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Thus it should be no surprise that the most complex and adventurous form of popular music has seldom received due credit from the critics, and has had a hard time making its way through an inharmonious music industry to reach a wide public. Progressive rock, or prog, has been largely derided by critics throughout the three decades since it hit the scene in the early 1970s. Pioneering prog bands such as Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Kansas, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer created ambitious, complex compositions blending classical, folk, medieval, and jazz influences with rock foundations. These artists skillfully employed unusual time signatures and chord changes, long songs (sometimes taking up an entire two-album set), imaginative and sophisticated (and occasionally pretentious) lyrical concepts, and, above all, tremendous creativity and adventurousness in the composition and performance of the music. Some of these bands received strong reviews initially, and several achieved such popularity that they are still making music three decades later. By the late 1970s, however, '60s-generation critics were on the lookout for any evidence of artistic pretension, and newer groups of this sort had increasing difficulty breaking into a market dominated by unmelodious punk and disco sounds. Progressive rock fell by the wayside. In the 1990s, however, two trends brought the form back (although most music fans are not yet aware of that, thanks to the critics' and industry people's preference for simple music with angry, openly left-wing lyrics). The personal computer radically reduced the cost of recording music of this complexity, and the aforementioned abandonment of melody by the rest of the industry left prog rock as one of the few options open to listeners who actually like music. As a result, groups such as Dream Theater, the Flower Kings, Echolyn, Glass Hammer, Pendragon, Transatlantic, and Salem Hill have led a new wave of progressive rock that has found increasing audience support in recent years. Except for Dream Theater, which has benefited from popularity among progressive-metal fans, most of these groups are still operating on a shoestring, but they and countless others are making what is quite simply the most interesting and creative — and arguably the most enjoyable — music of our time. One of the very best of these groups is Spock's Beard. Led by keyboardist, guitarist, singer, and songwriter Neal Morse, the group was founded in California in 1992 and recorded its first album, The Light, in 1994. Artistically, it was a stunning success. Consisting of just four songs, three of which are each more than ten minutes long, The Light combines classic prog influences from groups such as Yes, Gentle Giant, and the Beatles into a unique sound driven by Morse's strong melodies, witty lyrics, and expressive voice. (He sounds like a cross between the late John Lennon and Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra). The arrangements are confident and elaborate, and the musicianship is stunning, with the guitar work of Alan Morse (Neal's older brother) especially noteworthy. Also notable is the largely optimistic, positive-minded tenor of the lyrics, quite a contrast to the gloomy posture of most early '90s music. As the title might suggest, the lyrics show a respect for spiritual matters and morality unusual for the time. The album, however, was released by a small record label otherwise devoted to heavy metal, and it did not gain the group the large following the quality of the work merited. During the rest of the decade, the Beard released three more albums of original material, all of which concentrated on shorter, less complex songs in an evident but unsuccessful attempt to garner bigger audiences. Although these albums were quite impressive and enjoyable, prog purists began to deride the group as commercial sellouts, too melodic and pop-oriented to take seriously. In 2000, however, the group rebounded with V, probably the best second-wave prog release to date. Featuring one song of more than 16 minutes and another clocking in at nearly a half-hour, V firmly reestablished the Beard's prog credentials, emphasized the group's positive messages, and brought out strong hints of a particular religious orientation. These intimations have been made explicit in the group's latest release, Snow. An ambitious, two-disk concept album of nearly two hours' duration, Snow tells the story of a young man who has the mysterious power to look into people's souls and read their deepest intentions and desires. He travels to New York City, becomes something of a messiah, begins to feel excessive pride in his gifts, falls as a result, and then rises again by finding his real place in the world. The music proceeds continuously, with no breaks between songs, encompassing a wide variety of sounds from acoustic folk to orchestral pomp to jazz to power pop to something very near heavy metal. Unusual time signatures and quick changes in tempo express the powerful emotional currents of the lyrics, driven as they are by Snow's ability to read people's souls, but the words and story never force the music anywhere the band is incapable of going, if indeed there is such a place. The sections of elaborate vocal interplay in "Long Time Suffering" and "Devil's Got My Throat," for example, go well beyond harmony into the realm of counterpoint, a sophisticated approach that few rock artists have even attempted. Complex as the music is, it is always hugely enjoyable, driven by Morse's powerful gift for melody and the band's impressive command of their instruments. Perhaps most satisfying, however, is the album's spiritual content. Morse makes this subject matter evident from the very beginning, when he sings,
The nicely elliptical allusion to Heaven and the declaration that human beings are precious to God succinctly establish why Morse chose to tell this particular story. But all is not sweetness and light in Snow. Personifying a drug addict later in the first disk, Morse sings,
The song giving Snow's reaction to his fall, "All Is Vanity," clearly alludes to the Book of Ecclesiastes, and after a few more compositions describing his degradation, we encounter the source of his redemption. In "I Will Go," Snow tells us that
The next song, "Made Alive Again/The Wind at My Back," clearly refers to Jesus's words to Nicodemus in Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John. Here Snow himself repeats the opening lines of the first song, this time in a clearly different context, concisely expressing his new knowledge. The second half of the song reprises the lyric of the closing tune of the first disk, likewise called "The Wind at My Back," but with a crucial difference. In the first version, a group of homeless people sing their appreciation to Snow, in words such as the following:
In the reprise, by contrast, Snow sings these words to God, in gratitude for his deliverance and redemption. It is a beautiful moment, and characteristic of the album as a whole. Such overt Christianity is in fact quite common among the current crop of progressive rock artists; all the second-wave bands mentioned earlier here have been increasingly explicit about their spiritual beliefs during the past decade, with Glass Hammer, Echolyn, and Dream Theater leading the way. It is interesting to note that a good deal of the most vibrant and inventive music of our time is being produced by Christian artists. Spock's Beard had been rather less direct about this until V, though the hints were always there for those who chose to look. In recent years, however, Neal Morse has spoken with increasing openness about his conversion to Christianity, and he has even started a record label devoted to progressive Christian music. His simultaneous growth as an artist has been salutary, and I cannot help but see a strong link between the two. With Snow, Spock's Beard has created one of the greatest rock albums of all time, one that completely transcends the form's mundane origins. It is art. — S. T. Karnick is editor-in-chief of American Outlook magazine, published by the Hudson Institute. |
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he dirty little
secret about contemporary music is that almost none of the industry people,
broadcasters, and music critics actually know anything about music. Rock
criticism has always extolled lyrics, artistic personae, emotional directness,
and visual presentation because those are things a writer can observe
without having studied music. This ignorance is the main reason the biggest
critic-driven trends of the past four decades — folk, punk, disco,
and then, simultaneously in the past decade, grunge, rap, metal, industrial,
and Lilith folk — have been based on these things rather than music.
