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MAY 9, 2005
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Source: Entertainment Weekly
http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1058164_4_0_,00.html
Prog Rocks Again
By Evan Serpick
Cedric Bixler-Zavala's hair is a perfect metaphor for his music. Angry
curls balloon above the Mars Volta frontman's head, forming a spectacularly
au courant hipster Afro, while around his shoulders it settles into a
frizzy dome that evokes a '70s-era mullet. It spans decades, fuses styles,
and is utterly original just like the new brand of progressive rock he
and a handful of other ambitious, exciting musicians are reintroducing to
the mainstream.
The new prog doesn't yet have an official name (neo-prog? post-prog? prog
2.0?), but it's quickly gathering steam. Along with recent success stories
like System of a Down and up-and-comers like the Dillinger Escape Plan,
Lightning Bolt, and Coheed and Cambria, the Mars Volta create incredibly
complex and inventive music that sounds like a heavier, more aggressive
version of '70s behemoths such as Led Zeppelin and King Crimson.
Suddenly, after nearly 30 years of scorn, prog is cool again. ''Younger
musicians are discovering the magic of Pink Floyd, Yes, and early Genesis
records,'' says Lee Abrams, senior VP/chief creative officer of XM
Satellite Radio. ''There's a backlash to the one-hit-wonder thing.''
And to the amazement of just about everyone not least the bands
themselves new prog is as commercial as it is grandiose. On May 17,
System will release Mezmerize, the first half of a double CD (the second
disc, Hypnotize, comes out later this year), an album that's expected to be
one of the summer's biggest releases. (Their last CD, 2001's Toxicity, went
triple platinum.) Coheed and Cambria have built up a huge cult audience,
selling 464,000 copies of their latest, which boasts the appropriately
ludicrous title In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. And the Mars Volta's
second CD, Frances the Mute, recently debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard
albums chart, a remarkable feat for a band whose dense, difficult music
combines everything from salsa and noise-rock to electronica and hip-hop.
''We never expected this,'' says Mars Volta
songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, whose band will open
for System on a fall tour that could be dubbed Monsters of New Prog. ''When
we signed to [Universal], we were like, 'Okay, we'll take this money and
they'll drop us and we'll go back to making our records.' We're not really
being influenced by outside forces. We're influenced by what's going on in
our lives.''
When System of a Down released their self-titled first album in 1998, few
people knew what to make of their smart, ultraloud music. ''Everyone told
us not to scream [our vocals], but we kept on doing what we did,'' says
System frontman Serj Tankian. ''Major radio stations vowed never to play
any of our songs because it was too heavy.''
But then Toxicity changed everything. In the late '90s, Radiohead and Tool
had proved that bands could sell millions by tapping into the epic
spaciness of '70s prog. But with Toxicity's towering singles ''Chop Suey!''
and the title track, System blew the definition of mainstream rock wide
open. After years of warmed-over nü-metal, now, finally, came some actual
new metal, and its success opened the minds of listeners and radio
programmers alike. Soon major labels followed suit, pushing a host of
left-field hard-rock bands.
Mezmerize promises to be System of a Down's biggest and most ambitious
album yet (the first single, ''B.Y.O.B.'' short for ''Bring your own
bombs'' is already getting heavy airplay). So how did they win over rock
fans more accustomed to conventional bands like Creed and Nickelback? Their
success has a lot to do with the band's songwriting philosophy; by
condensing their eccentricities into three-minute pop songs with
irresistible hooks, they make the strange accessible. ''I wanted to find a
way to mix prog into a song structure,'' says System guitarist and
songwriter Daron Malakian. ''That's the challenge for me, to make it as
interesting as a prog song. . .but not as long as one.''
It's a tricky balance in this emerging scene, credibility is absolutely
crucial, and success is often viewed with suspicion. ''The bands who have
made it that we respect are bands that stumbled on commercial success by
mistake,'' says Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman, whose band
will tour with Megadeth and prog standard-bearers Dream Theater this
summer. ''When [success] is honest, you don't go to it. It comes to you.''
While System writes tunes that 13-year-olds sing along to, Dillinger's
intense brand of intricate thrash might be too much for teens or anyone,
for that matter to take. ''Every day I'm surprised by the things we're
able to do, considering the music we play,'' says Weinman, whose band has
managed to open for acts as diverse as Sonic Youth and Guns N' Roses.
''We're not doing anything for the sake of appealing to a certain audience.''
That was the idea the first time around, too. When prog initially hit, it
began as a haven for assorted long-haired weirdos with their minds expanded
by drugs and little concern for mass appeal. ''The early progressive bands
of the late '60s were a reaction to the ultra-mainstream pop of the
mid-'60s,'' says XM's Abrams. Early hints of the prog sensibility were
heard on Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's anti-pop double-disc
opus Freak Out! in 1966, and progressive experimenters like Soft Machine
and Can were soon making some of the most intriguing sounds of the era.
''We changed the world by saying my music can be whatever I want,'' says
Yes singer Jon Anderson.
But by the mid-'70s, scores of unicorn-worshipping keyboard virtuosos were
pumping out meandering epics with alarming titles like ''The Revealing
Science of God (Dance of the Dawn).'' The genre had become bloated and
ridiculous, and a fetish for complexity and virtuosity threatened to
overwhelm the experimental part. ''We were just looking out to have fun,''
says Rush frontman Geddy Lee, ''and fun for us was playing stuff that was
hard to play.'' Ultimately, the artifice proved too much, even for
insiders. ''To tell you the truth, bands like King Crimson and Yes, they
were for us a nightmare,'' says Holger Czukay, cofounder of the influential
German band Can. ''Too ambitious.''
Then, with little warning and massive consequences, punk happened. The
Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, and a generation of prog-hating young snots
doomed the genre to almost 30 years of hopeless uncoolness. ''Basically it
was like, 'You don't deserve all the money, so we're gonna give it to these
young kids who don't care about progressive music, don't care about
anything but real rock & roll,''' says Anderson. ''And I would say, 'Wait
until they get money. They'll get better amplifiers, get better cars, and
smoke better drugs.' That's what they did. It's the normal thing.''
The Mars Volta's Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez sit outside their
manager's Hollywood office in sports coats and jeans on a hot afternoon,
trying to make sense of their unexpected success. They look like extras
from Welcome Back, Kotter, except with lots of tattoos and more attitude.
They talk over each other and finish each other's sentences and generally
act like an extremely hip old married couple. It's as if they've known each
other all their lives, and actually that's not far from the truth:
Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez have been making music together for more
than 11 years.
Until recently, the duo led the innovative punk band At the Drive-In, which
itself seemed poised for mainstream success. But just as their breakthrough
album, 2000's Relationship of Command, started to take off, the band called
it quits. At the time, it looked like a terrible move.
Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez quickly formed the Mars Volta and in 2002
released an ambitious EP. One year later came their debut album, De-Loused
in the Comatorium, a bewilderingly indulgent concept album that couldn't
have sounded more different from their past work. De-Loused sold 336,000
copies as many as any of At the Drive-In's four releases. Why is the new
band connecting? ''[The Mars Volta] is very much about the moment,'' says
Rodriguez-Lopez. ''Things just kinda come out. As long as it moves us, as
long as it makes us feel something, we use it. It's as simple as that. The
most important thing is that the label left us alone. We work in the
laboratory and then we go 'Here it is,' and they figure out how to sell
it.'' Rodriguez-Lopez's approach to music can be summed up in a mantra told
to him by one of his heroes, Can's Czukay: ''I'm not the best player in the
world, but I know how to disturb.'' Apparently that philosophy is working.
After seeing the Mars Volta at a recent show in Cologne, Czukay was
impressed. ''I haven't heard such an excellent band in decades,'' he says.
Ironically, punk the movement that nearly killed prog is in many ways
behind its comeback, since most bands associated with the scene have deep
punk roots. The new prog is ''coming from a place of pure feeling,'' says
Rodriguez-Lopez. ''It's much closer to punk rock than it is to prog, which
was all about showing how technical you could be.'' But Dillinger's Weinman
thinks there's less of a difference between the two genres than you might
think. ''To me, this is the new breed of punk,'' he says. ''Punk isn't just
writing punk music, it's being against what's mainstream. And that's what
King Crimson and all those bands were doing. They were writing the music
they want to write, and that's punk rock.''
Even so, it's hard to think of the new-prog bands as truly punk.
''Progressive sounds fine to us,'' says Rodriguez-Lopez. ''We take it as
the literal word progressive, moving forward the idea that you can take
elements from the past and make something new.'' As Coheed and Cambria
frontman Claudio Sanchez puts it, ''The good thing about being a
progressive rock band is not having any walls being able to do whatever
the hell you want. We want to touch every part of music.'' Even the parts
played in 11/8 time on glockenspiel.
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