The verdict first, then the evidence. These two words are not two grades of the same thing and neither of them is a compliment. They are measurements taken on different clocks. Technical is settled in seconds. Progressive is settled in sides of vinyl. Almost every argument you will ever read about the pair is two people using whichever word they mean as a synonym for good, and it can be ended with a stopwatch.
Start with the numbers, because they are not close. Death's Human holds eight songs in thirty four minutes and twenty one seconds. Opeth's Blackwater Park holds eight songs in sixty six minutes and fifty nine seconds. Same track count, double the record. Nobody planned that as a demonstration and it is the cleanest one available. Where the two roads separated, and what else came off that junction, is in how the genre split.
The two clocks
| Album | Band | Year | Tracks | Running time | Longest track |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human | Death | 1991 | 8 | 34:21 | 4:39 |
| Epitaph | Necrophagist | 2004 | 8 | 32:56 | 4:59 |
| Crimson | Edge of Sanity | 1996 | 1 | 40:00 | 40:00 |
| Blackwater Park | Opeth | 2001 | 8 | 66:59 | 12:08 |
| Portal of I | Ne Obliviscaris | 2012 | 7 | 71:40 | 12:02 |
Read down the two right hand columns and the whole quarrel resolves. A technical band writes at the scale of the phrase, so its longest song is under five minutes, because there is no reason for it to be longer: the material is already saturated and adding minutes adds nothing but fatigue. A progressive band writes at the scale of the sitting, so its shortest serious song is nine or ten minutes, because a shape that has to leave and return needs the room to do it.
This also explains a fact that annoys people. Technical death metal albums are short. Thirty two minutes is normal, thirty four is generous, and that is not laziness or a lack of ideas. Half an hour at that density is roughly as much information as a listener can take before it stops registering as music and starts registering as weather.
The shuffle test
Here is the test that settles a disputed record in three minutes. Put the album on shuffle. If nothing is lost, it is technical. If the thing has been vandalised, it is progressive.
Epitaph survives it intact. Every track on it is a complete demonstration of the same argument and the sequence is a courtesy rather than a structure. Do the same to Blackwater Park and you have taken the quiet acoustic piece that exists to make the next entry land and dropped it somewhere it does nothing. Do it to Crimson and you cannot, because there is only one track and no way into it except the beginning. The test works because the two wings put their difficulty in different places: one in the object you hold, one in the order you meet it.
Technical difficulty is aimed at the player. Progressive difficulty is aimed at the listener. That is the whole of it, and it explains why one wing produces homework and the other produces arguments about track order.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
What each one does to the singer and the drummer
The consequences run all the way down the band, which is the part most comparisons miss. A technical record keeps one vocal register from start to finish, and it is nearly always the low one, because at that density the voice is a percussion part and a percussion part that changes character mid-song muddles the count. A progressive record cannot do that. A shape built out of contrast needs a voice that can be two things, which is why clean singing turns up in this wing and almost never in the other, and why the bands who try to import it into technical death metal usually sound as if two records are playing at once.
The drum chair splits the same way. In the technical wing the drummer is asked for density and independence: blast variants, ride patterns that carry the count while the snare follows the riff, no bar off. In the progressive wing the drummer is asked for something harder to learn, which is when to stop. Gene Hoglan on Symbolic spends half the record deliberately not playing the busiest thing available, and the space he leaves is why the melodies on that album land at all.
The bass chair is the clearest tell of all, and it is worth knowing because it takes about ten seconds to check. In the technical wing the bass is a third melodic voice, mixed forward and often fretless so it can slide between the pitches the guitars are hammering: Steve DiGiorgio on Death and Sadus records, Sean Malone with Cynic, Jeroen Paul Thesseling with Obscura and earlier with Pestilence. In the progressive wing the bass usually goes the other way and becomes the anchor, holding a root through a section so the two guitars can leave the ground and still have somewhere to come back to. Martin Mendez has spent a quarter of a century doing exactly that behind Opeth and almost nobody notices, which is the job done properly.
The records that will not sit on one side
Any honest division has to admit its awkward cases, and there are four worth knowing. Cynic's Focus is both at once, a technical record by any measure and a progressive one in every choice of instrument and shape, which is exactly why it confused everybody in 1993. Opeth are the reverse of what people assume: Blackwater Park is a monument of the progressive wing and there is very little on it a competent guitarist cannot play, because the difficulty was never meant to live in the hands.
Gorguts are the sharpest case. Obscura is one of the most difficult records in the genre and it is anti-progressive in its bones: nothing returns, nothing resolves, and the album refuses the one thing the progressive wing is built on, which is the satisfaction of a theme coming back. And Archspire are the pure form of the other pole, a band with no interest whatsoever in shape, whose entire proposition is what can be executed in a second.
The bands who genuinely hold both, Obscura in Germany and Ne Obliviscaris in Australia among them, tend to say so plainly rather than pick a flag. That is the sane position. The words describe two ways of making a record hard, and there is nothing stopping anyone from doing both, except the number of hours in a life.
Where to start on each side
If you have read this far and want to test the argument against your own ears rather than against a table, four records will do it, and the order matters.
- Human, Death, 1991. Thirty four minutes, nothing longer than four minutes and thirty nine seconds. The technical case at its most humane, and still the easiest way in.
- Epitaph, Necrophagist, 2004. The same case pushed to its limit, with a guitar part on "Stabwound" that a generation of players has copied note for note.
- Blackwater Park, Opeth, 2001. Sixty seven minutes that only work in the order they are in. Listen to it once from front to back before you form an opinion about it.
- Portal of I, Ne Obliviscaris, 2012. Seventy one minutes with a violin in the band rather than on the guest list, and proof that the progressive wing did not stop in 2001.
Play them in that order across an evening and the distinction stops being a matter of taste and starts being a matter of arithmetic. Two of those records are finished with you in half an hour. The other two want the whole night, and they earn it in ways that have nothing to do with how fast anybody can pick.
Which is where the third road out of the same junction is worth a look, since it makes a record difficult by removing almost everything the other two rely on, starting with the tempo. That argument is at what Is Death Doom.
