friggin’ Baroness.”

And upon giving it a few close listens, I stand by that claim. Stone offers up plenty of their trademark brand of anthemic heavy metal while also stretching further into new sounds.

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Record #901: Elder – Innate Passage (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Elder has been one of my favorite active metal bands ever since I heard Reflections of a Floating World, a psychedelic sojourn through doomy riffs and Krautrock-esque instrumental passages. But ever since Lore, much of the discourse around Elder has focused on the balance between metal and prog rock, and as the band has continued, they seem to favor more and more of the latter with each release.

Innate Passage might pose the question of whether they have finally crossed the line between Metal and Not Metal, but Elder doesn’t seem very interested in debating it any further. Instead, they spend an hour offering up epic journeys through massive riffs, third-eye-opening solos, and the catchiest melodies they’ve ever released.

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Record #891: Dream Unending – Song of Salvation (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s often said that music is a transcendent art—that it exceeds the sum of its parts, reaching beyond the mundane circumstances of our day to day. But if we’re being honest, an awful lot of music falls short of that promise. If I’m skimming the radio, there’s very little that might inspire even a shift in my mood, let alone an altered state of consciousness.

But every once in a while I’ll find a record that reminds me just how much power music has. A record that stretches my imagination beyond its usual limits and peels back the corners of the fabric of reality, even for just a moment. And if are once again being honest, a lot of musicians think this is what they’re doing, only to mire themselves in woo-woo pastiche and tired cliches.

In the case of Dream Unending’s sophomore record Song of Salvation though, those traps are avoided, in favor of long-form progressive death-doom metal that transcends not only its genre but its ambitions.

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Record #853: Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (1973)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Tubular Bells is an absolutely iconic record. It’s a staple in almost any collection. It is also a hokey, sprawling mess.

However, it’s also one of the first records of its scope to have been recorded largely by a single person using overdubs. This isn’t quite an impressive feat anymore—there are legions of solo artists making ambitious music on their laptops (I’ve even done so myself), and a lot of them are more listenable than this.

But there is a charm in Oldfield’s initial opus, burdened as it is by ambition and lack of focus. After all, he was only nineteen when he released it.

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Record #852: The Mars Volta – The Bedlam In Goliath (2008)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Unlike my mysterious ignorance of Amputechture, I know exactly why I ignored The Bedlam In Goliath. 

By the time this record came out, my tastes had shifted significantly. My musical diet was still peppered with similarly experimental acts that I obsessed over at the same time I discovered De-Loused, like Radiohead and Sigur Rós. But for the most part, my tastes were far simpler: I was devouring acts like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Phosphorescent, and whatever else La Blogotheque and The Black Cab Sessions were featuring.

I had come to desire simplicity. Even as a musician, I had “matured” past the progressive post-hardcore of my high school band and honed my craft as a solo singer-songwriter. I might have still appreciated the first couple Mars Volta records, but I wasn’t returning to them often.

So when Bedlam was released, I had little patience for their maximalist prog, their meandering jam sessions, or the claims of a cursed Ouija board tormenting them—however, I did largely agree with the original engineer who quit the project saying, “You’re trying to do something very bad with this record, you’re trying to make me crazy and you’re trying to make people crazy.”

But now that I’ve gotten older—and made peace with my previous selves—I’ve come to realize just how wrong I was about this record. Is it a bloated, self-indulgent behemoth that is often a taxing listen? Probably, but all of the criticisms leveled against it can be directed towards the albums that I love either, so…

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Record #851: The Mars Volta – Amputechture (2006)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s taken me so long to get into Amputechture. It was released right in the throes of my first obsession with the group: I had heard De-Loused in the Comatorium just a year earlier, and it exploded my mind. A friend had burned me a copy of Frances the Mute over the summer, and I would often leave the albums playing on repeat in my dorm room.

So why would I not immediately devour the follow-up? In my memory, I didn’t hear Amputechture until after I had moved home from Chicago in late 2009. At that time, I had bought into the hipster snob narrative that the Mars Volta was a bloated, overindulgent prog rock outfit that released two great albums. The inflated vinyl prices on the later albums didn’t give me much incentive to challenge that notion.

But the most recent batch of reissues happened to coincide with some extra playing around money, so I figured I might as well fill in the gap in my collection between Frances and Octahedron. 

And boy, am I glad I did.

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Record #768: Elder – Lore (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve been a huge fan of Massachusetts psych-metal outfit Elder from the moment I heard the opening chords of 2017’s Reflections of a Floating World. They combined elements of Black Sabbath’s lurching doom, Kyuss’ sprawling stoner rock, and Rush’s meandering prog in a brilliant package and wrapped it all in a coat of Can’s Krautrock psychedelia. I was powerless to resist it.

Since then, I’ve been searching for copies of their back catalog, and outside of a few high priced copies in Europe, the pickings were slim. But lucky for me, in early 2020, Elder repressed their entire back catalog with the intention of selling them on a world tour. Unlucky for them, that tour was canceled when the pandemic shut the world down. In either case, I have finally acquired their third full length, Lore, which found the band stretching more fully into prog and psychedelic elements. And to incredible success, I might add.

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Record #765: In This Style – Craft (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’m a devout believer in the importance of local music. Much of my life has been guided by the community I’ve gained from the local and regional music scene, and I’ve invested much in my life to its success. Perhaps the biggest reason I moved back to South Bend from Chicago was to help build the local scene here.

In that regard, one of the constant misconceptions I deal with is the idea that local music is necessarily of a lesser quality than “real” music. And while it’s true that there’s no shortage of lackluster bar bands hacking their way through Eagles covers bringing down the average, some of the most beautiful music I’ve experienced has come from the craftsmanship of people in my own community.

Take for instance In This Style, a seven-piece prog rock outfit that delivers the kind of hypnotic, mind-melting, sonic alchemy you’d expect to be played in stadiums or huge open air festivals, not small venues and dive bars.

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Record #757: Coheed and Cambria – Second Stage Turbine Blade (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Looking back, it makes no sense that Coheed and Cambria was ever lumped in with the early 2000s emo/post-hardcore/pop-punk scene.  Sure, they were members of the Equal Vision Records roster and shared a number of tours with scene mainstays like Thursday, The Used, and Further Seems Forever. They were even a fixture of Warped Tour for several years.

But musically, they have far more in common with bands like Rush and Led Zeppelin (to whom Coheed was compared by Guitar World on the advent of their sophomore album) than Sunny Day Real Estate or Jimmy Eat World. If Coheed was emo, it was by the most tenuous definitions of the term.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this was one of the most important albums of my emo phase.

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Record #701: The Moody Blues – In Search of the Lost Chord (1968)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I discovered all too recently that the Moody Blues weren’t the sort of schlocky, soulless dad rock that I had expected them to be.

Instead, they were charming pioneers that guided much of psychedelic pop’s shift to progressive rock—much closer to The Zombies and Pink Floyd than the Allman Brothers.

After being captured by the incredible Days of Future Passed and the otherworldly On the Threshold of a Dream, I had been searching for the album between them. Having now acquired it, it’s everything I had hoped for.

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