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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Bone Marrow - Protest the Hero (Fortress. Underground Operations, 2008)
Rules for the Modern Prog band # 014 – A balance must be made between the katty worlds of art (aka, personal masturbation) and audience pandering (which is more of a strange sense of molestation if I am set on sticking with such a metaphor…). SO, Brevity is a virtue for those that can wield it without blinding themselves by the rapid-fire bukkake of their own ego - do it if you have the mind for it, but stay the fuck away from anything under 7 minutes if you’re an easily bored musician with cronic masturbation syndrome.
Prog is a genre that paradoxically thrives in the minds of the eternally patient and the consistently stoned - what a prog song lacks in concise pop sensibility it makes up in cognizant length and at times (most) unabashed wanking. What that means is that while absorbing a fanbase that can at times (few) be diverse and intelligently free thinking in rejecting Pop Standards (and all its apparent EVIL!) they often alienate another larger fanbase that actually have jobs which means they’re short on time but have money!
So the only way for any band out in the modern world of digital downloads and VH1 Nostalgic Clusterfucks can only land a proper foot in the door in the elaborate music world that is PROG!!!!@!#$!@$!@!!%&^&!!!!!! is by streamlining what once was Progressive Rock. This means the 20 minute long overtures are violently chopped down to what is basically a 3-4 minute musical representation of a cummy, steaming pile of the artists’ musical and poetic Id.
So to complicate that - Prog, by the defining quality of the genre, is difficult to condense. This is due to two reasons 1) those that start venturing into prog do so to free up the song writing for a thin sense of artistic and creative expression and experimentation that all equals out to really really really really long instrumentals and maybe interesting use of “musical landscapes” if the musicians gets tired from their long, complex, multi-rhythmic riffs and need some time for their fingers to stop curling into irreversible carpal tunnel. Although this is what many of the genre’s critics request from the genre as a whole, by taking away their open time to jackoff Prog musicians will produce a product that sounds like a young Beethoven with a bad case of cocaine induced ADDHD. And 2) Rush already wrote and produced Moving Pictures back in 1981, so it’s recommended that you just simply rip them off (which is only a moral dilemma for those that still fear internet downloads and/or listen to Pink Floyd).
The former is the case for Canada’s own Protest the Hero, however they’re one of the few straight prog bands that actually make good work of random scene chances in their quick 3-4 minute song structures. This is a feat difficult to imagine considering they deem it necessary to fit every cliché (*cough*, I meant “rule”) within every song. So to end this off - I like them. They have the virtue of brevity despite their insane use of every play within the playbook of PROG!!!!@!#$!@$!@!!%&^&!!!!!!
