PROG ROCK NOT QUITE AS SEXCITING AS THE STEEL PANTHER

https://youtu.be/TsoLb-E7oy8?si=pxFEDzOElldwdKf2

Somebody asked me to do a music blog that was really dirty and naughty, like something on Steel Panther or W.A.S.P or the like. 

I know Steel Panther have a really filthy song that is called `Eatin Ain`t Cheatin`, but until i do a bit more research on what other music these deviants play lol, I think I might stick to writing about some innocent prog rockers from the 80`s. 

I mentioned W.A.S.P only because I went

and bought a New York Dolls album some weeks ago and I discovered after looking on the internet that the drummer out of W.A.S.P was in fact a tour only drummer for the Dolls for a long time after they had made their final studio album in the early 70`s. 

The Dolls album which I got was in fact their first new studio album that was released in 2006, with a whole new outfit. I`ll talk about

it another time, and by the way, W.A.S.P is the kind of music that you`d play to a girl while having a romantic evening in a sado-masochistic torture dungeon, certainly not for Lionel Richie fans. 

Okay, lets get to the point of tonight`s blog. I am doing this to try and keep my ol' mate Buddy Wilson happy, who I know loves prog rock to the max. I find it hard to right about prog, it was never my favourite sort of music, when I was a young dude I always cheated, and I listened to pop laden progressive stuff like Foreigner, Toto, Icehouse and even latter day Pink Floyd, which i think comes a little under that heading. 

The three pure no-nonsense full on proggers which I want to put a plug in for are `Countdown` by the band Rush, `I Dream in Infrared` by a Canadian progressive heavy metal band called Queensryche, and one which is a lot more commercial and more well known, `One Slip`by Pink Floyd minus Roger Waters. 

`Countdown` to me is one of the more convincing efforts which Rush recorded in the 80`s after the technically top notch and heavier recordings the band put out in the mid 70`s, such as Caress of Steel and 2112.

The early 80`s album by Rush called `Moving Pictures` was a great studio album and technological feet, but arguably a bit too polished for its own good.

In 1982, Rush released the album `Subdivisions`, which was just as polished as its two predecessors `Moving Pictures and 1981`s `Spirit of Radio`, if not even more, but it did have one song at the end of it which really has got to rate as one of the most intelligent and inspiring pieces of progressive rock EVER. 

That song is `Countdown` and the song is recorded around the actual sound footage of

a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The way drummer Neal Peart sequenced his precision drumming around the shuttle launch makes Roger Waters look very unprogressive. 

Even Geddy Lee sounds really good on this song, now that is saying something.

He`s the singer by the way. 

`I Dream in Infrared` by Queensryche is the song which should have made the soundtrack to Blue Thunder in the 80`s, for those of you`s who weren`t born back in the Woodstock days you might not know what Blue Thunder was. 

It was a very short lived TV series, which even come out as a movie, about a state of the art police helicopter which went around catching the bad guys. 

Queensryche are still going in 2010, they were a real clunky, unrefined prog-metal band back in the 80`s, most famous for an

album called `Operation Mindcrime`. 

Never liked the album really, too much concept and not enough actual rock for my tastes. They had a great song in the early
90`s called `Silent Lucidity` off the album `Empire`.

But except for the first song they just about ever released called `Queen of the Reich`, which is a speed metal classic, and the song i like the most, the very progressive `I Dream in Infrared`, I never got into Queensryche. 

Too metal and glammy for me, and I never liked the voice of the lead singer. But have a

listen to `I Dream in Infrared`, off the Rage for Order album. 

`One Slip` off the very commercial Pink

Floyd album Momentary Lapse of Reason is widely considered to be an artistic sellout for all the fans of the band who liked the experimental mumbo jumbo of bassist/ moaner Roger Waters, who was no longer
a member in 1987 when the three remaining members of the band went it alone and recorded what is essentially a Dave Gilmour solo album. 

He is a much better singer than Waters, and he can make a guitar sound a lot better than what Waters ever could anyway. 

Pink Floyd had a few good songs on `Wish YouWere Here`, they had a few good songs on `The Wall` and I even like two songs on `The Final Cut` which is a little ironic because a lot of hardcore Floyd fans absolutely hate that album, the last ever featuring the madman Waters. 

`The Final Cut` is a lot damn better than all the shit Pink Floyd recorded in the very
late 60`s and early 70`s. I actually dont mind a few of the very early Pink Floyd songs with the original vocalist Syd Barrett, who ended up going off his nana and turning into a reclusive hermit after frying

his brain with a cocktail of drugs. 

Anyway, getting back to `One Slip` off Momentary Lapse of Reason, a great uptempo rollicking, stampeding rocker, with a slight late 80`s metallic edge to it, Gilmour no longer had his songwriting hands being

tied behind his back with Waters now gone and the album is the first true `rock` Pink Floyd album. 

Maybe it was a bit of a copout in terms of

progressiveness, but no-nonsense rock is what people wanted in the late 80`s and Pink Floyd managed to forget about Roger Waters enough to make a foppin` no nonsense and hard pumping rock and roll album. I definitely need a root.