One thing you need to know me about me is that I'm the world's biggest progressive metal defender. It has been the fashion over the last...damn, two decades at least, to treat progressive metal as the unwanted step-child of metal. To be honest, I can understand the sentiment (in the sense that you need to understand your enemy). Much of progressive metal has, ironically, become templated and rote. The key, which is ephemeral and hard to quantify, is passion. So many of the bands in the progressive milieu have translated the mechanical emphasis of the sub-genre to mean machinic, dry, predictable, and exact.
But Red Graves (one half of which is longtime friend and blog contributor Ahmed Hasan) is a great example of what the style can sound like when you actually care. Drawing on a deep infatuation with progressive metal across the board, Red Graves bring forth a very dynamic and high energy style that will immediately call to mine other darlings of progressive music, Protest the Hero, but which includes plenty more besides. Which "more" exactly? Well, that's why we have this post below, going over the influences of both members of the band. You'll find a lot that you'd expect but also plenty that will help shine a new light on their music and really get to the core of what I (and them) love about progressive metal!
–EK
Artwork by Trent Bos
Ahmed Hasan (lead and rhythm guitars, drum programming, backing vocals)
The Mars Volta – Deloused in the Comatorium (2003)
It’s been [over] two decades since its release, but Deloused in the Comatorium is still one of the most sprawling and awe-inspiring debut albums of all time. I remain amazed by the depth that this album has to offer all while being extremely catchy and memorable. When I finally heard it for the first time, I’d been playing guitar and writing music for several years, and being a prog-metal kid had warped my sense of writing guitar parts: anything I wrote was all about The Riff, and any such Riff in question had to be dense and technical, with the end result being guitar parts written by a guitar player to try and impress other guitar players. There’s nothing wrong with doing that of course, and there’s a big audience for that sort of thing—but Deloused made me realize that that actually wasn’t what I wanted to do. (An aside early on: much of my blurbs are written from the perspective of a "recovering tech death/technical progressive metal" player. Nighttime Heists / Daytime Getaways is very intentionally neither of those genres.)
Instead, Deloused largely works because of the interplay between Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s frenetic guitar playing and Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s over-the-top vocals, supported by an impossibly groovy rhythm section. Here was progressive, complex music that’s made complex by the sum of its parts, and held together with brilliant song structures—not music reliant on guitar heroics alone. On top of that, it’s also just a phenomenally sequenced album that demands to be listened to front to back each time, with a palpable confidence that’s impossible to ignore. Hard to overstate what a game changer this was for a kid sitting in his room with delusions of one day becoming the next Tosin Abasi.
Thank You Scientist – Maps of Non-Existent Places (2014)
I guess I’m opening with back-to-back progressive opuses that happen to be debut albums. Maps of Non-Existent Places continues the theme of not being an album that inspired me to pick up a guitar way back when, but rather one that helped me understand what I actually wanted to do musically. Tom Monda is one of the most talented guitar players I have ever seen, and yet Maps of Non-Existent Places has him showing an unbelievable amount of restraint for much of its runtime. Instead, the guitar parts enable Salvatore Marrano’s incomparable vocals, and support all the additional brass/string instrumentation that makes this band so unique. Even still, the album weaves sweet instrumental parts impossibly well in between—"Blood on the Radio" is one of the best songs ever written, and a masterclass in how to write a longer prog song that makes every second count.
When we started this project, I set a few ground rules for myself to preempt my own tendencies. For instance: songs had to be written largely around vocal parts, only using 6 string guitars in standard tuning, no blast beats were permitted, sweep picking had to be kept to a minimum and so on. Nearly all of those self-imposed rules were inspired by Maps, which accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do while also matching those descriptors (save for a brief foray into drop D tuning). Yet somehow, as the writing progressed from “Nighttime Heists” onward, adding those constraints was the most freeing thing of all—and it was an absolute joy watching Cass’s unreal vocal parts start to develop, filling the musical space made for them.
Zeal & Ardor – Stranger Fruit (2018)
My adoration for this band is no secret to anyone who knows me well, but in the context of the Red Graves album, it runs even deeper than what I’ve let on. Stranger Fruit is another one of my favourite albums of all time, to the extent where I transcribed every note of every song over the months following its release – guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and all. If you’re musically inclined and know where to find transcriptions, chances are that anything you pull up from this album on the internet (except "Don’t You Dare", which someone else did first) was made by me. (This is also true of later Z&A albums, but that’s beside the point.) Does that sound like an insane thing to do? Probably, but I just really needed to understand how Manuel Gagneux made his mix of genres work as well as it does.
This meant that I spent a lot of time essentially studying how the music on Stranger Fruit was constructed and arranged. All of those learnings are embedded in the DNA of Nighttime Heists / Daytime Getaways in some shape or form, even if the genres of the two albums are very, very different. Plus, while there’s a lot of things Gagneux’s project does exceptionally well, incredible vocal parts remain one of its most defining features—the band doesn’t tour with two permanent backing vocalists just for shits, after all. I’ve talked plenty about the emphasis on vocal parts to this project, and I’m hard-pressed to think of many other metal albums out there that are quite this vocal-driven. If Stranger Fruit didn’t exist, full of lessons to learn, I’m not sure I would have felt confident writing most of the material for this project. Grateful I don’t live in that timeline.
Cass Redgrave (lead and backing vocals, rhythm guitars, acoustic guitars, bass, piano)
Protest the Hero – Volition (2013)
My first metal festival was Heavy TO back in high school. The first band I got to see there was Protest the Hero. ...and I left the venue with every one of their albums. I couldn’t believe they were also from our area! It was like music from a dream - the dual guitars worked so perfectly with each other, and Rody Walker’s voice was superhuman. When they announced their crowdfunding campaign for Volition, I signed up immediately and I still have my special copy in a place of honour on my album shelf as it’s my favourite of theirs. I think most singers in Canada had aspirations at some point to be like Rody when they grew up, and I am no exception. Guitar-wise Ahmed and I tried to lay some rules to avoid indulging our prog-metal/tech-death obsession, but a lot of Volition’s leads ended up being huge inspirations anyways for songs like "The Dance" and "Thick as Thieves".
Muse - Origin of Symmetry (2001)
In their heyday, I consider Muse to have been the perfect rock band. Their songs felt so full that I could scarcely believe they were a three-piece band when I found out. The interplay between guitar, bass, keys, and drums creates an incredible base for Matt Bellamy’s vocals. The first time I heard "New Born" I was amazed at the range of feelings his voice was able to pull out of me, starting so soft and intimate only to crescendo into powerful belted lines peppered with his signature falsetto. His voice encapsulated everything I wanted to be as a vocalist. The way he uses purposeful voice cracks and audible breaths, particularly on tracks like "Hyper Music" and "Darkshines", showed me there was so much fun to be had with switching up vocal styles. The piano and bass on this album are huge inspirations for me as well. It’s one of my rules for songwriting that the bass needs to carve out its own spot in the composition, not just following the guitar, and Origin of Symmetry is full of juicy bass lines that do just that.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In (1994)
While Nick Cave might not write the same kind of music I do, he is my greatest inspiration as a vocalist and lyricist. Cave’s singing always changes to suit the story of his lyrics, the epitome of the singer as an actor and storyteller. I have a lot of different vocalists to turn to for inspiration when it comes to higher-register, prog-metal vocals, but singing along to the Bad Seeds is what inspired me to write the deeper vocals you hear on Nighttime Heists / Daytime Getaways. "Song of the Stranger", "Mute", and "Oubliette" are both full of homages to Let Love In, but the overall themes of every song on it can be traced back to the album. Playing the villain when singing songs about terrible people is a skill I had to learn from him, and it’s been so much fun to do. I have always found it easier to write lyrics from the perspective of a character, and the narrator’s voice on NH/DG is one I crafted over many hours of listening to this album.