In case you were wondering, the bastardized Latin above is “We who are about to prog salute you!”

Anyone who knows me knows I love Prog Rock in all its virtuosic, mind-bending, pretentious, bombastic glory. King Crimson, Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, Rush, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Eloy, and so many more. They bestrode the Earth like the precursors to Spinal Tap that they were. A monument to all that was worthy of late-60s/early-70s popular music and half (with The Evil That Was Disco™) of what Punk and New Wave was rebelling against.

At its best, it idolized virtuosity and transcended the previous limitations of rock, folding in classical, jazz, world music, folk, and other elements and breaking free of the tyranny of the 4/4, 3-5 min., verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-key change-verse-chorus-repeat structure. At its most bloated and indulgent, it was 30 people on stage with massive synth pits, lasers, multiphonic sound systems, and sometimes on ice!

Ironic, really, that it took me until college to get into music that was popular around the time I was being born.

Rush was my “gateway band.” Before that, my tastes had actually been pretty abysmal with only a couple of exceptions. My first album (on casette tape) was A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low. My first concerts were The Hooters, Level 42, and post-”Don’t You (Forget About Me)” Simple Minds. I really wish I were kidding about all this. Aside from pre-”Don’t You (Forget About Me)” Simple Minds, Swiss electronic pioneers Yello, and the odd bit of Howard Jones, nothing from that time survived my introduction to Prog in college.

The album was Rush’s Signals. It was electronic enough to catch my undeveloped ear, complex enough to tease my brain, and just so much better than anything I’d really listened to before. My home was hardly what you would call musical. My Dad wasn’t into music at all, and my Mom’s idea of good stuff was Englebert Humperdink and Sade. Oy. I had to have more!

I collected Rush’s entire back catalog to date, and played the hell out of them to the point where my dorm-neighbors were ready to use my collection for skeet-shooting (I’d moved on to CDs by now). But I didn’t know where to go from there. Enter the record store guy. He worked at Streetlight Records on Pacific in Santa Cruz, looked like a biker with a paunch and a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, and usually a Motörhead t-shirt. His knowledge of rock music was encyclopedic enough to put the characters from High Fidelity to shame. I told him I wanted more like this, please. He turned me on to all the classic prog bands listed above. But I breezed through them and wanted more.

Unfortunately, Prog was extremely out of style at that point. The big prog bands had gone pop or disbanded, and ’80s “neo-prog” like Marillion and IQ was dreadful. But one album he turned me on to was the very future of Prog, even if I didn’t know it at that point…Porcupine Tree‘s 1991 debut CD, …On the Sunday of Life. The ’90s wave of prog set the stage for a mini-renaissance of prog in the 2000s. Porcupine Tree is now a pillar of the genre, along with Swedish acts like Anekdoten (a fave) and Änglagård, and throwback stalwarts, Rocket Scientists. though I wouldn’t find out more about them until later. I put aside PTree and expanded my musical tastes more toward New Wave and Industrial and the like for a time. Prog-metal flourished in the ’90s, but most of them were more metal than prog and did little for me, aside from some Dream Theater.

But a few years back, I rediscovered PTree thanks to their then-current album, In Absentia. Their sound had both matured and hardened and it was bloody amazing. I needed more again. Then I found the prog/glam/hard-rock trio, Muse, and was turned on to the new hard-prog sensation from El Paso that had actually stormed the charts with their debut album (De-loused in the Comatorium), The Mars Volta. Something was up. Prog was charting, even if no one was calling it prog.

And finally, in rapid succession, I found about 6 more bands that I’d never heard of doing some extremely prog music, though I’ve only had time to listen to about 4 of them. The music does keep progressing, bringing in elements of electronica, alt-rock, and more modern influences into the original prog mélange.

In no particular order…

Pure Reason Revolution. Their debut, The Dark Third, takes its instrumental cues from Eloy (but updated) and its swirling male-and-female vocal harmonies from the very best of Renaissance (but updated) in a full-length concept album about sleep and dreaming. New album, Amor Vincit Omnia, just came out but is only available as an import. I have mine on its way. They’re just getting started and they’re strong out the gate! Most Prog bands take a longer time to gestate into greatness because of the complexity of the music.

Mew. And the Glass-Handed Kites is nothing short of a masterpiece. Kaleidoscopic harmonies, countertenor vocals, tempo and time-signature shifts galore. Its predecessor, Frengers, hints at the greatness that would succeed it. This is also a young band, with only three full-length albums to their name so far. They have nothing but greatness ahead of them.

Oceansize. Polyrhythms, soundscapes, then some almost-metallic grind. This band is so good they’re scary. They also have only three full-length albums under their belt. Their debut, Effloresce, knocked me off my feet. Everyone Into Position kept right up. And Frames, the latest, flat-out blew my mind. They’re indescribable…they’ll take you on a long and rewarding journey covering ground as large as their name every single time.

Riverside. This Polish band sounds to me like what might have happened if early-model VAST had cross-bred with late-model Tool. They’re prog-goth-hard rock/metal. A trifle too close to metal some of the time…but only some. I’ve heard the second of their three albums, Second Life Syndrome, but I’m so getting the other two.

I haven’t had much of a chance to give Mystery Jets or Secret Machines a listen (though wouldn’t that be a great double-bill just for the names alone?), but they’re often listed in the same breath with the other four. Chuck in upstarts like Fromuz, and stalwarts like PTree, Anekdoten, and The Mars Volta, worldwide chart-toppers like prog-eque Muse and you’ve got the makings of a worldwide prog renewal. Listen to these bands…all of them. Buy their albums. Keep complex modern music that deviates from 3-chord crunchers and rudimentary structure alive and kicking!

Dibs on the first 1-song album of the new millennium…

Gratuitous album cover art:

Alright, so Andy Prieboy isn’t a “band” in and of himself (unlike, say, Foetus…just don’t ask me by what dark arts he manages it!), but only the most egregious of pedants (er…hm…*looks innocent*) would fail to accept that I meant musical performers in general of both a singular and collective nature. Oh dear, only just started and already I’m digressing!

One of the saddest things about Andy Prieboy’s career is that most people, if they’re aware of him at all, think of him as “that guy who replaced Stan Ridgway in Wall of Voodoo.” Only slightly less tragic is that it was one of his songs, “Tomorrow Wendy,” that became one of the more recognizable hits for a different act altogether: the far more financially successful, insanely overrated, and far less talented Concrete Blonde (check your Bloodletting album sleeve if you don’t believe me). Alt-rock heresy, I know, but you can feel perfectly free to disagree with me in the Comments. You’d be wrong, but by all means, go ahead.

Story of his life. I can think of few musicians who flirted with the big time as often and who got shafted as repeatedly by the courts, by the crass commercialism of the industry, or even by sheer dumb luck as Prieboy.

Thankfully, he did manage to release two bloody excellent full-length albums: …upon my wicked son and Sins of Our Fathers. Good luck finding them, though. I don’t think anyone who owns them will part with them cheaply. Goodness knows I’m not letting my own copies out of my sight anytime soon. Check out what used copies go for on Amazon by clicking the links! And eBay? Only one copy of wicked son and still not exactly cheap. OK, one copy of his first EP for cheap, but that’s not the point.

And what do these masterpieces sound like to merit their own blog post? His songs run the gamut from straight-ahead new wave to seriously cracked cabaret to veritable torch songs to jazzy avant garde sound pastiche. You can’t approach Prieboy’s work without an open mind, a warped sense of humor, and absolutely zero expectation that the sound of the current track will have anything at all to do with the sound of the next one.

Really about the only songs of his that sound at all like you might expect it to after his stint with Wall of Voodoo are his brilliant interpretation of the old Canned Heat number, “On the Road Again” (no relation at all to Willie Nelson’s song of the same title), and “Nearer to Morning” off of wicked son. By the time you get to Sins of Our Fathers, the more rocking tunes like the anthemic (and lyrically footnoted…how many rockers make mention of Alaric storming the gates of Rome or get away with calling “Ça Ira” the “‘Louie Louie’ of the French Revolution?”) title track, the punkified disco of “Robbing Her Own Room,” and the double-time “How Would I Know Love Now?” show a more developed and personal voice from Prieboy. These build on less straightforward rockers from wicked son like “Montezuma Was a Man of Faith” (love that title!) and “Man Talk.”  I love all these songs.

But I think I love his oddities even more…

There’s simply no describing a track like “The New York Debut of an L.A. Artist (Jazz Crowd).” It simply has to be heard, then puzzled over, then heard a few more times to be sure you got it right before breaking out into maniacal laughter. “Who Do You Think We’re Coming For?” could just as easily have been written by a descendent of Jean Valjean stuck in a cubicle. “Maybe That’s Not Her Head” is what you’d expect a drinking song-cum-sea shanty to sound like if it had been performed by Monty Python. Imagine if Gilbert & Sullivan had ever written about the relationship difficulties of the trailer-trash set…you get a song a lot like “Psycho Ex” (also the inspiration for The Psycho Ex Game, the novel he co-authored with noted LA wit, Merrill Markoe). This cut also presages the direction he took when at his rope’s end and practically reduced to pawning his gear before authoring the underground musical theater sensation, White Trash Wins Lotto, which I can only hope eventually sees a web-based production and release along the lines of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Admittedly, he starts to lose me a little on his more heartfelt crooners like “When the Heart Awakes” or “When the Dream is Over,” but maybe you’re less of a cynical bitch with a pathological aversion to anything resembling un-ironic sentiment than I am. And, for all that, he really does do them well.

Much to my delight, he’s actually started writing songs again (well, outside of the context of musical theater) after a 13-year hiatus. The new stuff is very much influenced by his theatrical endeavors, but I’m loving them all the same. The Andy Prieboy (aka Pricks Up Front) EP is available on iTunes, and a smattering of other new work can actually be found and bought via Prieboy’s own web site. Apparently, a new full-length is in the works and I couldn’t be happier!

So, good luck on your scavenger hunt for his CDs. If only he could get the rights to these back so he could re-release them himself…*le sigh*. Give Amoeba or Rasputin (or whatever their equivalent in your locality might be) a try. You might get lucky in the used bins instead of being gouged at the Amazon Marketplace. Here’s what to look for:

OK, time for a slight respite from outrage and politics. Back to fun topics like music…

Now, I know some of you out there might be thinking to yourselves, “Hey, wait a minute, Sonya! Porcupine Tree isn’t that obscure.” And I did go back and forth a bit over whether or not to write about that band as one of The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of™, but I still came to the conclusion that it’s one the average rock fan is unlikely to know. It’s been an underground sensation since 1991.

So, Porcupine Tree. Funny name, I know, but that’s because lead singer/guitarist/songwriter Steven Wilson originally concocted the band as a bit of a joke while pursuing his “serious” venture, No-Man. It just ended up becoming far more popular and profitable than No-Man could ever hope to be and consequently has been the definitive musical vehicle for Wilson for nearly two decades.

But, what started out as  way to satirize the excesses and eccentricities of ’70s-style progressive and psychedelic rock (complete with fictitious band rosters and discography), quickly caught a lot of ears when a pair of demo cassettes found their way into the right hands, allowing them later to be combined into PTree’s debut CD, On the Sunday of Life…. It seems a little precious now, compared to the great stuff that’s come since, but back at the time it seemed a lot more important. Prog was very much déclassé in the heyday of grunge, so a new British import sounding like the love-child of Yes and Floyd was a welcome and needed thing!

Tangential aside: I want to take this chance to thank a man whose name I don’t even know. He worked at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and I remember him as having a kind of scraggly salt-and-pepper biker beard, shiny pate with long hair encircling it, a bit of a paunch, and a real penchant for Motörhead t-shirts. But the man’s knowledge of rock music was more encyclopedic than any of the characters from High Fidelity. I’d just discovered prog thanks to my “gateway band,” Rush, and had blazed through the usual suspects—Yes, ELP, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, early Genesis, etc.—and this man always found me the weirdest, most obscure stuff of the previous 25 or so years. It was he who introduced me to PTree and to The Bevis Frond, previously mentioned in these pages, and to loads of others. Krautrock, Zeuhl, euro-prog, neo-prog, prog-metal…you name it! If it was technically difficult, long-form, and had symphonic overtones, he found it for me. So to this nameless (to me) purveyor of fine tunage, I say, “Thank you, wherever you are!”

So, back to Porcupine Tree. After being turned on to them with their debut album in 1991, I basically forgot about them for almost 15 years. Then, a co-worker of mine mentioned the name and that a then-new album, In Absentia, had been released. So I listened. I was blown away by how much PTree had grown and matured, and just how amazing the music was. All their early promise had been fulfilled. Needless to say, I snapped up the rest of their back catalog and have eagerly grabbed each new release as soon as it hit shelves (real or digital).

How to describe the music? My knee-jerk reply is “better Floyd than Floyd,” but that really doesn’t quite capture it. It’s epic, yet simple and elegant. It takes you on great trips full of washing synths, crystalline guitars, and melancholy harmonies, then jabs an andrenaline spike into you with some almost metallic crunching. Wilson has a gift for making a voyage to the center of your mind accessible and enjoyable with his songs. 

And, having seen them live, I can assure you that it’s an experience not to be missed. They perform extremely well in person and have some wonderfully disturbing and trippy visuals to go along with the music. Wilson himself seems insufferably smug — I recall at the concert I attended that he boasted about how he’d never touched any illicit substances and challenged the rest of the audience members as to whether or not they could say the same — but thankfully I don’t have to hang out with the man. I can just listen to his fine music. At the concert we all ignored him, they started playing again, and all was well.

Picking starting points for discovering PTree isn’t easy. Each album has much to recommend it. But, if I had to pick just one album from each of the three major phases of the band, they would be these:

1. From the early, more psychedelic days, Sky Moves Sideways stands out. It’s a wonderful trip.
2. From the more concise and accessible middle years, start with Stupid Dream. Each song is a well-polished gem.
3. From the somewhat harder-edged recent releases, In Absentia just noses out the other two.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t also tout their latest, Fear of a Blank Planet. (‘Sides, I wanted an excuse to put that creepy-as-hell cover on here!) This is a band still in excellent creative shape after nearly 20 years,one that keeps evolving and going from strength to strength as it’s done since the beginning.

Run, do not walk, and buy all the albums already. Meantime, enjoy some gratuitous cover art!

I’ll never forget the day I first heard the earbleed-inducing tones of Barkmarket. I was in my last year of college, had just been dumped by a woman I had really fallen for hard (story of my life), and had listlessly picked up a new batch of promo CDs from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, where I had a cushy little side-gig as a music critic. I could always get in “plus one” at the Catalyst, the only noteworthy music venue in town, and had a never-ending river of promo CDs I could (mostly) sell…which actually earned me a lot more than the actual writing did. But I digress.

I drove away from the building and put their then-new album, Gimmick, into my car’s CD player in a flash of serendipity. The music, which threatened to flay my cochlear tissues, suited my mood perfectly. But, even once the sting of the breakup passed, the quality of the music remained, earning Barkmarket a spot on my “Top 10″ list for 1993, and my permanent Top 10 list of all bands I’ve heard despite my only owning four releases from the band.

The music is impossible to pigeonhole. It’s driving without being punk, complex without being metal, grinding without being industrial, distorted without being grunge…and the lyrics are every bit as twisted as the music, which will sometimes take two or three separate bridges to completely different sonic destinations within a 5-minute song. Dave Sardy, who went on to much greater acclaim (and, no doubt, greater remuneration) as a producer and mixer, added an absurdist, vicious wit to the proceedings so often absent from music of the “heavy” variety.

I suppose you could say they sounded like the ones who pioneered the territory which Tool has subsequently mapped out in exhaustive fashion, only with a sense of humor and a deep-fry job in some pork-fat for rich, artery-clogging goodness while Tool went more the route of sounding like the soundtrack to a primal pagan festival in which a virgin is raped by some goat-creature from beyond the stars.

Anyway, along with bassist John Nowlin and the best-named drummer in the history of the universe, Rock Savage (I mean, seriously, anyone else might as well just not even try to outdo that nom de song!), Sardy ground out four full-length albums and several EPs. I haven’t had the fortune of hearing their demo release, 1-800-GODHOUSE (rare as hen’s teeth) or their debut, Easy Listening (ditto), or the Peacekeeper EP (double-ditto), but what I have heard is just plain good stuff.

If I were you, I would start (as I did) with Gimmick. I’d say it just noses out the other two full-lengths I have,the somewhat more raw (if you can believe it) prequel, Vegas Throat and the somewhat more mature and varied sequel, L. Ron. The Lardroom EP could only have been better by being longer. You can’t find them on iTunes, or get the CDs new from Amazon since American Recordings went belly-up. But getting ‘em is so worth it.

I think I would just about give my eyeteeth to see a reunion of these three. To see them live would be at once ecstatic and potentially life-threatening. And yes, it’d be worth it.

And now, some disturbing album cover art (in chronological order, no less!):

Welcome to part one of an indefinitely-numbered series of posts in which I open up my music collection, long noted for its penchant toward arcana and introduce you to The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of™. It’s true. People routinely look over my CDs or the Artist names on my iPhone and say, “wow…I’ve never heard of most/half/a bunch of these!” So I’m going to start telling all of you about them, and maybe (just maybe) some good, obscure artists will move some more plastic or electrons.

Today’s obscure-but-amazing band: The Bevis Frond.

Verily, I say unto you that, had Nick Saloman—a true and classic English eccentric nutter if ever there was one, but in the best possible sense—been born about 20 years earlier, he’d have been a megastar on the scale of a Pink Floyd. Since the late ’80s, he’s been making some seriously good throwback psychedelic rock and pop with an incredible ear for catchy hooks and polished songwriting. His droll, snarky, self-deprecating wit doesn’t hurt either. But, while musical trends may have passed him by, good songwriting is timeless and pleasures await the discerning willing to give the Frond a chance. You’ll feel like you’ve been put in a time machine for the Summer of Love, only without the adulterated acid and the patchouli-smelling “love-children”…so, in a good way.

Now, I’m a big proponent of prog rock and neo-prog, and the Frond isn’t nearly to that level of complexity (or, as some would hold it to be, wankery). You’re not going to be affrighted by arpeggios (paging Muse…who I love!) or besieged by scales (Hi, Mr. Wakeman…love you, too!), though Saloman and crew do bust out the occasional 16-minute free-form psychedelic freak-out alongside the perfectly-formed 3-minute gems and the 8-minute, extended-bridge, dueling-lead rockers. Early Floyd meets Hendrix meets The Nice…and yet I love the Frond so much more than any of those three.

And I know what you’re thinking… “OK, Sonya, how on Earth do I get this cool music?” As it happens, a sizable chunk of the Frond’s catalog is available right on iTunes. And both CDs and MP3s are also on Amazon, if that’s your preference.

Yes, there are an awful lot of them. Mr. Saloman is one prolific kind of guy. And that’s with several being both out of print and unavailable for legitimate download (the very well-reviewed Superseeder can’t be had for less than $80 used…argh!). Hell, you can’t even find any of them on BitTorrent, ’cause the Frond just isn’t well-known enough!

Your best albums to start with: his 1991 magnum opus, New River Head, the achingly melancholy Valedictory Songs, and his latest, Hit Squad. But really, they’re all quite good (the happy-hippy-dippy-sitar riff in the title track of What Did For the Dinosaurs is pure gold, for example). His first few, however—his “DIY, all-overdub-all-the-time” years…Inner Marshland, Miasma, and Triptych—might be a little raw and low-fi for some. I know I prefer the stuff he’s done with a backing band in the studio, personally.

So, uh…I don’t suppose anyone has a copy of Superseeder or Any Gas Faster they’d be willing to part with out there, do they? I’m sure we could work something out.

Addendum: I got some love on the requests! Many thanks to reader sonicsoundchaser for a most fruitful bit of musical cross-pollination. 

Pretty cover art: