Let's Talk About Progmatism Pt. 3

Go Forth, Get Good, Get Weird

For the last two weeks I’ve gone in depth into a new critical mode called Progmatism. In the first week I focused on Progmatism’s philosophical roots in the American pragmatism of Richard Rorty. This was necessary in order to clear the air of the metaphysical conceptions of “authenticity” and “relevance” that fogged up conversations about music over the last two decades. Next, I defined my terms and explained what prog means to me as a genre and a creative mode, detailing the way the genre points both to a legacy of musical excellence and a future of musical innovation. Today I’d like to sum up by explaining what Progmatism could mean to you, prospective critics and musicians. How do we do Progmatism instead of just talking about it?

First let me address the musicians. I am not suggesting that you abandon your sound write only 12 minute long Yes-songs from here on out (though, hey maybe try to write one or two). The purpose of Progmatism isn’t to make every band into a 1970s progressive rock band, but to apply the ideals of prog to whatever it is that you do. In other words, git gud. One of the crucial tenets of Progmatism is that It Is Cool To Be Good At Stuff. If your thing is writing lyrics, write the best lyrics you can. If you’re into guitar pedals, learn how to get exactly what you want out of them. Big on improvising? Pursue the flow state as a daily practice. Excellence in Progmatism takes no specific shape. It isn’t molded by a metaphysically consistent ideal. Instead it is contingent on the context of the game that the Progmatist is playing in. Master your instrument, whether that be a pen, a guitar, or a DAW. In this light artists as disparate as Joanna Newsom and Aphex Twin can comfortably be called Progmatist icons despite not resembling classic prog rock bands.

Getting Good is not enough, however. The Progmatist must also Get Weird. Whether drawing from prog’s traditional wing or it’s futurist side, the Progmatist has no concern for popular conventions. The Progmatist follows their own taste to its logical extremes. They’d don’t excise their idiosyncrasies for the sake of fitting an easily digestible package. These quirks are signs of life, a musical signature that proves that specific people with specific points of view are responsible for the music. Interesting and discerning taste is just as crucial as technical facility. You won’t have to dig long to hear complaints that certain musicians are too good to make listenable music, that their technical facility has rendered them “soulless”. What these critics are diagnosing is not an excess of skill but a deficiency in taste. If John Petrucci lost 30% of his fast-twitch muscle memory he wouldn’t sudden start writing better songs. One need only listen to a Dream Theater ballad where nothing exciting happens instrumentally speaking to realize that skill is not the issue here. What separates a Progmatist visionary from a boring show-off is the quality of their ideas, their willingness to pull from unexpected places and take creative risks. The Progmatist must be so committed to their personal taste that they risk looking ridiculous.

While working on this series my mind has been unable to shake the image of Peter Gabriel in the flower costume, high kicking while the rest of Genesis play one of the least pleasing stretches of their often stunningly beautiful music. The whole affair is about as far from what the average person thinks a rock concert should look and sound like as you can get before ending up in another genre completely. I mean, just google what Imagine Dragons look like on stage. Then consider who you, dear musician, more closely resemble. In this age of sub-fractional streaming payouts, live venue merch cuts, crumbling media, and widespread disinterest in music as anything other than lifestyle branding, we all might as well be donning flower costumes any time we hit the stage or the studio. To choose to do this is ridiculous and more than a little embarrassing. So why not go all out and risk being very embarrassing? If the world already thinks you’re uncool and a joke, why ever hold back? Give the world the largest possible target for its pies and tomatoes. Prog is nothing if not a big target. It gives the hecklers a lot to work with because it gives the audience everything it has. Prog is generous, abundant in the face of musical austerity. The Progmatist does not hold back. Excess is their natural environment. Going big is going home.

All of these tenants hold true for the Progmatist critic as well. There is no longer a mass audience for music criticism, so why pretend to appeal to one? Instead pursue your own personal rabbit hole. Be obsessive, dig too deep and too greedily for your own definition of gold. Not only does the Progmatist master their own craft, they also uplift and celebrate others who go equally hard. They pore over liner notes to determine who busted their ass to make the music good, whether that be the songwriter, the instrumentalists, or the producers behind the boards. The Progmatist seeks out The Good Stuff where-ever it may be, and praises it on its own merits without resorting to metaphysical explanations for its “realness” or “relevance”. The music itself will dictate what critical lens it requires. Progmatist criticism works at both the micro and macro level. It is both detail oriented and prone to overkill. Calder Hannan’s Metal Music Theory is Progmatist in its laser-focused riff analysis and malleable toolbox. Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones is also Progmatist in its massive historical scope and demanding workload. Action Button Reviews is obviously Progmatist given it’s byzantine long-form structure. And, if you’ll allow me to toot my own horn alongside these bellowing trumpets, Drumming Upstream is Progmatist for many of the same reasons.

I encourage you to toot as well. Go forth, Get Good, and Get Weird. Take on an impossible task and see it through. Don your own flower costume. Progmatism is here, Progmatism is now.

# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #

• Earlier this week I shared a collection of in-progress Lamniformes demos with my paying subscribers. I plan to do something like that every month going forward in an effort to give my paying subscribers more bang for their buck. In that same spirit I have a special series of End-Of-The-Year content scheduled for the next two months, also exclusive to my paying subscribers. Join the club now to access this bonus features, as well as other exclusives in the future. Your support means the world to me!

• Though today is not Bandcamp Friday, it is still an excellent day to buy music from Bandcamp, specifically my Bandcamp. Personally, I’d recommend my album The Lonely Atom released earlier this year, which you can sample below. You can also grab a Lamniformes shirt or a cassette of my old album Sisyphean!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a Spotify playlist with all of this year’s tracks here, updated with a new song every Monday-Friday.

“Schizodipshit” by Machine Girl (MG Ultra, 2024)

In 2010, comedian & sports gambling pitch-man Patton Oswalt wrote in WIRED that nerd-ness had permeated all of mainstream culture. Everyone had become a geek about *something*, whether that be reality TV, politics, professional sports, etc. To me, this nerd-ification is a direct consequence of the information age. As more stats, content, and lore oozes out from the internet into reality, this tendency towards obsession has only gotten stronger. Now, we’re not just fans, we’re Tool fans. Everything is a potential breadcrumb, part of a pattern, one twist of numerology away from revealing the truth about everything else. Machine Girl have the perfect digital hardcore anthem for our info-addled age: “you can be a Schizodipshit too/Fall down a hole, follow the clues/everything’s permitted, nothing is true”.

“Maracutaia” by Papangu (Lampião Rei, 2024)

Now THIS is what I’m talking about, baby! Along with the Greep, Papangu are exactly the kind of band that Progmatism is designed to uplift. This tune mixes local Brazillian flavor with crispy prog noodling and even sneaks in some scalding extreme metal passages in before settling back down.

I was planning on posting about this band no matter what, but as (bad) luck would have it they could really use the support right now. Earlier this week the band got robbed at gunpoint, losing their rental car full of gear, merch, and personal belongings. If you are even remotely into this tune and want to support a band in a terrible situation, please consider buying Lampião Rei on Bandcamp!

“Afflecks Palace” by Floating Points (Cascade, 2024)

Floating Points returns to the dance floor. Loads of gorgeous sound choices here, big fan of the harpsichord-ish lead line in the second half. Electronica readers, am I nuts for thinking this sounds a little like a classed up Big Beat track?

“Square Wave Subversion” by Gigan (Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus, 2024)

Now that I live in Chicago maybe I should stop being a Pyrrhon fanboy and instead start posting about Gigan all the time. Joking, of course, but I do see the two bands as spiritual compatriots, both chewing through the fabric of death metal in different directions. Pyrrhon bring the genre back into reality, amplifying the mundane horrors of urban living. Gigan push death metal even further into the unknown, overloading their sound with psychedelic effects and deranged shifts in tone that make the music feel like it’s bubbling over and bursting into a new form entirely.

“Plague Dancer” by Night Verses (Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley of Night, 2024)

The first Night Verses album was one of the last releases I wrote about at Invisible Oranges before leaving. I hadn’t heard a single thing about them since, until out of nowhere they dropped a massive follow up earlier this year. Not a peep from them in between! Never seen anyone else talk about them, no appearances on festivals or tours that *I* can recall. Given that the band does all their own graphic design and visual work, I suspect they’re all well paid creatives with serious jobs, which only makes their outrageous technical facility all the more impressive. How do they find the time to shed this much?

\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /

Here are five micro reviews of albums from my vast Rate Your Music catalog. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) by Jai Paul (2019) - Art Pop

When these tunes first leaked back in 2013 I filed them under “overhyped” and “undercooked”. Now, a decade later with a more refined ear for the wonky and unquantized I see what all the fuss is about. Funny how these “unfinished” songs feel more alive and fully realized than the more polished attempts at this style of British R&B that have come out in recent years. I can’t tell whether I’m bummed that these songs only made it out to the public because of a leak or grateful that they are out there at all.

The Bends by Radiohead (1995) - Rock

This was part of my sister’s CD collection but I shuffled it into my own rotation after she went to college. Radiohead’s version of a Most Improved Player award before they won back-to-back MVPs with Ok Computer and Kid A. I think it’s easy to overlook this as “just a rock record” in light of their late, experimental material, but that perspective has the whole thing backwards. Radiohead’s (highly successful) turn to electronica and genre-bending was so interesting because they were already a GREAT rock band. Wall to wall hooks, Thom Yorke as a convincingly sexy rock singer, a great sense of humor and the required ratio of absolute day-ruining bummers. If you’ve never clicked with Radiohead’s stuff before, start here!

Ok Computer by Radiohead (1997) - Alternative Rock

Thee Radiohead album according to most of the press and the meme-makers of the world. Getting older is neat. I’ve watched this thing hurdle inevitably toward classic rock dorm poster status in real time. What gets lost when an album reaches that kind of critical mass and memetic virality is that uh, the songs are really, really good. Listen to “Let Down” and tell me I’m wrong. The reason people hype this one in particular is that its the first time Radiohead looked up from their guitars and realized there are a whole bunch of other instruments they could use in the studio. There’s a bunch that could be said about the themes of alienation and paranoia and blah blah blah, but come on. You know the deal by now.

Hail to the Thief by Radiohead (2003) - Alternative Rock

My first Radiohead album, borrowed from my friend Preston after he sat me down and forced me to listen to “Wolf At The Door” in middle school. Took me a long while to figure out what the appeal was, as a nü metal dirtbag my musical vocab was pretty limited at the time. Once it clicked I never looked back. After their detour into the Warp records catalog on Kid A & Amnesiac this album reconciles their electronic influences with their status as a rock band first and foremost. Probably has the least extra-musical intrigue of any of the band’s mature work. The key difference is that this is the first Radiohead album since Yorke became a father, which magnifies the expression of his by-now familiar anxieties.

[Editor’s Note: This album’s anti-Bush/Blair subtext, and Radiohead’s left-leaning credentials generally, are a little hard to take seriously given Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s wishy-washy response to pro-Palestinian protesters this year. To my knowledge no one has asked the other three guys where they stand on the issue.]

Powerslave by Iron Maiden (1984) - Heavy Metal

My first Maiden record, which I picked up as hesher homework in high school. I thought it was lightweight at first, but riff by riff, solo by solo, Iron Maiden won me over and showed me that metal didn’t need to be dark, angry, and brooding all the time. It could be bright, colorful, and most importantly, fun! This was the second album with Iron Maiden’s classic lineup. The continuity must have had a positive effect because even the filler tunes are a blast. The gem is “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, easily the best of Maiden’s spark notes book report epics.