Oh my God! Progrocketal? Pentalist? Someone call an ambulance! Trollheart's having a stroke! Whaddya mean, just let the fu
cker die? Charming. No, as it happens I'm no more weird than usual: I'm making up words again, is all.
I got tired of saying prog rock and prog metal, so I've now decided to meld the two subgenres into one single word, so that progrocketal is just an amalgamation of prog rock and prog metal. Makes things easier, for me anyway. As for pentalist? Merely a playlist with five songs, my friends. No need to fear.
This, then, is the section where I will post my five favourite progrocketal songs, perhaps every day but I think that's unlikely; certainly once a week anyway but maybe more if I can do it/be bothered. I may write a little (or a lot) about all five, or one or two, or I may just drop the videos in and say nothing (yeah, like that'll happen!)
I'll be doing two specific playlists, one chosen by me and one chosen at random, just for the fun of it. Chances are I'll probably end up writing more about the random one, as it may feature songs I haven't yet heard.
So then: on with the first selection.
“The shattered room” - Arena – from Pepper's Ghost.
I pretty much love every track on this album – not that surprising, as I'm a big fan of Arena, though some of their albums can be a little hit or miss sometimes: this is not one such case. From beginning to end it's all killer, no filler. The way the song opens on a soft piano and seems like it's going to be a ballad till it suddenly explodes into a claustrophobic, paranoid, raging rockfest (for a prog rock band) is really well handled, and there's a pretty superb solo from John Mitchell on guitar too.
Weirdly, the entire album is on YouTube except this track! As a result, I have to use this live recording, but it captures the essence of the song.
“The losing game” - Verbal Delirium – from From the Small Hours of Weakness
Next up is a band from Greece I enthused about in my main journal before The Great Discography Project took it over. They're called Verbal Delirium, and this is from the second of their, so far, three albums. Definitely one of the better tracks on
From the Small Hours of Weakness, though most of that album is pretty excellent anyway. This one really stands out though.
Glass Shadows – Mostly Autumn – from Glass Shadows
One of my favourite recent prog bands, there was a time when I would quite literally listen to nothing else. I had all their albums on a shuffle playlist and for absolutely months I just played it over and over, with the result that though I didn't really sit down to listen to many full albums of theirs, I pretty much knew every song on every album by the time I finally dragged myself screaming away to force myself to listen to other music.
This album has never been a real favourite of mine, but I can pick out some real gems, and the title track is one. Ominous and dark, Bryan's voice is counterpointed by Heather's softer approach, and the song works really well.
“Pilot in the sky of dreams” - Threshold – from Dead Reckoning
But I called this list a progrocketal one for a reason, so let's have some of that “-etal”, shall we? In other words, some progressive metal. Even though they shrink from being described as such, Threshold always come across to me as one of the archetypal prog metal bands, fusing heavy riffs and snarling solos with clever tempo changes, instrumental breaks and deep lyrics. I could have chosen any track, really, but this is definitely one of my favourites, and demonstrates how they can start with a really soft balladic tune and then just kick out the stays and rock the house, bringing it all back to where it began as the song comes to an end.
“A broken frame” - Eloy – from Performance
This final track comes with the patented Trollheart Story of the Old Days. Having purchased I think Marillion's debut album, or some prog rock album anyway, I recall asking Tommy in the Sound Cellar, where I used to get all my imports, if he had anything in a prog vein I might be interested in? He suggested Eloy's
Performance, and I trusted him. I remember being very disappointed with it. I guess it sounded like “newer” prog to me, not the organ/keyboard driven tales of dragons and such I had up to then been used to, and I assumed Eloy were a new band. Little did I know they've been around since the early seventies, and that this was their twelfth album!
Nonetheless, I didn't like it and I have never really had occasion to revisit it, but I do remember the closing track being very impressive, more of what I had been hoping for perhaps. Too little, too late, but at least I finished the album with a sense of satisfaction, if only for that one track, or at any rate a feeling that I hadn't completely wasted my money. Eloy remain something of a mystery to me to this day. But I still like this song. I think a lot of that has to do with the soaraway guitar solo at the end.