Newer Prog vs. Older Prog

[Monk]

What are your thoughts I generally class The seventies prog bands as older (doesn't mean worse) and the nineties ones as newer (doesn't mean better) and ones that don't really fit go fifty fifty depending on how close to each wave they were.

[tonewheel]

Early 70's bands were more melodic whereas bands like Wolfmother have more bit in their sound..what do you think.?

[pedro]

I think that if you lent the superior production quality of today's recordings to the bands of 30 years ago, there wouldn't be too much difference between the two groups.

I also think that today's acts, such as Wolfmother, have the advantage of a path being opened up for them by break-through acts from the late 60's/early 70's - who were all pioneers. Or you could say that its also a disadvantage with so many people saying "hey, they sound like [enter band here]..." because it sounds so close to similar styles of acts who have gone before them.

Wolfmother for me though falls into the later category. Why? Because I'm a progressive nut, to the extent that I only really listen to some of my music in my own time as most people find it too confronting or too busy - and wolfmother is too tame for me. But then, what do you class as progressive?

Personally, I find the more I develop as a musician, the more intense and selective my taste in music becomes. Bring on The Mars Volta! Only Cubans could make music so random and still be able to tie it all together at the end.

Which makes me wonder, do you think its harder for prog bands now to be original because so much ground has already been covered? I suppose this question could possibly be applied any genre of music.

[Monk]

I wouldn't really class wolfmother as progressive but as psychedellic which was kinda bordering on prog not many bands these days in the progressive genre do suffer from its been done before, except possibly Dream Theater as they've got themselves into a rut, I personally enjoy the more symphonic progressive stuff and there are still bands who do that sort of thing like Iona, Glass Hammer and Neal Morse

[butcher boy]

What about a band like Toto, who these days are a little left out of the prog circles. I think because they were able to transend the prog only stuff and wrote some big hits (half there luck). You'd have to say though, overall, they are very progressive, especially from song to song.

[Monk]

Well you found that with a lot of the Progressive rock bands.
Genesis and Yes through the 80's found lots of commercial success
Rush also found such success, but this is probably more due to them having a really large fanbase at the time.
Pink Floyd doesn't really need to be discussed much further than this.
And apart from The Rolling Stones quite a few of the Progressive Rock bands are hitting that mark of 40-50 years as a band examples, include Rush, King Crimson, Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield