Hydria – Entangled (2012)
Hi, I’m Blogdude, and I’m a recovering prog addict.
[“Hi Blogdude”]
I’ve listened to alternative music for 22 years now.
[polite applause]
It’s lonely. Most of my fellow prog addicts have passed. I’m told they’re in a better place now, but I have trouble believing that and even more trouble still letting go.
Prog (progressive music, as it was called then) was my solution until it wasn’t. Things were different then. I remember my first prog album. It was A Trick of the Tail by Genesis, a band that had come back from the dead following the the departure of its frontman and – ostensibly – creative spirit Peter Gabriel. The album, I came to know, was highly anticipated firstly because it was never supposed to happen, and secondly because their drummer, some impish-looking bloke named Phil Collins, was going to become the new voice and face of an A-list band that only really serious rock music fans listened to.
I was nervous as I dropped the stylus to the vinyl. This wasn’t kid stuff. I was shooting up on art rock. I’d seen with my own two eyes what their listeners looked like: could I sit with these people? Was I that man (*ahem*, teen)?
Fifty-one minutes later, my life was changed forever. This one storybook of netherworldliness, telling impossible tales, weaving undefinable sonic fabrics, became the gold standard by which I would measure everything I would hear after it.
After that day, I eventually shot, smoked and snorted all of it: Yes, ELP, Floyd, Crimson, Gentle Giant, then the stuff cut with baking soda: Styx, Kansas, Rush, Marillion. Musical friends became strangers and I kept lower and lower company all the time, seeking out the next prog thrill. I couch-surfed on Gowan and Tears for Fears. Family (R&B artists) shunned me.
I can’t point to one seminal moment of clarity, but I emerged from my haze to a higher power of female artists (especially Canadian artists like Sarah McLachlan, who lit the way for women worldwide) and the Seattle School, who taught alt musicians that it’s quite possible to go rogue and still produce quality music.
When I revisited prog years later, I didn’t recognize it. Gone were the delicate textures, instrumental subtleties and ambitious story-arcs that defined the oeuvre of their godfathers. Prog was now US-based, not European; it was now a flavour of heavy metal, not of older symphonic traditions; it was virtuosic and showy, not the measured, synthesized fabric of yesterpolyester; it was Born-again Christian, not of the courts and their lore or the estates of the realm.
And although I’ve checked in on Glass Hammer, Spock’s Beard, Haken and Echolyn (with some glee, I’ll admit), it just hasn’t had the same resonance with me that the golden age of this majestic genre did all those years ago. The neighbourhood changed, and so did I.
So I was not a little skeptical of an outfit from Rio named Hydria when I discovered their version of the ethereal Entangled from A Trick of the Tail.
The band itself was a local product and unremarkable on the international stage. Hydria formed in 2007 and disbanded in 2013, leaving a legacy of four full-length studio albums and a couple of EPs of original music, scarcely known outside of their native Brazil. Prog really isn’t a thing anywhere beyond the long tail of niche listeners, and Hydria is a microset of that.
But I couldn’t not listen. This was Entangled. I’d listen to this blessed meditation if it were blasted by a hearty party of thirty hurdy-gurdy’s.
It starts badly. And by badly, I don’t mean that singer Raquel Schüler and multi-instrumentalist Marcelo Oliveira prosecute their duties poorly – they’re very able performers. Rather, it was, for the first verse, anyway, whole lot of Not Phil Collins, Not Tony Banks, Not Mike Rutherford and Not Steve Hackett goofing on Collins, Banks, Rutherford and Hackett. Bar bands do this.
Then the new crack-cocaine of modern prog enters the chill for the chorus: full-metal jackets of power-chord guitars, full drums and a renewed soundscape of keyboards picks the song up and does exactly what Genesis did four decades earlier: carries the listener to a place they’ve never been, and coldly leaves them there.
Did not see that coming. This brilliant creative re-imagination makes it sad that Hydria wasn’t able to apply that spirit to their own breakthrough.
See? The ditch is only that far away for me. Thank God for these virtual rooms.
{“Thanks Blogdude. Keep coming back.”]
