You know, I'm not a musician or at all knowledgable about music theory, but I'm not sure where people get the sense that ...And Justice for All is a prog album. Sure, it's proggier than anything else Metallica has done, and maybe than anything else a "Big 4" band has done, but that's pretty much it. I like the album, but very little about it screams "prog." I mean, "Eye of the Beholder", "The Shortest Straw" and "Dyers Eve" are all pretty straight-ahead songs, and the title track seems to be more "long" than "progressive". It's longer than "Metropolis Pt. 1", but it is certainly far less technical or complex.
Anyway, the review is stupid, and we should probably ignore the stupid instead of pointing to them and saying "look at this person!" because often, nothing gratifies them more. I'm really not angry about people like that, because in the end, they're the ones who are missing out. Images and Words has some of the most beautiful songs ever, and if you can't see that, it's your loss.
As to whether it is a metal album, I would say that it certainly is. These days, it seems like people are trying to narrow the definition of metal, sometimes so far as to eliminate things like "melody". I&W certainly has the heaviness (as far as distorted guitar goes) and influences to be metal. "Pull Me Under" is certainly a metal song, and you could say the same about "Metropolis", "Take the Time" and "Under a Glass Moon". Naturally, "Another Day" and "Surrounded" are semi-ballads and so don't necessarily uphold the traditional metal style, and "Wait for Sleep" is a ballad leading into "Learning to Live"' which is on the line, but I would say that it is metal.
Of course, I do prefer to adapt a wider view vs. a narrower view of what can be considered metal, possibly because I'm not obsessive about genres. I think genres are useful for classifying music, but that's it. Metal is not the beginning and end of all that is good, nor is prog or any other genre. One band that I'm not sure how to classify is Rush up through Moving Pictures. I think they could be considered metal, but they're right on the line between prog rock and prog metal. If it counts for anything, Sam Dunn talks about them in his Metal Evolution documentary, but I digress. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if 2112 or Images and Words or Led Zeppelin IV or anything else is a metal album. It also doesn't matter terribly much whether I&W is a prog album, though it obviously is to anyone who knows what they are talking about. It matters that they are good albums. And that is the fact that Mr. Genre Obsessed Reviewer missed when he dismissed "Surrounded" in one sentence. End of rant.
Topic: Images And Words: A Progressive Album? (Read 3754 times)
