Once upon a time in Chicago, there was an instrumental post-metal band named Pelican. They did pretty well for themselves. Following them rose a band named Russian Circles. Russian Circles took Pelican's instrumental metal in a less-sludgy and more-prog direction. They did pretty well for themselves too, if 300,000 views of the following YouTube video is any judge:
This brings us to the real focus of this post. The night after Gamma Ray played in Chicago, I was back at the same club (the doorman recognized me, yay!) to complete the prog half of the ProgPower equation. On the bill were four local bands who all surely have heard of Russian Circles: all instrumental, all with a prog-metal influence, all with highly-active drummers, and from my mid-30s old-man perspective, all kids. And all quite good.
While "prog metal" is an entirely-fitting description for these bands, they're clearly coming from a different place compared to most ProgPower prog-metal bands. Since they're instrumental, they're pretty close to the Canvas Solaris/Scale the Summit sphere, but I feel like this style has been developed independently, almost from the ground-up, without the chains connecting them to 80s metal that define most long-running prog-metal bands today. From that perspective, I find it strange to envision bands like this playing at ProgPower, but getting a band like Russian Circles would sure be an interesting direction to go in, and would be a good way to attract a different audience.
These four bands together show that this is a new sub-sub-sub-genre coming together here, and since I was one of two or three people at this show who wasn't a band member or girlfriend of a band member, I figured these dudes deserve some publicity.
If you've only got time/interest in one song, watch the Russian Circles clip if you aren't familiar with them, since they're still the top of the heap. But every one of the following bands seems quite promising.
Sioum is the most artsy and atomspheric (lineup is drums/guitar/keyboards, with keyboards acting as bass guitar), Seppuku Survivor is the most jammy (perhaps with a Latin influence?), Fathoms is the closest to traditional prog-metal (two guitars!), and Weye has a guitarist heavily into looping (like Russian Circles).
Sioum:
Seppuku Survivor:
Fathoms:
Weye:
To any Chicago locals, I highly recommend seeing any and all of them live, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better value for your dollar in concertgoing.
Speaking of, Sioum is playing Tuesday at Reggie's for $8 with Clad in Darkness (black metal) and Austaras (Agalloch-styled dark metal?); other cities would kill to have local metal shows with bands of this caliber.
Neil
This brings us to the real focus of this post. The night after Gamma Ray played in Chicago, I was back at the same club (the doorman recognized me, yay!) to complete the prog half of the ProgPower equation. On the bill were four local bands who all surely have heard of Russian Circles: all instrumental, all with a prog-metal influence, all with highly-active drummers, and from my mid-30s old-man perspective, all kids. And all quite good.
While "prog metal" is an entirely-fitting description for these bands, they're clearly coming from a different place compared to most ProgPower prog-metal bands. Since they're instrumental, they're pretty close to the Canvas Solaris/Scale the Summit sphere, but I feel like this style has been developed independently, almost from the ground-up, without the chains connecting them to 80s metal that define most long-running prog-metal bands today. From that perspective, I find it strange to envision bands like this playing at ProgPower, but getting a band like Russian Circles would sure be an interesting direction to go in, and would be a good way to attract a different audience.
These four bands together show that this is a new sub-sub-sub-genre coming together here, and since I was one of two or three people at this show who wasn't a band member or girlfriend of a band member, I figured these dudes deserve some publicity.
If you've only got time/interest in one song, watch the Russian Circles clip if you aren't familiar with them, since they're still the top of the heap. But every one of the following bands seems quite promising.
Sioum is the most artsy and atomspheric (lineup is drums/guitar/keyboards, with keyboards acting as bass guitar), Seppuku Survivor is the most jammy (perhaps with a Latin influence?), Fathoms is the closest to traditional prog-metal (two guitars!), and Weye has a guitarist heavily into looping (like Russian Circles).
Sioum:
Seppuku Survivor:
Fathoms:
Weye:
To any Chicago locals, I highly recommend seeing any and all of them live, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better value for your dollar in concertgoing.
Speaking of, Sioum is playing Tuesday at Reggie's for $8 with Clad in Darkness (black metal) and Austaras (Agalloch-styled dark metal?); other cities would kill to have local metal shows with bands of this caliber.
Neil
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But the interesting thing about the four bands at this show was that *they* all labelled themselves "progressive" in some way in their bios, and the show was advertised as "progressive metal". This is in contrast to Russian Circles, who I haven't really seen adopt the "progressive" tag, even though their music is quite similar. So maybe "progressive" is less of a dirty (nerdy) word to this younger group.
