The first prog-metal album in time

While it may not count for the whole album, I always thought Larks Tongues In Aspic part 1 by King Crimson was a very heavy song for it's time.

But yeah, like J-man said, I think prog gradually emerged over a period of time

BaldJean wrote: this is the first prog metal album (from 1969):

npjnpj wrote: Maybe it's me, but I've always thought Rush to be too soft for Metal. I get where you're coming from, but to my ears there was much more metally Prog-Metal around.

Crimson Glory hell yeah why did I forget them? Sieges Even´s first album was released in 1988 as I recall and Savatage only started incorporating progressive elements to their sound later in their career IMO. Maybe I´m wrong though but the early albums I´ve heard by Savatage sounded pretty straight forward heavy metal/ US power metal to me.

I think the thing to remember here is that prog metal as a genre, certainly as its been seen for the last 15 years, didnt exist in the 70's so I consider albums from Rush, Led Zepplin, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, High Tide, Iron Maiden, Metallica etc, to be precursers that set the ball rolling and with Wtchtower's ED as the most likely first album that took the final step to being full on Prog Metal.

As for King Crimson being mentiond, no, just no.   

Valarius wrote: You guys are all sooooo wrong.   The first ever Progressive Metal album was Dream Theater's 'When Dream and Day Unite'.   Before that, there was only The Beatles and Wham!

I quite like how the thread has evolved and many people have contributed

b_olariu wrote: Where is Savatage or Crimson Glory, Sieges Even???? they release albums in mid '80's, so when prog metal was in his infancy, they have a share among the first to combine metal with prog elements. Definetly agree with Watchtower after all. And I will gone deep in time maybe Black Sabbath albums the early ones.

To your comment I would partially agree. Crimson Glory released the debut in 1986 with lots of epic elemnts and certainly some prog-metal as we think of it now. Same year is also Heir Apparent's debut . Sieges Even debut is another one to applause - released in 1988 or 1989 if I remember correctly.

UMUR wrote: Crimson Glory hell yeah why did I forget them? Sieges Even´s first album was released in 1988 as I recall and Savatage only started incorporating progressive elements to their sound later in their career IMO. Maybe I´m wrong though but the early albums I´ve heard by Savatage sounded pretty straight forward heavy metal/ US power metal to me.

I have to agree on that - the first prog elements came into their music with Gutter Ballet in 1989 although HOTMK in 1987 was a brilliant record.

Well, prog metal is definitevely heavy, so bands like Rush,King Crimson or Deep Purple do not count, even if they were very influential. If we keep going back we will get to Vanilla Fudge and Cream, and we maybe would arrive to the conclusion that Beatles invented prog metal. (Well, there are some who claim that Beatles invented everything but I think that would be exaggerating a little bit.) Queensryche is not progressive metal, although Geoff Tate did influence vocalists in that field. Many metal bands in the 80´s incorporated prog influences (Iron Maiden, Metallica, Savatage, Helloween, King Diamond and many others).But if we listen to  Yngwie Malmsteen´s debut album Rising Force from 1984 we can find many of the elements that would later be found in prog metal: tons of fast guitars, pounding double bass drum beats, classical (or pseudo classical) chops, a bigger keyboard presence than was usual in metal those days, focus on technique and interpretation rather than composition, and a singer that tries to sing like Dio. Maybe the songs do not have that many parts and there are no odd signatures, but I think the roots are there.

J-Man wrote: Valarius wrote: You guys are all sooooo wrong.   The first ever Progressive Metal album was Dream Theater's 'When Dream and Day Unite'.   Before that, there was only The Beatles and Wham!   Sorry, that was 1989, and I can think of many prog metal albums by bands like Queensryche, Blind Illusion, and Watchtower that came before that.

He was joking....ahem...

Most of 70's bands cited in the thread are heavy prog and NOT prog metal.