Heir Apparent - Graceful Inheritance

We may have never lived but we will never die, we are eternal and so, here we are again.

Let me introduce to a record from my childhood. Let's walk through the steps of how such a thing happened and how it is meant to happen again. If you know it and love it, give me a hug, metal sister, brother, or metal non-conforming, I salute you. Stay a while and read... be reacquainted through my eyes with a vision of your long-lost future's past. Fall in love again.

Let's fall in love, again.

If it is new to you give us a hug anyway, we're here as friends and we will part as comrades, you will see. Art has never lied and the truest steel cuts deep the vein of romance that will drown this world of utter lies, ah... you know the score.

Surely you hear the funeral bell by now, for decades it has been massing in the distance, this cacophony of anger...

Let's leave aside the rotting death for a moment and play a part in the summer bloom of love. The flowers are so fragrant, in heat the locust grinds away a madness all-encompassing, the mountain song is wordless, as if sculpture'd in air.

From the ancient ritual site of Dionysus I send you this lonely letter, and it reads:

Let me introduce you to a record from my childhood.




I got it on cd 10 years after it came out, which means the record cover has been absurdly shrinked from the LP original down to a little jewel case.

Did you know, dear reader, that it has been a long-standing tradition in the world of comic book art, back in the ancient times when humans read them on printed paper, for the artists to do the art at double the size of the intended print resolution and then have the art shrank down for the final product? They did this because it hid away imperfections and tightened the art on one hand, but it is also of another effect, the effect of miniature, of sharpened detail that invites the eye to look upon this Entire City all at once.

Comic books are a cubist medium by structure, you can follow the panels one to one in pleasing free jazz tempo, the languid sequence as it were, but at the same time you're also unconsciously always looking around... below, behind the current panel, the whole page you take in in furtive glimpses, you pervert. You're constantly spoiling the future and you connect it to the past, such is the beauty of the most ancient of our artforms of de pict ion, from an apeman hunting a mammoth on an ancient cave painting to Little Nemo and to whatever superhero crap springs to your mind now, the power to look at this, but also look behind it and ahead of it, all at once is a most ancient power. It grew our brains, it did.

So it is that the perfect format of a comic book is not so big that you cannot take the whole page in at once, it is, somehow, handy to make things small so that you may see them better.

That effect came into play when child Helm (Helmet, indeed?) came to possess this album, because the impossibly detailed and complex composition by artist Eric Larnoy, such a piece that would induce an LP appreciator to spend hours potentially, following every little nook and cranny of the grotesque and magical forms is all but augmented by the miniaturization of jewelification. It speaks to the fantasy therein before we even tackle the what-is-it-about-ness of it all, we are taken with the intensity and sharpness of the detail. Perhaps the music will match this ambition, a child would think.

It would be such cruelty to let a child down, and this is not a story about such, don't worry.

Take some time to look at the art and be transported back, years, to meet me in a small greek room. The fairest metal warrior of them all was still alive back then, he looked with pride and support to you as you perused this artifact of magical power. His echo never left us.

As to what-it-is, a horrifying duality confronts us. A conjoined twin – surely the work of a foul magic – wearing a kickass jacket to be sure, together but apart but of one transcendental, stitched together mind. He is standing in a passionscape of chiaroscuro, neither here nor there but surely everywhere you've been and felt a chill run up your spine.

A dead one and a live one, a serpent and a ring, a spider and a demon bat?! It has that je ne sais quoi energy of a record cover chosen after the fact for a selection of music instead of one explicitly drawn to the music and as such it is selected because of an existential concept that it matched to, not because of a storyline that needs to be exact and to the letter to fulfill its fantasy.

For me it is one of the perfect heavy metal album covers, then and now and I have indeed spent that hour looking at all the details. I must have been 12 or 13 then. I am 41 now. The form of an angel tops the bracycephalic, shared brain of the past and future twins, like an illumination that can only be resultant of thesis and anti-thesis coming together to produce... a thesithesis? I don't know these things very well you have to excuse me. What if I bang my head to this but also think it through? In any case we may not become any smarter today but wiser still is on the table.

Heir Apparent were here to tell us that heavy metal can be and indeed is much more than an one-sided affair. It is more than the sum of the parts, even! It's the music of the future, sans cliché. This is where, what we would come to call 'progressive metal', was also born. Q-ryche local to this Seattle scene paved the way. 'Tower in Texas an affront to every poser who thought in their puny minds we can draw a circle around what's wrong and what's left. Fates in Connecticut the effervescent soul of it all. They were all conjoining a twin of inspiration and aspiration in a similar manner. Though today relegated to the 'true metal' bin because it's old people with beer bellies and mullets that still listen to them, back in their day they were carving with force a new way through the hair metal of their contemporaries, tryin' to bring the message to you, and as such we must remember their pioneering spirit and not just how they conform today with a refurbished heavy metal immitation.

The label? Black Dragon records. Of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus fame, so much I knew. The time was 1986, but truly, the time is now. A black dragon, such a fearsome imagination!

The band is called Heir Apparent because they're here to collect their crown and the album is called Graceful Inheritance, for the crown must be passed on to them with all due honours and all social graces must be observed. 1986 is the defining year for everything we have ever talked about, dear reader. Have you noticed?

With age the paper seems all the more yellowed I notice. This ancient manuscript, what does it reveal? Well, as it always is this is a thing made by people and because we will all pass from this earth eventually, scripta manent.

Let us celebrate the people and have a little peek at their mugs before we let the fantasy unfurl. That was and remains a part of the experience. If the band took a band photo and put it on their stupid cd, we will look at this photo and make our judgments.

Ah, yes. Dress-shirt metal of the highest decree.

I see a vest, I see a skintight sleeveless, I see the perms. But I also see the steely eyed resolve, I see a band that isn't here to fuck around. Do you also see? I see young men that dedicated their lives to something utterly useless and it moves me deeply. If only I could through my persual of the utterly useless also inspire one single other human in this billion earth, it wouldn't be a waste.

Heir Apparent for this recording are:

Paul Davidson Vocals
Terry Gorle Guitars, Vocals
Derek Peace Bass
Raymond Black Drums

Also, if this band had a real budget they would have a photographer worth a shit to tell them that in this arrangement there's a visual illusion: it looks like scarf boy is holding the hip of vest man and vest man has his little precocious fingers of his reverse hand in scarf boy's belt loop. Do you see it? You're never going to unsee it now, you're welcome. What a strange thing, to both somehow find a couple of talented musicians with two left hands each and to have them touch each other so sensitively.

Enough fucking around, time to listen. You could listen along, or listen first, or listen first and then listen again as you read, whatever's your kink is fine with me, pervert.

The album starts En Trance, gettit? A wordless minor key fanfare of an intro, percolating in an air of mystery. Like gates opening, revealing to child Helm an altogether outer realm. Such an intro track feels like it's setting up an existential concept and not a storyline album. It's as if to say 'welcome to our world, leave all else behind'.

The introduction of the instrument tones and sound space is in a word elegant. There's no technical excess to it, it's restrained and short. A hooky chordal opening establishing the key we'll be spending a lot of our time on in this record to be sure. Given the emergent form of heavy metal relying on a guitar's lowest available open string tone, you'll often find a lot of any given album centers and wanders around that lowest tone. Heir Apparent are – and continued to be on their second album, it's no accident – a very airy heavy metal band. They're robust and tight as a unit but not so concerned with grinding your face on an palm chugged E note over and over the thrash revolution happening around them notwithstanding. The heaviness here is more of a theatrical weight, tubular bell ringing along with rhythm, bass, lead and cymbal in unison. Apocalyptic tolling, you are enthralled, pulled to the edge and then left to shimmer as we fade on to

Another Candle

From intro to intro, we gently glide, dreamlike from the gates to this oneiric plateau, punctuated by shimmering delay returns and chimes, soft and inviting. Today such elements of a heavy metal soundpicture get flattened down for there has been so much metal inbetween of every stripe, of every genre trying this and much more. But for 1986, for you having just bought this and for you playing it expecting the lightning bolt of Marshal steel, it is a fake out. The conjoined creature is given to such melancholic shifts, it gives it a soul and a longing. We haven't even heard a human word and we are already in a complex musical world. An inbetween place. And then there is a man, talking in harmonic parallel, in fact:

I've seen through times of mystery
And dreamed of truth in history
I can't imagine why we'd let our lives be stolen away
For armageddon

To be their pawns
And fear their gods
With no free will – No!

And the band enters into the metal gallop in earnest. Now with modern ears we can discern weaknesses when put next to aforementioned Q-ryche or a Fates in terms of the singing power, or in terms of production and sound design that could relate to us why this band is seen as an obscure entry, for die-hard enthusiasts as it were and not a band that put out an Operation Mindcrime and made a million... But if we set our modern ears aside and listen to it as if it's the only heavy metal record that ever was we will see not deviation but innovation of the form. I will briefly highlight the harmonic-heavy ornamentations of the guitar player – of his time surely a guitar hero of a sort – that here and on every song very clearly establish an identity that is unmistakable. When you listen to Terry Gorle play guitar you immediately know it's him not so much because of technical affectations but because of his chorusy tone and his compositional choices that always highlight these gestural mannerisms that come from an era of guitar playing where a heavy metal player of some accomplishment didn't seek to be a Swiss army knife of tricks and tones but instead to purely express one or two particular ideas at the full logical extent of their application. This is the best way to describe the guitar approach of this band: Terry, in rhythm and solo does just a couple of things, all of the time, but he does them to their utmost.

Heavy metal is inspiring because it isn't jazz fusion or classical music. It's inspiring because it is the overreaching achievement of regular humans wanting to play rock n' roll for the gods, it is exciting because you can hear the sweat and lust to materialize something useless in full force, something only a few thousand humans in the world would end up vibing with, but vibing with it hard. Terry plays for that crowd and he will until the end. His hand brings the soul to this band.

I don't know if Heir Apparent had misgivings because they didn't make it big, if there were inner arguments and band strife about how to commercialize their sound – historical anecdotes point to yes, mind you – but when it comes to the immediate riffery and tone and attitude of this guitar-driven power metal band from 1986 it surely doesn't come across as confused at all. It comes across full formed and confident.

The picture in the poetry is lucid as it is abstruse. It could be about anything but it isn't. It's about a real anxiety and a real foretelling. It is of consequence as are all the lyrics, we shall find together throughout the duration. There's the weltanschauung of a studied mind, young but studied. Confident enough to tell the truth, naïve to a fault, it's the voice of heavy metal circa 1986, a voice that thought the world would go much different but in reflection is not surprised it went as it did.

The band confidently hits their beats throughout the verse leading to a rousing, chorus-and-wah washed solo. You'll find every solo on this album to be absolutely memorable without ever devolving to brainless pyro. Heir Apparent didn't put 'grace' on the cover for show, they're cut of a different cloth in regards to their peers in american metal.

The song coalesces to a powerful coda verse with muscular drum and bass punctuation of every little emotive detail of the simple riff.

Desire – the lust for total joy
The fire – a world it shall destroy
And there's nothing you can do
Cause the world you've known is through


A perfect heavy metal song? An eternal staple. A song sang along to by the metal faithful again and again indeed. And we're only getting started.

The Servant jumps off with its arch riffery and loquacious soloing and young Helm was headbanging then and old Helm is headbanging (more carefully, neck issues) today. As we dovetail into the verse section the vocal comes in with such melancholy, Heir Apparent aren't a simpleminded band. You can say on its face an album such as this is about spraypainted wizard mural on the side of a van kind of theatrics but that'd be missing the (or a) point. The puppet show is a puppet show but the lead puppet is taken with these melancholy moods, often. The puppet play quiets down and there is a spotlight on lingering, small emotions, you know there's a human holding up the puppet, really and the human is letting you off easy. You'd be a fool to throw away this tension between this absolutely grandiose verse loopy guitar playing and the softness of this, ostensibly, power metal singer going on about a misty dew that settles down on this earth below, the winds of time are telling us there's no play for us to go.

We're on our way, alone.

Progressive metal isn't about Berkley chops. It's about this tension. It's the power metal band, stealing from Iron Maiden and Rainbow but to tell a human story, an inspiration to strike steel and melt the heavens in a cast that is abstract, it follows the crevices and frames our most hidden desires. It pictures us as kings propped up in our fantasy by servants – us, as well, servants to our own fantasy – we are the ones that sweat for this fantasy, we are the ones crowning ourselves for our useless achievement. We are the ones playing and the ones listening, this music was - and is - ours.

These are the emotions this song pulls out of me, then and now. As Icarus is falling to the earth surely there is a moment where the dread subsides and there is a stoic joy to this ending. To believe in your wings as they melt, to rejoice in life as you die. Icarus regrets nothing, he'd fuckin' do it again, believe it. I could listen to Terry Gorle solo the fucking phone book to be honest.

Two perfect heavy metal songs back to back... Slowly you begin to understand, as countless heavy metal bands and their various offerings start to observantly move aside for Heir Apparent is walking in the centre stage. That feeling, that ancient feeling: this is the only Heavy Metal band that ever was.

Tear Down the Walls slows things down and delivers another pristine guitar hook, supplanted by these ghost noted volume swells that feel like violins. This regal, yet melancholy feeling. Heir Apparent are very unique in this way, they don't surrender to the campy cheese of the Kingly metal thing like a Manowar would often do, yet they don't decohere in the other direction by a way of a confused, fragmented composition. There's such confidence and direction to this song, it's no wonder it's another eternal live show staple, another song sang word for word by regular humans at the top of their lungs, people like me and you. Because this song is actually about us, as it goes:

They dwell in a palace of ivory and gold
In beauty and comfort, a fortune untolled
Yet, out in the courtyard injustice prevails
They've turned their back on what lordship entails

They squander their riches on oceans of wine
The masses are starving while ministers dine
The bringers of Sorrow, the masters of Pain
Rise up in anger, let sweet vengeance reign

Tear down the walls!

So we see Heir Apparent are on a humanist crusade, an enlightenment borne through heavy metal steel. For decades in the interim heavy metal fell prey to the funeral of meaning of a globalized, neoliberal post-modernity. Reading lyrics is embarassing, so let's stop. Extreme metal is about a vague feeling of superiority, let's keep things vague because if you look too close it all falls apart.

For decades people would laugh at you for taking a heavy metal song seriously as if talking about the human plight of the downtrodden through purple allegory and Conan the Barbarian prose like this. But in 2025 looking back, guess who was right? That heavy metal spirit was right. It never lied. We had to grow up to become children again and realize that what we once felt was true was the only thing that was true and we spent our whole lives struggling for the wrong things. Art never lied to us, ours souls were just too small to accept it without some fingers crossed behind the back, without some sort of moral escape clause lest we are mocked for our simplicity of mind. With age comes the torture and from the torture the soul either withers or engorges itself with wisdom.

Unafraid, now, now that heavy metal has survived itself, somehow, and the world accepts the spandex as much as it accepts the double bass and hollering as part of the cultural milieu at large we headbang demanding more, we demand this human spirit, we demand a cry for justice even if it is the last naked scream that will percolate through a blasted nuclear universe, the last thing of value that humans had to say is right here in songs like this, dumb heavy metal songs by idiot savants, not a symphony, just a dumb riff and a rousing message that burns incandescent, still.

Running from the Thunder

This bar room boogie pace switch-up best serves as a backdrop for the guitar man to go wild, showing us the more Dionysian flavour of his playing. Old heavy metal records were not obsessed with keeping style consistent from every track because what they were selling was not a subgenre niche, they were conveying the whole thrust of heavy metal, ambiguous and open ended as it felt to them before it congealed into selected offerings for selected audiences. This aspect of heavy metal isn't easy to reinvent without appearing instead as some sort of post-modern circus music conglomeration of styles. For Heir Apparent, as they were of their age this is seamless and congruous, much like it would be for '70s Priest. Strong chorus about being filled with dread and inexplicable power. Every bar punctuated with some sort of guitar wailing, all propped up perfectly by an incredible rhythm section. Truly the power metal essence of this band isn't necessarily to be found in the guitars in the conventional sense, it is in the extremely lock tight and groovy pocket rhythm section where we see clearest the deliniation between older styles of rock and heavy and what we called USA-styled power metal. There's also an inventive key change in here for the musically observant, and at the very edge of this short song Heir Apparent threaten to take off, they just cannot contain themselves. That's my favourite part of this song even after all the guitar theatre, it's where the song lands of this threatening V and surges on its climax.

The Cloak

Another shorter one. It's actually interesting how fully formed the sorter tracks are on this album by this band that I squarely would place in the progressive metal originators camp. That's a thing they have on all their competition, these extremely catchy shorter tunes that work themselves out fully without ever feeling throwaway. Another killer, winding riff going into taut and gallopping verse sets up this morbid fantasy. When Heir Apparent do grim melodrama it acts as this beautiful foil to their more high minded ambitions on the signature tracks. This and another track down the line are some of my favorites from the 'heavy metal of the darkest night' variety of composition on offer on the debut.

Often I listen to this album and just follow the bass, it's so on point and it does the lion's share of outlining the harmonic movement as the guitar often is arpeggiating in a chorus sheen and building to a soaring solo from such foundation. Only Crimson Glory had an equally crucial bass element to their US power metal. There's been many others with a strong tone or chops, but that the songs so depend on the space given to the bass to propel the compositions is where I find Heir Apparent very unique.

R.I.P.

Ah, the heavy metal instrumental on side two... here, Heir Apparent return to that regal melancholy, painting a vivid tale without a need for a script. From the harmonic double led introduction to the beautifully twisty verse riff, this is one of the two guitar workouts on offer on this album. A strong Rush influence (there is no progressive metal without the seminal influence of Rush) rears its conjoined head, worshipping Dionysus and Apollo together, IAAA... mid-soaring in the verse riff, the power chord is pulled and we are plunged into this deep darkness of a soundscape. In an understated way, Heir Apparent here are providing a blueprint for motivic and suite-like composition as much as any of their proto-prog peers that could inspire many a contender for the crown. Much like the deep well in the middle of 'La Villa Strangiato' this is one of the highlights of this record that the listener's ear longs to re-experience. The attentive will be drawn into an otherwordly trance as the bass player gets a chance to lead us deeper and under floating pad chords and chiming spell... Terry blesses us with his most beautiful solo... often when in orgiastic mode I accept the solo as a wash of sound, but it's when we get a slower and more compositional extended lead line like here where I truly feel that feeling, as a guitar player you know it as well “I wouldn't change a single note of this solo, I wouldn't change a single bend or expression of his touch'. One for the ages, melting in controlled amp feedback, shimmering in chorus and that particular reverb... we do not make them like this anymore and when we try it's just a mockery of our own vacuousness of spirit.

This band, had they two guitar players would be tremendously diminished. I do not need a rhythm track propping up the solo work, I need just that punchy bass and Terry trading riff with lead with himself. It's exactly what the cover promised, this schizoid tension that in the end collapses into a brilliant, shimmering illumination. Pure steel but airy and inchoate. The riff reminds its dark majesty on exit and then the record needle scraches to awake us from this morbidly beautiful dream. A perfect heavy metal instrumental.

Hands of Destiny

Oh my god, how many peaks can this mountain range have? One of these perfect anthemic songs, in full splendour we again see this juxtaposition of glory and tragedy:

Yet in our abundant wisdom
Man can't tame the sky, the mountains or the sea
Held beyond our understanding, helpless to deny
The hands of destiny

For a heavy metal genre so taken with abject tales of shock and terror this is downright modern, yet in literary terms this is a point as old as The Odyssey. That's how Heir Apparent come off, that's why their style can both feel arcane and cutting edge. They understand rock and roll as a music that belongs to the people and so it should be thrilling, you know... the basic idea of the post-industrialization pop song, it's entertainment but it owes to people something more than that. There's not a shred of pretension to this and that's a very fine line to walk, to the point where a lot of listeners wouldn't necessarily place this in the progressive metal camp exactly because it's not self-absorbed in that particular way.

Keeper of the Reign

This is the other anthem back to back. Again the theme of melancholic regalia at focus. Much is expected of the first amongst men, a heavy burden to be king. The standout element of this track for me (beyond the endlessly singalongable chorus) is the romantic bass solo culminating in an extremely rousing coda that transforms the balladry into full-on power metal. The slow triplet, punctuated by the complete rhythm section is so classy, a stroke of understated genius while guitarman does guitarman things at full blast on top. Airy Heir Apparent only a couple of times on this album go full-on rocket fuel and as you'd expect this is a moment much beloved by everyone that has been to a Heir Apparent live show or listened to this record with any attention. If you're new to this, you're welcome.

Dragon's Lair

Back to the heavy metal of the night style, here. Impossibly great riff sets up one of the all-time greatest metal screams recorded on wax. Much like the Number of the Beast scream, once you've listened to this one you will often find yourself wanting to play this track just to listen to it again. Perhaps the vocal isn't as strong on the whole on this album at the impossible standard set by Tate, Dickinson, Dio and co. and, verily, Heir Apparent would try their luck on a second album with a more conventionally powerful throat on the mic but that's a story for another time. There are moments, though where the vocalist really gives it their all and this opening scream on this track is such a moment indeed.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa he goes and I am as excited about heavy metal as I've ever been. Time collapses to madness!

Looking through the windows to your mind
Can't you see that there isn't much more to find?
As you take the crystal deep within
Waiting for the magic to begin

And are the broken mirrors of your soul
Dying for a lesson to be told?
And will you ever find an answer there?
Daring to approach the Dragon's Lair!

Lurid melodrama and manic fantasy, a child taken by sojourns of the imagination. Songs about power, songs about darkness, songs about fear and dreadful joy. Heavy metal! The post-verse bridge juxtaposes again this particular brand of melancholia to the muscular verse rhythm. As usual with great heavy metal records, songs about dragons and such often betray a parable, here one about giving in to the worst vice. Chopping one's breakfast down a mirror as it were, daring to approach the dragon's lair, a rush that never seems to satisfy, tempting us once more before we die. Beware!

Masters of Invasion

This lurching beast takes a while to come together and groove, I always enjoy this slow start after the insaniac energy of Dragon's Lair. It settles into this bass pocket and a lyrical vocal outlined by a slow rhythm gallop. An Omen kind of feeling if you would allow. Though in the lyric one could pin the narrative to a particular war truly the crucial stoicism of Heir Apparent's approach broadly scrutinizes and condemns the inexorable inhumanity of modern warfare in general. The solo has this beautifully tense middle section that ups the tension before surrendering into itself again and returning to the sparse verse rhythm. When you think it's all over a coda solo soars as if to escape this madness, once again. A masterclass of understated grandeur and one of the best songs on this incredibly stacked record.

Nightmare

As we're nearing the end of the offering we are treated to another up-tempo banger filled with phantasmagorical visions. The only fault I can find on this album is the thin background vocal on the verse but even that is quickly assuaged by a killer bass break post-chorus that pumps me up every single time as it hits the solo. Once again bass player MVP on this track. As far as songs go that are about, broadly, 'nighttime is scary' this is a winner. This is another very short track that perfectly sets up the final statement of the album.

A.N.D. ...Dogro Lived On

For the life of me I have no idea who Dogro is and I haven't chanced on any interview material that would substantiate the title of the track (perhaps that can be a fun reader participation element in the comments if you, dear reader, know more than I do) but I have to say this is probably my favourite track on the album and the strongest all around statement on the debut, for a few different reasons.

First of all that segmented stop-starting riff is pure progressive metal majesty and I have tried to emulate the emotion such riffs evoke many a time in my own writing. That is to say a riff like this opens a whole new department in the mind thereafter from where many inspirations will come that are internally validated by enthusiastically the Ego confirming the base drive by going 'oh, yes, like the Dogro riff, yes! Yes!' and for that I can only be eternally grateful to Heir Apparent.

The way the rhythm section supports the mysterious riff with intelligent syncopation just melts me. You can imagine this band in fucking 1985 playing this in the rehearsal room and looking at each other with gold in their eyes it's so prime prog without a hint of affect about it... it's as if the riff tablature was found carved in a stone and there were parts rubbed off by millennia and that's where the band just opted to restart the riff over and over, mesmerized by the winding, menheiric gravity. One for the ages indeed.

What solidifies the approach here however is the lyric:

Face the facts of Life On Earth
The nature of Mankind
Pages from our past are now defined
Humanity has common sense
We all know right from wrong
We've lived in false pretense too long

RISE! RISE!
Face the facts of present day
RISE! RISE!
Rid yourself of ancient ways

Fear of gods and demons is the folly of your mind
Acknowledge facts of Science - don't be blind
The war of Good and Evil is what you create within
The Facts of Life are where the truth begins

RISE! RISE! RISE!

Prepare for your future - don't live within the past
The ancient cultures never knew the facts
Technology has given truth where myth had been before
It's time Humanity stepped through the door

This is where, in earnest Heir Apparent put their contribution forward to what they imagined 'a heavy metal for the future' could truly be about. Obviously withour Rush we wouldn't get here. We called it progressive metal afterwards and in our confusion we led it astray, but here it is, without much comment needed, honestly. It's 1986 and while the thrashers were still caught in a mosh Heir Apparent are conveying an altogether different worldview.

It isn't so much that I agree or disagree with the thesis, it's that I had, and continue to have a wealth of thoughts about it, passionate thoughts, complex and sometimes uncomfortable thoughts. That I sing along with it, I yelp 'Rise!' every time, puts me in a place where I am half-arrested, I am at a distance but I am in it at the same time. That Brechtian moment captured to be relieved for decades, the promise of heavy metal to me is right here. One can only hope to give a difficult but inescapable challenge like this to their listener in 1986 or in 2025.

Thank you sincerely, my dear reader, for listening and scrutinizing this old masterpiece with me. We did well, didn't we? Beauty only grows more beautiful as it grows old only in the sublime realm of art and all that will be left behind even after we are gone are these explorations of something that is of us but beyond us, it is of that other realm where a sound can be as a mountain, where a poem is as if it was never penned by instead always has existed. I wish to go to that place myself and spend a forever or two surrounded by these finer forces, indeed subsumed into them like I was never even here, because truly it never really mattered in any other sense that I was, but to become, once, solved inside the etheric alchemy of quintessent art.

I wish you well until we meet again.

Pirates of the Underground

 In the long and ill-considered term where old internet got subsumed into the grotesque corporatist conglomeration of 'web 2.0' services and when all the little useless homes of personal chronicle like this blog felt truly outmoded, people of our subculture struggled to recreate and retain their spaces with variable degrees of success on the new attention economy platforms.

One such small community is 'Midnight Lighting Steel.', a facebook group of 100-150-odd people, lovers of old metal, weird metal and unique metal all the same that I was part of founding. 

In this space over the last few years many topics were brought on for discussion and many an obscure metal gem was dusted off for re-appreciation. Interesting thoughts came out of seeing disparate individuals appreciate forms of metal and particular cuts that I thought were truly passé for the constitution of the modern heavy metal listener, but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that even in this crippled state the promise of internet connectivity still inspired something new for me and others.

Web 2.0 being the cretinous machine that it is, however, it soon became apparent that even the groups internal oral history was getting lost in the obscurity of the near yesterday, as the search functions and, generally, the archival functions of the platform are pointedly inoperable, discouraging any sort of conglomeration of fact in lieu of an endless re-discussion. That's attention economy, isn't it? 

My mind rebels to that idea, especially when it comes to matters of passion and fetish; Surely we have talked about Secrecy before, right? Surely we have all listened to Last Crack by now, no? We can build upon an edifice, but how? How do we know what is worth bringing up and what's been enshrined in the certitude of fact?

The idea that new members come and go and old members forget and we can't simply fish out our own discussion out of a deaf-dumb archive set me to ponder on the kinds of ways we propagated metal wisdom in the older world, the nascently connected but not yet overconnected world. What is an attractive package, even for a very small audience, even better, exactly for a very small audience to remember and remind itself of its oral history? 

In the world of tomorrow no-one should seek to talk to the many, the many are deaf to the world of tomorrow. One should seek to talk to the few because the few can become a community that imagines freely what will come to pass.

In this sense, for Midnight Lighting Steel I sought to do a little bit of a pirate radio show. I do not want to be a 'content creator' for youtube, I don't especially want to have my face or voice on the internet at all to be honest, but I thought it a decent challenge to contain my generally extremely verbose brain on all things metal down to the radio show format, and to hearken back to a different standard of how we package and convey information on this style of art to each other all the same.

Furthermore I sought to be a living example of how 'we listen to music', in ways that to people of similar background and idiom to my own will seem obvious but to a generation of listeners fed by spotify and listening to music on a phone that mutes their song with a ding about a video ad will be a challenge. Offline hard drive of meticulous collection, record cover and lyric, year and country, genre and ambition, the lives of little humans given with such passion and steel dedication to a purely useless thing. The inspiration is to never forget them, so we as well may never be forgotten. To listen to music with love and to comment with wit, it is a simple thing to the loving and curious but fewer and fewer of us remain...

Ultimately, and this is no shame it is in fact the biggest ambition of them all, these are meant to be videos you put in the background that deal with something you dearly love with passion and mature understanding, to keep you company and give you a feeling of comradery while you have to work a stupid fucking dayjob or take a long car ride or just assuage the loneliness of a long night, here and there. Steel has always been there for us and I am paying it forward.

The videos were unlisted, they were meant to be seen by 10, 15 people tops. They were meant to incite small discussions and more than anything they were meant to do that one magic thing where when, say, Secrecy would come to mind for one of the viewers/listeners, the memory would also conjure up a comment, a bit of wisdom, something mentioned or something sparked in relation. A metal brother has already given years of life to thinκ of this, we learn from each other.

To assuage this catalogue fixation, the rateyourmusic wound of endless scroll and no papyrus of what the metal chronicle has become we need to get a little post-apocalyptic. A small human's story, an interesting anecdote and not too much more, an overarching theme and concept to this subcultural endeavor of metal, all of it dancing madly on a stolen radio-wave, hijacking a service meant for gross self-exploitation -- pirates of the underground, lightning, the speed of sound we will prevail


I did a few of these inward-looking radio shows for the group and then I thought since they're unlisted and they still fall in a hole of facebook groups backlog not easily fished out, I might as well give them a final resting place here, where all my other thoughts are, where my heart always rests, in the ethereal tomb of Poetry of Subculture: my most useless and in some ways my most cherished creation - and trust me, I've indulged in so much uselessness over the decades - satisfying the double credo of maximum effort and for no apparent credit. Levitating between the anonymity of the unlisted internet of yore and the data aggregative totality of the future, we soar the liquid seas of imagination.

As these videos are not meant for general use keep in mind they need not be circulated, nothing has to be made out of them, and I don't particularly want to think of them as media to account for in any other way than a measured discussion in this old world comment space. If you've found yourself here there is surely a reason and they're meant for you, instead. You understand this distinction and you know what to do with such information.

As always I remain your faithful correspondent, beyond time and space, amidst world-ending chaos and uncertainty. We met a long, long time ago and before this is all over we may truly never die.

Xerxes - Myth and Poetry

My love,

It has been years since we've last corresponded.

I still see you in my dreams.

The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.

I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.

I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?

I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.

A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.

I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.

Please believe me.




Months later, you came to me in a second dream.

Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.

A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.

I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.

I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.

You ran to me and embraced me.

You kissed me on my lips.

You whispered to me two things:

"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,

"Hold me tighter".


I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.


I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.


Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?

Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.

This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.

Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.

It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.


Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:




Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.


Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.

Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?

It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.

This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?

Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!

In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.

As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.



The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.

And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?

Good answer.




The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:


"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.

Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."

It's okay to cry.





The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.

What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.

What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.

And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.

After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.

"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.

I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.

The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.

"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"

But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.

Xerxes will never tell you any lies.

Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.

Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?

If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.

Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.

Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.

But in the distance you will see a bridge,

floating

Let's Try to Understand Progressive Metal, Part 26.5

Hello! I have less time these days so let's get to it right fast.

Listen to this a few times.


Lemur voice were a progressive metal band from the Netherlands, quite late to a very uncomfortable, girls over there/boys over here and nobody's dancing party. They released their debut in 1996, well after Dream Theater had already achieved massive success with their sophomore effort "Images and Words" and instructed the B-list of how to play modern prog. Another influence here is Psychotic Waltz, yet it will not be obvious unless you're very familiar and I put it into your head that some of their stuff is in here, deep inside. Possibly, Watchtower's density might also be an inspiration, but that could be cycled through Dream Theater for all I know. Let's not get into history and genealogy too much. Instead, we will look at the form of this music and what it's attempting to achieve.

Before we even get to the lyric, we are treated with an instrumental section that wants to communicate a few things to the listener. Try to put yourself in a 1996 mood, here, if you were alive and sentient at the time. Or even if not, can you imagine a time before you were alive? Have you ever felt nostalgia towards events that never occurred?

We open with keyboards, and not just a synth wash, but the main melodic phrase of the song. A lot of people would tune off at exactly this point, because Heavy Metal and Keyboards, you know. Those that do stay, have been self-selected as progressive metal listeners of some stripe. This is important, because back in 1996 people believed in progressive metal, and there was such a thing as the progressive metal snob that thought other forms of metal were outmoded and this is the vital voice now, a busy keyboard salvo in your face meant you were part of the club. There is very little accommodation for a death metal or thrash listener, here. Perhaps (and that's a big 'perhaps') an unsteady bridge exists between this music and what was called "atmospheric metal" by the euro press at the time. I leave this door open because that's how I went through the other way around (from power and progressive towards extreme metal) so, surely going the right way through a door would also work?

Anyway, you're in the progressive metal ponytail club now. What's this place about? Well, complications.

Literally, it's about being complex. Right after the keyboards, we get slashing distorted guitars and drums in unison, in a syncopated pattern. The keyboard part is in 7, and the slashes are on the up-beat, down-beat, up-beat, they do their little cadence into the song proper. What does this mean?

Again, this means you are not listening to thrash (or even techno-thrash) anymore. This guitar technique comes from there (playing a lead theme and then having the rhythm cut through towards the verse) but it's mutated, it's altered, it's at once softened by lead keyboards and it's made even more complicated because that's compensation for the aggression of thrash that's lost. Progressive metal can be seen as an enduring effort to tell a different story using macho heavy metal methods, and at the same time trying to retain its aggressive, macho essence by introducing even more density and virtuosity on top. There's tension here.

The intro rhythm slash would take 2 bars in an Exodus song, here it takes double because... compensation. You might have expected the verse part to be double-time (if you're thinking in 1996 terms and you're coming off of thrash and death metal) but instead you get harmonic chords and omitted rhythm in between, at a leisurely pace. This sounds like - you guessed it (or did you?) - Rush. And therefore like Dream Theater of the same era.

Another staple of the time is that this is trying, somehow, to groove. This is another masculine compensation introduced by Dream Theater on their second record, by way of incorporating half-thrash riffs a lá Pantera. Nearly all of the contemporaneous progressive metal scene listened. They started stripping down the more aggressive thrash riffs into half-thrash grooves because 1. this allowed the music to breathe so you can put more keyboards and vocal melodies on top and 2. it retained some sense of 'metallicness', but not too much, friends, can't headbang with glasses on.

Speaking of vocal melodies, this is where Gregoor van der Loo, makes his entrance. Let's examine the first verse and chorus.


Gusts of color, senses of energy enter the realm of intuition. 
The question of validity is rhetorical in presence of Nature's purity 
A child's honesty, strength through vulnerability 
Yet feel the overwhelming beauty of intuition 

By concentrating on positive energy flows 
That emerge in your aura 
Stop confining yourself, open up 
Stop confining yourself, open up


The delivery is not at all aggressive, nor is it attempting some high lyrical drama. It's actually a bit flat, emotionless, though technically sound for the most part. The vocal lines are quirky, they're unexpected, off the wall. That's the Psychotic Waltz influence, I theorize. Keeping yourself in a 1996 frame of mind, consider that the first three words this record has uttered to you have been "Gusts of color". Can you remember any Heavy Metal before 1995 or so opening up like this?

The New Age vibe continues. "The question of validity is rhetorical in presence of Nature's purity" takes a bit of decoding, as a philosophical statement. If it is a moral issue, as in, valid means morally correct, then Lemur Voice are making a naturalist assertion that there is no right and wrong when we look at (and presumably follow) natural order. This natural order is further described as spiritual, not biodeterministic. It's useful to note that although this New Age thing is new to metal at the time, it is still a conservative position, politically. When people make claims of self-evidency of knowledge (or "common sense"), of a return to an imagined state of purity and Nature, they're still well within the right-hand of the political realm. This is in keeping with the history of Heavy Metal where even Rush (a very occasionally metallic band, really) were ardent objectivists and individualists in their message, never socialist.

The symbol of a child being powerless but having oneness, the overwhelming beauty of intuition. This is what this song is about. Not thinking but instead, being. The second verse is about meditation, opening up. Again, keep in a 1996 presence of mind. You just bought a compact disk from some foreign mail-order service, that looks like this:

The structure may be ruined, but here come the well-dressed progressive metal brigades to renovate!

Whose group photo is this:

The singer's beauty fits his performance. Formal, distant, serene.

And they're talking to you about meditation over Pantera riffs.

The important thing here is what they're doing, musically, while they're talking about mediation. This cerebral, very orchestrated and complex interplay is happening between every instrument on almost every bar, and yet the singer, in a dispassionate, floating voice, is talking to you about opening up your energy.

Is the music off-message? Is this contrast destructive, or constructive for this sort of music? Is the libidinal tension between the remnants of thrash in the music, the masculine performance of virtuosity (any virtuosity, really) and the conceit of spirituality adding or subtracting from this? In your answer to this question, you know where you stand towards progressive metal. The choices of reply to this challenge can be the following:

• You understand the tensions and welcome them. Again, keep in a 1996 frame of mind. You think this is the future of the form and finally Heavy Metal has something new to offer (in a modernist sense), and hopefully to a larger section of people than angsty teenagers. Perhaps stale musings on meditation come first, and then something more radical? You are a tragic figure because you were in the tiniest minority of listeners, and history proved you wrong.

• You understand the tensions, but you are willingly choosing to frame how you listen to this music in an old-Heavy Metal way, by focusing on the density and technicality and the masculinity that's left in there and overcompensated for, so as to pretend this is, like, ripping, man. LISTEN TO THAT SOLO, DUDE! You see the higher conceit as yet another bullet-point of superiority for progressive metal, but you don't access what it means. You are a poser, and you're also in the majority of progressive metal fans, both in 1996 and today.

• You misunderstand the music and do as above, yet not willingly, just because you lack the tools to access what's going on.You are not a poser, you just listen to progressive metal for half of what it is because that's as far as you can get with it. Possibly because you were there when this stuff was happening and that's what was new and you were in the scene. Your interest will be passing. Even if you loudly proclaim your interest is still all there, you are instead performing it to keep in touch with your 1996 self.

• You doing like any of this emasculating energy and aura talk one bit. Back to anti-modernism, dragons and visions of the holocaust for you.

A revealing point in the music, and actually the most beautiful thing in this song for me is in the chorus, when Lemur Voice say "feel the overwhelming beauty of intuition", there's a series of major chords that end on a dramatic minor when "intuition" is uttered. By some conspiracy of the unrelated fact that this band is not natively singing in English, they pronounce the word as "intrusion" instead. The effect is very noticeable because intrusion fits the musical cadence better (3 syllables). Think about "(happy)The overwhelming beauty of (sinister) Intrusion" for a moment. That little Freudian slip perfectly encapsulates the accidental strength of progressive metal (especially in the many B-lister bands from all around the world that were inspired by Fates Warning, Queensryche and Dream Theater) in that they were trying to serve a high concept they were ill-equipped to tackle and possibly misunderstood themselves. Beautiful ambiguity and un-comfort results. That is the legacy of progressive metal and that's where it historically is indeed tied into the grander heavy metal scheme. Anything beautiful that happened in this genre happened in a moment of Icarus-like hybris. Someone a bit stupid or ill-informed tried to write a grand symphony with drums, guitar, bass and now obviously very 90's sounding synths. The scenes have long since disintegrated, but the art remains eternally.

Note that on the reprise of the major -> minor chorus, what falls in place of intuition/intrusion is instead the lyric of "open up", and there is no minor shift, instead there is a playful scale by the vocalist, which is on-message for what opening up would entail for a metalhead. I can see the furious leather and denim clad hordes saying ".........nope" right there, I love it.

So,

True appreciation of faith
Openness without fear
Devotion  from the heart
And crystal clear consciousness

Can you dig it? In the mid 90's, that's what we were looking at as the future of Heavy Metal, all the while, the raging maelstrom of machismo, anti-modern, nationalist, neo-romantic alienation of black metal was exploding sensuously over yellowed newspaper front-pages. Could you guess in 1996 which role would be assigned to heavy metal for the next 15 years or so? Would it be talk of auras and openness, or would it be the Sturm und Drang of an imagined third world war? Hmmm....

Secrecy

Running down the memories

Wrapped up in desire

Oh, where to start. Where to begin.

Was it when you rejected me? Was it when you told me lies? No, before that, before anything. Was it when I realized I am alone, that I'm not an appendix to mother/father? Was it when I was born?




In the early '90s Heavy Metal had gone through three formal transformations. It went from a grassroots, do-it-yourself movement in the UK, inspired by (and often interchanged with) punk to an integrated marketing item during the glam/thrash years and finally it tried to negotiate (with itself, within itself) what it means to be successful and what it will mean for now, towards the future, when the eye of the public will move on to the new trend. What will Heavy Metal be now that it can no longer be innocent?

Because that is what it was in the early '80s, it was spontaneous and more than a little bit silly. Guys with bad guitars and drums and bad voices cutting a 7 inch vinyl record about the Castle of Some Wizard. Let's say that was the period of a little boy playing with their toys alone.

Let's then say that success in the mid to late '80s is mother/father finally taking note of the elaborate constructions, dioramas and vistas their gifted-if-a-little-weird child has created in solitude. Acknowledgement and function warp the form. The difference between a toy and a game is that the toy has a masturbatory function. A game is to be won or lost, instead.

And Heavy Metal lost. How could it not? Mother/father demanded too much. The potency inside the little boy's reconfigured toys was ambiguous by subconscious design, disaligned with Reason and Truth. Mother/father demanded that the insane pathos therein be transformed somehow in an understandable patron design, to be reproduced and enjoyed by adults that live in the Real World, only, responsibly so, perhaps on the weekends, perhaps on a rowdy night out, then back to the office.

Heavy Metal became a fully formalist pursuit circa 1990, with the gravestone being - of course - Metallica's Black Album. Finally, a Heavy Metal record that a marketing executive could enjoy without feeling bad about themselves.

So the teenager Heavy Metal, at the time, tried to appease mother/father. But then they had a second child (grunge and indie rock, whatever you want to call it) and *they* were illogical and impulsive and their toys where ambiguous again and mother/father had a new problem child to solve.

Heavy Metal entered its most volatile, disgruntled teenage phase. It said FUCK YOU MOM/DAD, but it didn't really mean it. It went back to playing with its toys, but when it thought nobody was watching, it took hidden glances towards what mother/father were up to, hoping they were looking back. Not too much, but at least once in a while, to let him know if the grown-up world was outraged/pleased with how the game was shaping up. Either could do.



1. In the '90s, Heavy Metal tried to kill itself to live forever. A norwegian young adult was murdered by another. Churches were burnt down. To assuage the gods, the ablation will be blood. Boys and their toys, oh what will they do for mother/father to pay attention to them again? It's very boring being a teenager, you know.

2. In the '90s, Heavy Metal also tried to stop being Heavy Metal. It tried to become Something Else Metal. Atmospheric metal with gothic touches, industrial noises and new-romantic pop frilly shirts. Or Progressive metal, modernist, abstract, ambiguous like a cubist painting, fey and fleeting. Hang me in a museum.

There was never a time where Heavy Metal overextended itself so much as during the '90s. Toys became games, games became enterprises, big dreams were crushed and unexpected success came for many that had hoped for self-destruction instead.




There was a German band, once, called Secrecy. They started out as a thrash band, like a great many others, slightly late to the party in 1987. Germany in 1987 was not a fun time, kids grew up fast, even if they wanted to play Heavy Metal. As was the paradigm for many German thrash acts of the time and place, Secrecy played a very precise and well-designed type of thrash, one possibly inspired by the then just released "And Justice For All..." by Metallica. As evidenced in Secrecy's first demo "Like Burning One's Boats", Secrecy were trying to take that techno-thrash mold and push it even further in a emotive direction. As far as I've noticed, they were the first to do so, and even now in 2013, ones of the very few to ever attempt this.

In that rapidly reforming state that Heavy Metal was in circa 1990, Secrecy very quickly shed the remnants of their thrash past and quickly assumed a fully progressive metal attire. They got signed to Noise Records, the place to be for their sort of music. They were smart people because thrash was indeed dead in 1990. If you wanted to go the savage route, you would have to play death (or if you were really forward thinking, black metal) at that time. If you wanted to pursue more human topics like those first touched upon in techno-thrash, you would have to become even more melodic, more artistic, more grown-up. Secrecy put their money in that direction.

As early as on their first record, "Art in Motion", Secrecy had created a masterpiece of modernist Heavy Metal. The band is now largely forgotten, and they have not been influential even in underground circles. There are no Secrecy clone bands, there is nobody trying to play progressive metal like this that I know of. It is worth our time to discuss why I consider their material so successful and also why then, would such a successful effort not reach a wider audience.

Secrecy's thing on their first record (and to some extent to its follow-up) is that they play very muscular, well-defined music, very rich in harmonies and with melodies that extend and complete themselves beautifully. The rhythm guitar playing here fills every verse space with sharp triplets, but takes care to open up for the choruses to breathe. When the drummer does a drum roll, the guitarists will palm mute its approximation. They always take care that even if a melody goes through unexpected directions it will resolve itself in a clear manner. Unlike many other progressive metal bands, they are not complicated for complication's sake. There's very little formal abstraction in this music - I can envisage it performed by a string quartet or small orchestra without major alterations. Sure, there is aggression - in fact I would say that on the first demo and on a few cuts from the debut they reach proper thrash metal band levels of push. But even their aggressive parts are always considered as means to create contrast with their more emotive melodic themes. Now, this was a new thing for Heavy Metal.  Take Watchtower, techno-thrash and progressive metal stalwarts. Their music was much busier than Secrecy's, and it was, for the most part, always so. There were dynamics, but usually the contrast achieved (and desired) was one between abstract, fluid chromatic solos over bright clean guitar arpeggios and then, their full-on, compact, over-composed, every instrument independent, on the brink of collapse style that made them notorious. Watchtower were not an emotional band. Secrecy were very much about conveying emotions and they used the shell of thrash and Heavy Metal to do so.

Could then Secrecy then best be understood as a post-thrash band? I do not think so. I think a staple of post- anything bands is that they appropriate surface formal characteristics of the music they're about to turn inside out, and then they create art that is dialectically opposed to the function of the original music. So far, so good, that's exactly what Secrecy are doing. But here's the problem: post-x music cannot be appreciated as an object belonging to x genre de rigueur.  SunnO))) appropriate black metal tropes and can be seen as a post-metal endeavour, but they cannot be enjoyed as a black metal band. There's simply not enough there, there's only surface textural characteristics of metal (or black metal). There's no depth to the content, when looked at as metal music.

This is a common issue with post-modern art, I'm not pretending I've made a startling realization here when examining Secrecy's music. The case is that Secrecy's riffs and songs are too well constructed as thrash or Heavy Metal music to be seen as post-metal anything. In fact, were the listener to be selectively deaf to the vocals of Secrecy and a few select musical passages in their debut, they could place the record historically, in the Bay Area circa 1987 without much trouble. Anthrax were often as melodic, for example.

So if Secrecy know their Heavy Metal inside-out and they can compose 10 Accept hit songs in their sleep (I am not exaggerating, this is the caliber of the composers in Secrecy) then we have to beg the question. Why are they juxtaposing harsh, muscular thrash edge with this meek, teenager voice and why is their lyrical subject matter so decidedly teenaged?

The answer I've come up with is actually pretty simple and that's a big part of why I think it's the correct one. Secrecy were playing a gambit. They looked at Heavy Metal circa 1990 and they tried to think which of the then nascent 'exit-points' would become the most popular. Would it be romantic, nationalistic and often reactionary returns to blood, guts and sorcery? Or would it be humanist, modernist Heavy Metal-for-every-thinking-being? Secrecy thought the latter, bless their hearts, and set out to create one possible patron of that ideal.

This isn't to say that they did not believe in that direction, I don't think it was a calculated, cynical affair. I would bet that Secrecy - or at least the chief lyricist, pulling the rest of an uncertain band along? - really believed in themselves in all of this.

The lyrical material on Secrecy's debut is not well-written. This further mystifies subject matter that is ambiguous to begin. What I've gathered - and perhaps most importantly the function I use it for, the type of emotion I want to have when I listen to them - is that Secrecy are recounting the various existential wounds of teenager and young adult life. There's a real sense of hurt to this music. An accusatory tone that turns outward and inward at the drop of a dime. It is remarkably successful how just keywords, and the singer's singing voice are capable to evoke such an emotional response in me. In the past I've rambled about one of my first failed love affairs while Secrecy played (I will not reproduce the text as it is in Greek) and I just can't help but summon those uncomfortable feelings of alienation, loneliness and mistrust of my own teenager experience when I listen to them.

It's extremely potent to put these feelings not on top of some mope rock or gothic pastiche, but instead over crystallized Heavy Metal power. It is not just a good tool of vengeance, it is life-affirming. Secrecy take the shittiest parts of being a teenager, the shittiest part of being under the thumb of mother/father, or that of the school system, or being pressured this or that way by your peer group and they place it on top of a towering artifice, kaleidoscopic in its beauty and seemingly eternal. It will stand upright forever, and the most tender and wounded part of a child's heart will be there, on the top, for all to see. Defiant and beautiful. No Secret.



Secrecy were wrong, we know now. They succeeded completely in creating the avatar of emotional, warm, complex, prickly on the surface yet still tender-hearted Heavy Metal. Their songs are a joy to listen to purely on a 'whee, Heavy Metal!' fun way. But they're very deep and thoroughly composed. The voice employed is the voice of someone's childhood. It is so brave to put this voice, singing these words, on top of their quasi-thrash. It is, in fact, too revealing of their intentions. I can imagine a rowdy, denim and leather clad beer-guzzling hesher saying "turn that shit off" if you played them Secrecy, because it would make them uncomfortable. Secrecy are uncomfortable to idiot metalheads exactly how a homosexual person would be uncomfortable in their midsts. Playing Prostitute Disfigurement for them, that would be fine, it wouldn't make them uncomfortable at all. But Secrecy? A fey teenager girl voice whining on top of muscular, compact and composed thrash? Filth, just filth.

This is the triumph of Secrecy, that you have to confront a soft attack. You have to learn something about yourself to understand them. You might find yourself lacking. There's no two ways about Secrecy. If you like Heavy Metal, it's impossible not to like their SONGS. If you're trapped in some perpetual masculine performance, it's imposible to like their tone and their message. Secrecy will let you know that. They have truly taken a thesis, an antithesis, and structured a synthesis out of the parts - how Marxist of them. There is such internal tension in Secrecy's music but there is no disagreement in it. It is What It Is. A remarkable achievement.

I bet people couldn't stand them - I bet they ran as fast as they could back to their Destructions and Sodoms, to their comfortable fantasy escape, to the occultating mists of mysticism. Back to their toys. Eyeing mother/father, are they paying attention? What use is Heavy Metal if it illuminates the most tender core of the teenager heart?

Well, a lot of use, it turns out, now in 2013, that Heavy Metal is spent and over, now that it is a civil war reenactment, now that there are a million bands whose sole raison d'etre is 'to be one of a million bands'. I look at Secrecy's brief two-album trajectory and I am humbled by what is achieved in such a brief time. More than that, I am inspired.  The clarity of intent, the musicality of the songs, the emotional capacity of the awkwardly written, yes, lyrics. I want there to be more of this type of Heavy Metal, because it is most needed than ever before, unlike, oh, 99% of the other, oversaturated metal genres. The tender heart still beats because how could it not? History has ended, capitalism has won, but injustice is still here, injustice is still experienced daily, the wound is there. How will we address it?

Naturally, on their second record, "Raging Romance", Secrecy have an answer. They are mostly preoccupied with their faith in God. Did you ever doubt that this would be the end-point of their story? Angsty teenagers against everyone, rebelling against Reason and Logic as much as they were to nonsensical posture and bravado in the metal scene, what would be left to them but the ultimate alienation of their peer group? Christianity it is, then.

There have been many "white metal" bands over the years, many of them playing to their home crowd (christian communities that liked the form of Heavy Metal but detested its message, easy to market to, right?) but there has been no other band like Secrecy, who used finding-God as the ultimate punchline against everything that Heavy Metal stood for, and did it with such panache. As you would expect, there was no third record.

The band is rumored to be back together again, and unlike most reunions, I am half-looking forward to another record by them in 2013. If there's a band that can push forward from their past glories and become vital, upsetting and offer something new in 2013, it's Secrecy. But it's equally possible that they will be trapped by self-conscious issues, their 'legacy' as a band, and create "Raging Romance pt. 2". It would be such a shame, as the music would be good, I bet - nay, stellar, possibly - but it can't be about God. Not in 2013. I refuse to believe that the tender heart of Secrecy resonates to the calling of God. It can either be charred and withered by now, 45 to 50 years old, conservative and slavish to authority, or it has to have forsaken the lord, it has to be irreverent, impossible, brighter than the sun.

Progressive metal -- Attempt at a Definition

This has been swimming in my mind from when I read Jeff Wagner's book on the subject of Progressive Metal. I got a real handle on it a couple of weeks ago as I was playing choice cuts from the genre for my girlfriend. I tied down the nascent description I'm about to present to exact musical quotes and this helped in solidifying my theory. I'll try to do the same here, though keep in mind I'm still working out the implications.

So, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Progressive metal has been defined literally to mean "metal (or metal-esque) music intent on constantly changing/evolving' for decades now and it's a favorite pastime of pony-tailed metalheads to argue about how a band is truly Progressive (or merely 'progressive' or 'prog') so why mess with it and them? Because that definition doesn't work, even worse, because it's pathological. In the popular conception, Progressive metal owes to its name to keep on moving forward, ultimately further and further away from its 'Heavy Metal base' and further away from the archetype into curious reconfigurations that constantly push the envelope, any envelope. This is a recipe for disappointment if there ever was one and it's very curious, psychologically, why people would obsess over their favorite bands eventually becoming something different from what made them their favorites to begin with. After all "inclined to constantly progress" is not a positive or negative attribute in itself, it isn't something one can love and attach themselves emotionally to. It is to what one progresses towards that could possibly be the attraction point for the listener, but then, even if the band reaches that initial promise, the mandate of "Progressive" demands that they then discard it and move on. It's schizophrenic. But that - the psychological profile of the pony-tailed metalhead and his mock (I contend) desire for ever-forward moving progress - can wait a while.

I think Progressive metal, as we've experienced it from 1986 to roughly the end of the '90s is actually defined by very different things than what are popularly accepted. Metalheads have this curious incapacity, well, perhaps not incapacity, perhaps it's a lack of desire, but anyway, they don't want to consider the social context that shaped the subgenre variations of Heavy Metal they're devoted to. It's as if speed metal, then thrash and power metal, then progressive metal, were destined to come into existence because the Metal Gods willed it so and that's as musicological one has to get about it. Do you like it? That's the issue for them, not how or why something came to be exactly. Jeff Wagner took a brave step outside of this mentality in his book by tracing the musical lineage of Progressive Metal to its rock counterpart, but there's more there, I think.

Rush is a big deal for Progressive metal, so thinks Jeff Wagner and so do I as well. But besides the obvious technical chops and lengthy compositions of the band, we can take a sideways look into Rush and explain what Progressive metal really is about. The Canadian trio is considered the forefather of most, if not all things Progressive Metal for the straightforward reason that the forefathers of that genre (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Watchtower but not Queensryche, who were influenced by them only by a degree of separation through Iron Maiden) are all professed fans of the band and because traces of their music of Rush can be directly found in most of these bands material. It's not high musicology, 'Ytse Jam' sounds like 'YYZ', there you go.

However, Rush were not a band infinitely bent on progress, and even if they gave that illusion during the one quantum leap in their '70s discography between the first two records and what came after, or if we're lax and consider their shift of sound towards the more streamlined, techno-pop of their '80s material a move in that same progress, it still then ended. In fact, that '80s shift in Rush is I think, emotionally, the crux of modern proghead mentality. '80s Rush found their final, adult sound and have occupied that niche since then. Progheads keep hoping that an equivalent adult metal sound will be found, but no such thing exists so far.

Furthermore, keep in mind that when Progressive Metal was in its heyday, Rush have been putting out the same record for half a decade already. Rush as an inspiration was not to push the Progressive Metal stalwarts towards infinite progress (what we instead came to call 'Avant-Garde Metal' instead, for good or worse), so... what?

It was the gradual move from the fantastic, romantic and solipsist (the domain of Heavy Metal, now and forever) towards the modernist and humanist that Rush started. Rush were an inspiration to young metalheads in the late '80s to attempt to write songs about their real and current human situation. Rush, for every 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog', for every 'Necromancer', also presented (Ayn Rand inspired, curiously but not surprisingly) paeans towards self-will and actualization, allegories towards surviving modernity and even negotiating singular identity in a mass-consumption world. These are concerns that every sentient being in the modern world has to deal with, and that's what Progressive Metal tried to introduce into the Heavy Metal cannon. The psychological reasons for such a violent shift of context in metal music in the latter part of the '80s has to do, I theorize, with the increased outsider interest in the genre and the market pressure on it. As I've said many times before, metal music felt that in the spotlight, it had to come up with something 'grownup' to say. This may sound damning but I do not necessarily think that nothing useful and artistically vital could come from such pretensions of adulthood. If anything, those that got the worst of it were not the musicians that created Progressive metal masterpieces but the naive progheads that structured their identity on the basis that their 'grown-up metal' was better than everything that came before it. Progressive metal was an open question but yet it was percieved as a final answer by many.

I've said this in different ways on Poetry of Subculture and other places, but never so clearly and directly. Progressive Metal (of that ten year period, modern prog is a different matter, which we'll get to) is not focused on endless forward movement as an end in itself, it is about the introduction of modernist themes that deal with the social human condition while using Heavy Metal tropes to achieve energy and direction. That modernist concerns are inherently confusing and sap willpower, whereas Heavy Metal music is inherently simplistic and directive are contradictions of intent and form is very much apparent and at the core of the genre.

To qualify my statements we'll have to look at a few disambiguating examples. First, let's think a bit on technicality. Much is constantly made about Progressive Metal being the technical frontier for not just metal musics but rock instrumentation music in general. Indeed if one listens to Watchtower or even Dream Theater's debut (1988-9 releases) there isn't much in popular rock music that offered such pyrotechnical display. However jazz and fusion musics were miles ahead, even then, in the pursuit of intricacy as raison d'etre. Perhaps today the two fields have been largely equalized, but listening to say, Tribal Tech, back in 1989 would put the rigid ditties of Dream Theater in some perspective. Furthermore, in the metal field it could be said that the true frontier for technical intricacy had been pushed by the many children of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, in the 'shred' sub-genre. Or from a different vantage, the barrier for information density had always been the domain of technical death metal, not Progressive Metal itself.

Could Progressive Metal players of 1985-1995 play even flashier, more dense, more intricately? That question is diverting from the important fact that even if they could, they didn't. Progressive metal, especially in its infancy, was flashy, but not too flashy. They were trying to do something with their chops that wasn't devoted to the chops themselves. They were using modern technique and equipment to express modern themes and considerations. There were much more technically obsessed types of music than Progressive Metal in that period and its only due to musically illiterate fans (it's true, the elitist progheads usually can't tell consonance from dissonance, they can only tell when 'there's a lot of notes') that the reputation of Prog is primarily one of technical overindulgence. One needs only compare a Dream Theater instrumental with any given top-player fusion jam session to see the difference in focus. Progressive Metal overplays like a nerdy but bright pre-grad university student trying to attack a subject they have burning interest in from every which way. And that interest was the human condition. Naturally, a sophomoric atmosphere is inherent in much Progressive metal due to this, but even that can have its charm.

The other issue I have to tackle is the mythos of Progressive Metal constantly having to move forward to dignify its moniker. This is a trip many Progressive Metal musicians of the early '00s (the decade of post-modern self-reflection for metal) fell into as well, eventually taking their bands and aspirations completely outside the field. Fans rejected most of these bands for their 'betrayal' while at the same time still considering the need for ever-forward progress as the definition of the sub-genre they so loved. This must have been confusing for musicians and listeners alike. Bands that have enjoyed the interest of Progressive Metal fans have instead kept to a narrower path. Dream Theater is the most striking example of a Progressive Metal band that is very conservative, almost never moves forward. But even slightly outre bands like Fates Warning, have enjoyed their lasting success for keeping to a general formula of Progressive Metal. Bands on the fast track to actual progress, like Mayfair or Depressive Age, were finished with metal in the span of one or two records. There's a reason for this: Heavy Metal can do only a few things, but it does these things great. If you try to make it hit different beats, it's a lot of work for relatively few returns. Eventually the struggling musician realizes they can actually achieve the moods they're going for without depending on distortion, solos and double bass, and they morph into the electronica or post-punk or whatever else outfit they needed to be anyway. Those that keep the metal tropes are doing it because they still love Heavy Metal for its romantic core, and that's not 'Progressive' at all.

So that's the tension inside Progressive Metal circa 1985-1995, romantic tools in the service of modernist goals. The genre was bound to suffer commercial death early on with such a volatile tension in its core. Rush circumvented implosion by dropping the romantic tropes of grand compositions and overplaying arrogance by the '80s and instead found the contemporary rock niche in which they could explore their modernist concerns and they grew a whole second audience for it.

So what of modern (post '90s) Progressive Metal? Or, to put it as its now known, "prog". That's second generation music that has had to deal with the confusion I describe above and it has had to take a stand on what it wants to be in light of such information. Most of it has tried to be all things at the same time: hyper-technical, yet constantly bastardizing the metal with outside influences, both completely left-field and at the same time rigidly conservative when it comes to Heavy Metal play structure and composition. The end result is schizophrenic: imagine Meshuggah covering U2 while Tangerine Dream supplies keyboard drones. Some people like that type of music, I personally can't stand to listen to it for long because it hasn't made a choice of focus, instead it has made its focus to not have to commit to a choice. This is the perfect music, psychologically, for people who suffer from delusions of grandeur and/or enjoy self-validation by how elite their hobbies are. At any case, not a good path in life.

Humanist arts are necessarily wimpy. They're not tough, or macho. In fact, the forces behind such stances are under the critical eye of humanism. Chauvinism, racism, sexism, inherent philosophical aspects of most romantic ways of thinking are deconstructed in every way by modernist arts. That is after all, their purpose. Watchtower have nothing in common with Exodus or any other beer-thrash band. If anything, Watchtower felt they are here to destroy this conception of what Heavy Metal music is. Now that all that stuff's in the past it's easier to see it in a docile light, but the minor revolution of Progressive metal was that it was flamboyantly weird, wimpy, nerdy... even gay, at times. Modern progressive metal that tries to be all things for all people all the time is terrified of being gay and wimpy and weird predominantly. It thinks the way to counteract that aspect of its identity is by slapping on Pantera and Meshuggah riffs to keep the image 'tough', it's schizophrenic.

Let's listen to this, the quintessential Progressive metal song, and see if we can find anything even remotely 'tough' in it:



This is not at all manly. As intercourse, this is erratic and interrupted. As rhetoric it's rambling and multifaceted, fractured thoughts going every which way. Driving pulse is sacrificed for scope and color. This song goes in many directions and it most importantly takes the most roundabout route to its destination. This is the essence of Progressive metal. It's the audio version of a painting such as this:



That struggles so not to say one thing in the most direct and clear manner, but instead to convey as many aspects of a situation, with its many actors and disparities and often even illogicality. Of course this high concept is wimpy! Machismo is a simple and heavy concept, a bold red color that destroys nuance and detail, it has no place on the page. Listen to that fractured riff, modulated through many keys and rhythms, as if Fates Warning are trying to present it in as many ways as possible, leaving it to the listener to decide, in dialogue with it. Of course the guitar sound is hollower (Rush producer being no accident) and lower in the mix, so that every voice in the mix is equal. Democracy, such an incompatible notion in dynastic Heavy Metal, yet, here it is. From this song to everything vaguely Progressive metal that came out in its shadow, these concepts and concerns are clear and bright to the educated listener.

This means that it's possible to make Progressive metal as such even today, and still keep to the formula. Indeed many bands do. The clarity of the approach should be judged on the modernist grace of the music, not on whether it's overtechnical, genre-bending or all-things-at-once carnival music. Progressive metal is judged on how it utilizes composition to augment its modern program. As the concerns of modernity have not been assuaged (and never will) so will every living popular music have a fringe aspect dedicated to it. Literal-minded metalheads will eventually need to develop the knowledge and language to understand what it is Progressive metal tried to do.