Originally Posted by Trollheart

I guess it's hard to be "progressive" in the way prog rock used to be, when just about everything has been done now. When prog rock got going in the seventies, the idea of using, say, violins in rock, even pushing keyboards to the front of the mix was quite new. Songs were constructed in a formulaic way (verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus etc) and generally short. Prog rock giants like Yes, ELP, Genesis etc took this formula and kicked it out the window, leading to a lot of excitement at the time because all of this "new" music was different.

Prog rock bands of today, while there are some good ones, are basically copying the same sort of music as their idols/inspiration, with the result that it's hardly what could any longer be called progressive. Prog Rock is basically now just a label, like extreme metal. It's all been done.

I suppose the most progressive of bands these days are ones labelled as experimental or avant-garde, who actually ARE doing new things. Most are not my cup of tea, but they're probably doing more to advance the ideas in music than so-called prog rock bands such as Spock's Beard, Arena or IQ, though I love these bands.

Perhaps the term progressive rock, with respect to those and other bands, should be redefined. Retro-progressive? Retrogressive? Maybe just Keyboard Rock? I don't honestly think any of the bands around in the last ten or twenty years can claim to be moving the music forward and therefore could not, in the strictest sense of the term, be regarded as progressive.

And I'm a lifelong prog head!

I just listened to a band called Comedy of Errors. Good band, but one of the most obvious melding of bands like Yes and Spock's Beard. I still use the term progressive rock for the bands who play like that, who I like, but really as I say, to find true progressive rock you probably need to look outside the genre, to the experimental bands. They're the ones who are actually taking chances, breaking moulds and perhaps trying to set new trends.