Prog Metal-Like It or Don’t Like It?

My fav genre!

Early Heavy Metal and Hard Rock were pretty much interchangeable as terms.

The music is based in the riffing structures of the late Heavy Blues bands - many of whom moved away from their blues roots to play more riff-based Hard Rock style music.

The band setup is more or less the same - lead guitar with plenty of soloing, bass, drums, and often a rhythm guitar as well as vocals. The 5-piece setup is classic for both Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.

Hard Rock tended to focus on the traditional blues themes, but elaborated them into celebratory themes of lust, life and luurve, and the music became swaggering and testosterone-laced. The rhythms became cleaner, but retained much of the swing of the original blues bands. (Think Aerosmith or AC/DC, etc.).

Heavy Metal focussed more on cult, dark or occult themes, and the music became darker - the riffs tending towards use of the tritone interval (e.g. E -> Bb). The rhythm guitar particularly used more fuzz and distortion and the rhythms became more constant, eschewing any notion of "swing" or anything that might indicate some sort of cheerfulness. (Think Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer, etc.).

Of course, there's always been crossovers, and bands that played some metal tracks and some hard rock tracks and it's not black and white (Think the Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Saxon, etc.) - but I think that covers the basics.

This time I agree with you Maiden. Hard rock should better be called hard blues because it's where it finds its roots.

What about Black Sabbath? I adore all their early records (until sabotage). Metal or Hard Rock?

MikeEnRegalia and Progtologist:

As I understand it, you two (if there are others, this includes you to) are working on the organization of prog-metal. I agree with this. I think one of the propositions Mike made in the original thread in the Prog Music Lounge, to make "Prog Metal" a seperate entitiy from "Prog Rock" yet still include it on this site, is a great idea. Even if that is not what you plan on specifically doing, I support your project fully.

Carry on.

Adagio are an amazing band, very professional and ambitioned musicians and quite sophisticated songwriting. But they're not very diverse in their choice of musical "tools", it is mostly centered around classical piano parts and Power Metal. Initially I placed them in the Symphonic category, but like Symphony X they are very close to the traditional metal sound, that's why they're now in the Power/"Heavy" category.

Just out of curiosity: How would you describe Adagio - how would you "tag" them (multiple genres)?