Periphery is not progressive at all. As I've said in a few previous threads, all they're doing is taking the Meshuggah style and adding post-hardcore and metalcore elements to it.

Progressive does not have to mean "it progresses the genre". There are tons of Dream Theater and Pain of Salvation clones rehashing the same ideas coming out with albums and it makes sense to put them in the same category.

I've never understood how chugging on 1 note could be considered technical or progressive in any way.

Out of curiosity, what genre would you place a modern Genesis clone into?

"prog" progheads progarchives "neoprog", "neoprog" progheads. "progressive"

I've never understood how chugging on 1 note could be considered technical or progressive in any way.

It's the "complex time signatures".

It seems my statements were pretty inflammatory so I feel obliged to clarify myself.

First of all, I've noticed many of you saying that "metal isn't just about being as brutal or heavy as possible!!" but I guess it should come as no surprise when I say I totally do subscribe to that belief. The way I see it, very early traditional metal from the 70s/80s (NWOBHM and USPM are extensions of this) comes from an entirely different way of thinking than the more extreme genres. The way they achieve heaviness (crunchy "metal" riffs, high pitched singers, twin lead guitars, etc) is entirely different than how death/black metal (harsh vocals, blastbeats, tremolo riffs) achieved heaviness and how today's tech-death/deathcore/djent bands achieve heaviness (even more guttural vocals, blastbeats/complex drum patterns, extremely fast lead guitars which are not limited to solos, the inclusion of breakdowns).

I did not grow up in the 80s. I did grow up listening to 80s metal though; I'm sure you guys all think I'm some lame poser deathcore kid but I was way into Judas Priest, Jag Panzer, Fates Warning, Exodus, Overkill, and Motorhead or whatever for many years before I ever got into today's metal. I've seen most of those old bands live, but when I do I can literally feel the generation gap between me and them, between what I consider brutal and "metal enough" for myself and what they're actually performing. It doesn't stop me from enjoying their music or the show, but it does help me realize what makes a band "metal" to me in 2013. In particular, today's bands have a sense of "immediacy" and "urgency" which is unique to them, I think.

They also have a short shelf life because anything that's done for effect rather than the actual music is utter shit.

It's never about the extremes you go to, it's always about the songs. Your virtuosity, quirky time signatures, how brutal it sounds, how high you can sing, how fast or slow you can play, how nasty your growls are, how weird or outrageous you look.... none of this means shit if it's not done to serve the actual songs.

That's what more and more modern metal (and proto-metal) bands don't understand. They attach importance to details and they build songs that serve these details when it's the other way around. You're supposed to push the envelope in order to create an amazing musical experience.

But whatever. If 20 or so nerds want to cram themselves up in shitty bars to listen to irrelevant music that's totally forgotten 3 months later, then so be it. Unfortunately, that's no way to build a following and create classic music that will last for generations.

It seems my statements were pretty inflammatory so I feel obliged to clarify myself.

It seems my statements were pretty inflammatory so I feel obliged to clarify myself.

First of all, I've noticed many of you saying that "metal isn't just about being as brutal or heavy as possible!!" but I guess it should come as no surprise when I say I totally do subscribe to that belief. The way I see it, very early traditional metal from the 70s/80s (NWOBHM and USPM are extensions of this) comes fro...

...it metal too.

Unrelated to picking on TheExodusAttack, my take on Abom's progressive thing. Indeed, "progressive" is not a genre, it is a descriptive term, but the definition of it has certainly changed from it's original purpose. While it originally served to state that a band was inventive and exploratory for it's genre, somewhere along the way after the big 70's prog explosion it's become synonimous with long sprawling compositions with varying instrumentation, much like how black metal was usurped from literally anything satanically themed. Is it logically the best name for it? No, but it's stuck, and that's basically what the "progressive" descriptor means these days. So progressive anything is those old prog rock tropes applied to the genre, meaning progressive metal, is regular heavy metal plus prog elements, not just progressive any style metal ie black/death/doom etc.

It's just like modern classical music. In 500 years, the style of classical music associated with the early 20th century will still be called modern classical.

In a sense, I agree, and I'd never use "progressive metal" as a label to describe a black metal band that thought outside of the strictures of its genre and just leave it at that, but I do think "progressive" has indeed retained its original meaning. Listen to the progressive rock bands of today...at least the ones that are relevant: They don't sound like Genesis...Mars VOlta (god I hate them, but still), Porcupine Tree, that band Riverside, maybe even some stuff like Secret Chiefs 3...that's progressive rock today. It's still sprawling compositions with variant instrumentation (well, many bands have learned the art of writing shorter songs), but incorporation of electronics, modern production techniques, new experimentation with vocals, etc, is common. I don't know a lot about modern Dream Theater clones, but I'd say an album like Symphony X's The Divine Wings of Tragedy is still progressive despite the fact that it's not really doing anything too new. It's just not as progressive as, say, Fleurety's debut, or maybe The 3rd and the Mortal.

Funny how confusing this topic has gotten. Despite not being a genre, I think diehard progressive rock fans have just as many heated arguments over there on the progarchives forua about what constitutes "progressive".

All right, my brain isn't doing so well today; I think I'm done here.

If "progressive" can't be a genre, or rather a subgenre, then what do you propose calling the genre currently referred to as progressive metal? Or progressive rock? They aren't progressing anything anymore, even though they clearly were at the beginning of the genre. You'd have to find some new term to call the whole genre. Keyboard rock/metal?

What I'm saying is progressive has become a descriptive term, but is not a genre in itself, it's like "Melodic" or "Technical" or "Atmospheric", all the words imply certain things, and can be used in conjunction with existing genres to make an easily understood genre of it's own, but no band can just play "progressive" or "melodic", it always has to be an extra detail attached to an existing genre. It's the genre rock/metal/alternative/death metal with the added distinction of having progressive traits.

The Mars Volta aren't doing anything progressive. Their riffs are straight Fripp/Howe-meets-Santana, vocals and lyrics are Yes/Rush, played with a similar energy to At the Drive-in and some salsa and Latin influences from their youth. They're a better example of prog as a style than a way of thinking.

TheExodusAttack, I think you're seriously confusing "heaviness" with metal influence. The two are distinct: they don't necessarily come hand-in-hand nor does the presence of one have to indicate the other. Metal was not defined by its comparative "heaviness" to everything else, even back in the 1970s - at that time I'm sure there were already early industrial/noise acts who were much heavier than the NWOBHM/early doom metal bands, so to say that these bands were classified by the intensity of their music, rather than the types of riffs, compositions, etc. that they used to create songs, seems rather short-sighted.

I can relate to the ideal of searching for the absolute endpoints of intensity in regards to music, since my tastes revolve around that sort of thing to an extent, but you have to realise that from the standpoint of classification you can't simply group "everything that is heavy" into a genre like that. Djent, for example, has roots disconnected rather far from the meat of the metal scene - it was spawned out of an exploration of groove metal (which is a rather borderline genre in and of itself), which was then toned down to retain the grooves and not the riffs, and mixed in a blender with various other things (metalcore, mathcore, perhaps a bit of post-rock, etc.). Associating with a scene, in my mind, doesn't make a band like Periphery or Tesseract metal; the reason for that being that, from a purely musical standpoint, their origins can be traced to areas of development that aren't based in one of the major genres (thrash, heavy, doom, death, black, etc.)

To attempt to illuminate the issue with this sort of historical revisionism, let's try to compare metal's evolution to the animal kingdom. Say that, somewhere, on a remote Pacific island, you find a new species that - superficially - looks sort of like a dog. ("Sort of" meaning its ears are too long, snout is too short, it's too prone to breakdowns instead of riffs, whatever.) DNA testing and physiological observation reveals that it is in fact a closer relative of the cat than the domesticated dog, and that the dog is a much, much more distant cousin of this new species in regards to its path of evolution. So, as a scientist attempting to describe this creature, what would you do? Do you completely redefine the traditional definition of a dog, trying to say that the new creature is one by comparing elements of both which tend to miss the big picture of the animal's anatomy? Or would you relate it to cats, because it is physiologically closer to a cat despite the fact that it shares some features with dogs? Now you might try to argue, then, that music is a completely different playing field compared to the rather hard science which is biology, but at the same time I'm pretty sure that with the help of music theory you could dissect the riffs of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and others, and find explicit melodic ties that bind their musical works together.

By the way, I'm not sure if this is the issue within your mind or not, but you don't have to classify bands as metal to justify your enjoyment of them. Seriously, I'll be the first to admit that I like a lot of nu-metal, djent, deathcore, and so on, but I don't think of it as metal at all. And they don't have to be metal for me to like them.

I raged so much when I read TheExodusAttack's post, I will not even bother with a long post, Ghenghis and MT did it.

"To me, being a "real metalhead" was always about seeking the heaviest, most brutal, sickest and challenging metal you could find." and then you link Veil of Maya You live in your own secluded and biased historical revisionism. Your arguments about djent bands are also very ridiculous. Even if they are in the "scene", it doesn't make a band like Periphery a metal one. And anyway, the bands they tour with are chosen by the labels and they're present there because they're trendy (remember the amount of butthurtness when the Summer Slaughter tour headlined by Cannibal Corpse was announced). It's a matter of convenience and $$$$ decisions and a "heavy bands for kids" tour.

I also hard at your last sentence. I believe most 80s metalheads would had call this band "shit" and nothing else.

Sorry for the attacks, my jimmies were rustled.

For any of you oldz out there, admit it: if something like this had come out in the 80s, your head would have fucking exploded! And you'd probably call it metal too.