Just got great news re: Neal Morse from Richard Schwartz and Radiant Records (yay, Chris Thompson). Neal Morse is releasing the New York show of the Momentum concert on DVD. Here’s the note, directly:
The Momentum Live DVD and Audio Box Set!
YES… yet another big giant Neal Morse live package is on the way! I have been mixing for days now the audio for the live show that was shot in New York City last October. I have to say it’s pretty darn good. Except for that guy in the center, everybody’s really great!
Yeah, it’s a really cool set list. Here’s the track list for the DVD:
DVD 1
MOMENTUM
WEATHERING SKY
AUTHOR OF CONFUSION
THE DISTANCE TO THE SUN
TESTIMONY SUITE
(Sleeping Jesus, Prince of the Power of the Air, The Promise, Wasted Life)
THOUGHTS PART 5
THE CONFLICT (From Sola Scriptura)
DVD 2
QUESTION MARK SUITE
(The Temple of the Living God, Another World, Entrance, Inside His Presence)
FLY HIGH
WORLD WITHOUT END
CRAZY HORSES
SING IT HIGH
KING JESUS
How’s that for some cool info? It’s 2.5 hours plus long, and it’s the entire show. Plus Randy George has made a tour documentary as only he can. So it will be a 5 disc set in a special box, much like the “Testimony 2 Live in Los Angeles” Box Set was, it will be about the same as that.
Progarchist Mark Widhalm and I saw him the next night, in Chicago, but he didn’t play “World Without End.” So, very glad to see this here.
Morse also noted that there will be a new Flying Colors album and, if all goes well, a new Transatlantic.
Great news for the day before the Apocalypse! Thank you, Neal.
Mike Portnoy, in an interview with iDrum magazine, made an interesting remark about all the guys in the supergroup Flying Colors; namely, their running joke during the writing process:
We almost felt like the Village People! I’m the metal guy, Neil Morse the prog guy, Casey McPherson the pop guy, [Steve] Morse the country guy and Dave LaRue the funky guy!
I feel the same way about the supergroup team here at Progarchy. In addition to our shared loves, we also have our distinctive tastes. Me, I’m the metal guy; Brad Birzer is the prog guy; Carl Olson is the jazz guy; Kevin McCormick is the classical guy…
One of my greatest pleasures of 2012–and there have been many–has been listening to massive quantities of progressive rock, mostly for pleasure.
Being a literary and humanities guy, I’d contemplated rejecting the entire numerical ranking scheme. Rather, I thought about labeling each of my best albums with various qualities of myth. These albums achieved the level of Virgil; these of Dante; these of Tolkien, etc. But, I finally decided this was way too pretentious . . . even for me.
Below are my rankings for the year. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised by any of these choices. I’m not exactly subtle in what I like and dislike. Before listing them, though, I must state three things.
First, I loved all of these albums, or I wouldn’t be listing them here. That is, once you’ve made it to Valhalla or Olympus, why bother with too many distinctions. The differences between my appreciation of number 8 and number 2, for example, are marginal at best.
Second, I am intentionally leaving a couple of releases out of the rankings: releases from Echolyn, The Enid, Minstrel’s Ghost, Galahad, and Kompendium, in particular, as I simply did not have time to digest them. Though, from what I’ve heard, I like each very much.
Third, I think that 2012 has proven to be the single greatest year in prog history. DPRP’s Brian Watson has argued that we’re in the “third wave of prog.” He might very well be right. But, I don’t think we’ve ever surpassed the sheer quality of albums released this year. This is not to belittle anything that has come before. Quite the contrary. I am, after all, a historian by profession and training. The past is always prologue. Close to the Edge,Selling England by the Pound, and Spirit of Eden will always be the great markers of the past.
10. Flying Colors – At first I thought this was more “pop” than “prog”, but I kept coming back to it throughout the year. It’s prog, and it’s very good!
9. Neal Morse – Momentum. Neal stays true to his beliefs, while delivering the best album of his solo career. Full of energy and great melodies, he, Randy George, and Mike Portnoy create a masterpiece with this one.
8. Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy – WaterSky. A beautiful set of ambient pieces that were recorded while on retreat at a lodge in rural Texas. The sympathetic interplay between Johnson’s keyboards and Keaggy’s guitar is simply wonderful. My students request this music while working on math problems! Continue reading “Yet Another Best of 2012”→
Though Progarchy is only two months old, I’m absolutely thrilled with its successes. A thanks, first, to all of you out in the world (it’s a blast to look at the google map of who checks us out daily) who read us. I hope you keep coming back to us.
Second, though, an immense thanks to all of the Progarchist writers. Everything written here is purely voluntary. We each have full-time jobs and families, but we do this because we love it.
We’re certainly not the biggest music website, but I believe that–in terms of sheer literary quality–no other website matches us. I would hold any one of our writers (individually or collectively) against any other group of writers in the blogosphere. If this sounds cocky, I apologize. But, as editor, I find it quite humbling. We really like each other, but we also believe that the importance of the music demands that we write and try to match with our utmost abilities. On this, I think we’ve succeeded.
Additionally, though the site is based in the western Great Lakes of North America, we also have writers from the U.K., Brazil, and New Zealand. We’re hoping to have someone from Antarctica soon—Penguin Prog?—but, it’s been more difficult than one might first imagine.
As 2012 comes to its necessary and inescapable end, each of the Progarchists has been asked—as time permits—to rank her or his favorite albums of the past year.
I’ll be ranking my top fifteen albums as well, and I’m sure my number one pick of the year, which I think is the best album of the last twenty-four years, will probably come as no surprise to anyone.
I agree that this is a great way to keep the peace when people are being obnoxious and unreasonable.
And it’s also a fine way to habitually cultivate humility on a personal level.
So okay, Mike, you got it. You’re one of my favorite drummers, and you are on many of my favorite albums this year!
But surely something only becomes a favorite because we consider it the best.
And the real reason we share “best of” lists, is not because we claim omniscience, but because we want to share what we know and love, so that others will do the same for us.
If they do, we can thereby learn from them, and thus grow in our love…
We don’t want to merely win musical arguments. We want to learn from the musical experiences of others, and to expand our own experiences, and to enlarge the way we think about music.
But still, when it comes to aesthetic argument, Roger Scruton gets it right:
Perhaps the most persistent error in aesthetics is that contained in the Latin tag that de gustibus non est disputandum— that there is no disputing tastes. On the contrary, tastes are the things that are most vigorously disputed, precisely because this is the one area of human life where dispute is the whole point of it. As Kant argued, in matters of aesthetic judgement we are “suitors for agreement” with our fellows; we are inviting others to endorse our preferences and also exposing those preferences to criticism. And when we debate the point we do not merely rest our judgement in a bare “I like it” or “It looks fine to me”; we search our moral horizons for the considerations that can be brought to judgement’s aid. Just consider the debates over modernism in architecture. When Le Corbusier proposed his solution to the problem of Paris, which was to demolish the city and replace it with a park of scattered glass towers and raised walkways, with the proletariat neatly stacked in their boxes and encouraged to take restorative walks from time to time on the trampled grass below, he was expressing a judgement of taste. But he was not just saying, “I like it that way.” He was telling us that that is how it ought to be: he was conveying a vision of human life and its fulfilment, and proposing the forms that gave the best and most lucid expression to that vision. And it is because the city council of Paris was rightly repelled by that vision, on grounds as much moral and spiritual as purely formal, that Le Corbusier’s aesthetic was rejected and Paris saved.
Another one of the albums in my Top Ten for 2012 is Neal Morse’s Momentum.
Brad Birzer appends a useful album overview to the end of his epic CWR review of Neal Morse’s career:
Not a concept in the way several of his other albums are, Momentum most resembles his penultimate album with Spock’s Beard, “V.” As with its 2000 counterpart, Momentum has six songs. The first five are eight minutes or less long, with the last song being a 34-minute epic.
With skill and passion, Morse’s new album considers [in “Momentum”:] the pace of modernity and our reactions to it, [in “Thoughts Part 5”:] the necessity of appearing deep in conversation, [in “Smoke and Mirrors”:] how to weather deception in this world, [in “Weathering Sky”:] how one interprets his calling in the world, and [in “Freak”:] the way a powerful spiritual figure would be perceived should he arrive bodily in the present day (I’ll leave it for the reader to discover the identity of the protagonist in the track, “Freak,” as Morse deftly leaves the identity a mystery until the very end of the song) in his shorter tunes.
The epic is, well, epic. As the title, “World without End,” suggests, the thirty-four minutes explore the motivations of a person, and especially whether he or she is trying to shape the ephemeral or the permanent and timeless.
I have to admit that one of my favorite moments on the disc is when the title track glides on into the killer guitar solo that is expertly framed by an ecstatically swirling keyboard flight path:
Go listen to 3:10—4:10 on the album track…
Indeed, that is definitely one of the best minutes of prog we have heard all year.
(Note: 2:49—3:18 in the video below has the killer guitar solo, but omits the awesome keyboard/guitar dogfight. But I am not complaining: I love that I heard the Single Edit version first by watching it as a sneak peek on YouTube; and then, even though I had already fallen in love with the song, when I downloaded the album itself, I got the extra thrill of hearing the suddenly-new keyboard/guitar dogfight now added to the end! It was a unique experience unparalleled by any previous prog preview encounter!)
Review of Neal Morse/Prog World Orchestra, A Very Proggy Christmas (Radiant Records, November 20, 2012)
Every Thanksgiving night, we watch “Home Alone,” knowing perfectly well how successful Kevin’s antics will be. This little ritual of laughs inaugurates the annual Christmas season for the Birzers.
From that showing of Home Alone until the arrival of the Three Wise Men on Epiphany, we celebrate the season of Christmas rather vigorously in our house. Though we don’t put up the tree until the 24th of December, we certainly let the house ring with festive music–operatic, pop, classical, jazz, and rock. Indeed, such music plays almost the entire season.
I must admit, I’m a big fan of Christmas albums. There’s something about such familiar and comforting music being reworked in some kind of new fashion that almost always hits me in particular but probably predictable ways.
I am always especially impressed with artists who rework these Christmas classics, knowing that their songs will be judged by enduring and relatively rigorous standings. In particular, I especially enjoy the Christmas music of George Winston, Vince Garibaldi, Sixpence None the Richer, Sarah McLachlan, and Loreena McKennitt.
This year, joining this impressive list is Neal Morse’s Christmas band, “Prog World Orchestra.” Arriving on November 20 (Tuesday, a week from tomorrow) from one of the finest record labels around (Radiant), “A Proggy Christmas” offers a wonderful take on a number of holiday classics. Not surprisingly–as this comes from the mind of Mr. Progressive himself–the production is rigorous, the music is serious but tinged with Morse’s humor, and a number of pleasant surprises await the listener.
The name of the group, “Prog World Orchestra,” is appropriate. All of the members of Transatlantic (Portnoy, Trewavas, and Stolt), Steve Hackett, Steve Morse, and Randy George. Portnoy is even “The Little Drummer Boy”! Jerry Guidroz does his usual extraordinary mixing and engineering.
Songs include “Joy to the World,” “O Holy Night,” “Hark! The Angels Sing,” “Carol of the Bells,” and the aptly named “Shred Ride.”
While I’m thoroughly enjoying the entire album (breaking my rule of not listening to Christmas music until Thanksgiving), my favorite track is “Frankincense,” an absolutely brilliant collision of Edgar Winters and “Deck the Halls.” I can’t help but smile for all 3 minutes and 53 seconds of the song. I would love to know the story behind this song–especially how Morse came up with it.
My second favorite track is Morse’s rendition of “Carol of the Bells,” perhaps the most purely prog song on the album. At almost eight minutes long, keyboard solos abound.
As I listen to this song, I can help but be reminded of Kevin running to his home after the conversation with the “South Bend Shovel Slayer” in the church in his neighborhood. The clock tower bells are tolling nine.
Please don’t get the image that this album is in any way sacrilegious, as I’m afraid some of my above descriptions might very well seem to make it. The music is certainly playful, but it’s never in bad taste. Not in the least. This is Neal Morse, after all. Neither, though, is the album as a whole evangelical in the sense that, say, Morse’s excellent “God Won’t Give Up” is. Perhaps the closest Morse gets to evangelical is in his delivery of the traditional lyrics of “Hark! The Angels Sing.” Of course, if this song can’t be pro-Christian and evangelical, no Christmas song can!
Again, the album is done in good and respectful taste, but with definite prog and metal arrangements. There’s an equal amount of jazz, pop, and big band in here as well.
If you have even the slightest love of prog (and, you probably wouldn’t be reading this unless you do), “A Proggy Christmas” is a must own. Even if you only pull “A Proggy Christmas” out with your other Christmas albums once a year, it’s still a must own.
My guess is that even non-proggers will immensely enjoy Morse’s take on Christmas as well. Remember how wildly popular the Mannheim Steamroller/Fresh Aire Christmas albums were in the 1980s? Some of Morse’s arrangements have that same feel, but “A Proggy Christmas” is much, much better. The same is true, of course, of the Jethro Tull Christmas album. Still, Morse’s is better. This album might even be a great way to introduce a non-progger to prog.
Just got great news re: Neal Morse from Richard Schwartz and Radiant Records (yay, Chris Thompson). Neal Morse is releasing the New York show of the Momentum concert on DVD. Here’s the note, directly:
Progarchy 