Much of the BLK JKS’s press to date invokes afro-beat tinged comparisons to TV on the Radio, Bad Brains and Living Colour, though guitarist Mpumi Mcata brushes off the comparison game by encouraging “the reader to seek out and envision” rather than relying on, you know, critics.

The four-man group has erupted from South Africa as evangelists of any-influence-goes prog rock. Their latest, After Robots (Secretly Canadian), is a rousing yet challenging post-apartheid free-for-all. Such a frenetic melding of different styles, tempos, and instrumentations, though, can threaten to bury the central idea of a song.

“Funny you should say that,” Mcata said. “We used to have talks about a return to innocence… We hope people follow and see and feel this music as we do; music—and not its mathematical sum, which in any case is just guitars, vocals, bass, brass drums, and piano.”

D.C. residents will get their second chance to hear BLK JKS on Tuesday night at the Black Cat with openers Laughing Man. (After a coast-to-coast tour, BLK JKS will move on to Europe in support of After Robots.

“We are totally into D.C.,” Mcata said. “Really interesting and suprisingly mixed open communities even if it was kind of together but not together together, which is kind of the case in most places, it’s still beautiful to see people making an effort….re-imagining society in everyday mundanities; we’re looking forward to it.”

Prog-rock band Secret Machines frontman Brandon Curtis helped produced After Robots, and Mcata’s said of his contribution, “He was there to mediate—expedite the process so to speak. The brother really helped us get to the sounds we wanted…. He was a little bit of amazing.”

With so much going on, it must be difficult to reproduce After Robots onstage, no?

“The show is its own beast.”

The BLK JKS also project a positive image of post-apartheid South Africa, a role they believe artists have in interpreting the political and social events that transpired in their country.

“Oh it’s a major role…our part  is to be ourselves; no preaching or politiking—at least not yet. [Laughs.] You know, most of the world is unaware that such youths walk the streets of Africa.”

BLK JKS plays with Laughing Man at 9 p.m. on Tues., September 29 at the Black Cat Backstage. $10.

Fresh off a well-reviewed performance at NEARfest, the most prestigious progressive rock festival in the United States (don’t laugh), Mexican instrumental trio Cabezas de Cera are playing two dates this week in D.C. plus one in Baltimore. Cabezas de Cera aren’t your typical bombastic prog band; rather, they combine folk, prog, free improv and a touch of the avant-garde into a fascinating and fairly uncategorizable mish-mash, and they’ve been doing it for about ten years now. While the basic format of the trio (plus a member credited as a “sound designer”) is guitars/saxes/drums, in reality they play a bewildering array of instruments, from traditional instruments to nontraditional rock instruments like the Chapman Stick, plus a variety of homemade implements.

Cabezas de Cera are playing the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage tonight at 6pm sharp, then at Artomatic tomorrow night at 8:30pm. Both these shows are free. On Sunday, they will make an appearance at Orion Sound Studios in Baltimore alongside Might Could – you can expect a longer set at this show for your $15. Orion is at 2903 Whittington Ave, shows are usually scheduled to start around 8pm.

Have a listen at Myspace or check out their website for more info.

Image courtesy Cabezas de Cera’s Myspace page

• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Miriodor – Avant!
• The Ed Palermo Big Band – Eddy Loves Frank
• Positive Catastrophe – Garabatos Volume One
• Upsilon Acrux – Radian Futura

Let’s see. This is all potentially good stuff. Perhaps most exciting (for me) is the Upsilon Acrux – this is a young avant-rock band who were once upon a time on D.C.’s own Planaria Records, whose last record Galapagos Momentum was a feast of heavy odd-time riffing. Miriodor are a Quebecois band who have a humorous and peculiarly Francophone take on avant-rock (you know it when you hear it); Ed Palermo has carved out a niche for himself reinterpreting Frank Zappa tunes, and by the name of this new album it doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

Then there’s the jazz. I know nothing about Led Bib, but apparently the Times (UK) said of them, “Sun Ra didn’t die in vain,” so that bodes well. Positive Catastrophe is a new group fronted by the always excellent Taylor Ho Bynum (and includes a favorite saxophonist of mine, Michaël Attias) and sounds really, really, interesting, purporting to combine Latin jazz and free/avant-jazz in a way that, as far as I know, hasn’t really been done before. Cool!

I listened to the five tracks that comprise Phantom on the Horizon over 40 times (some tracks more than others) during the process of reviewing the Fall of Troy’s new album for the dead-tree version of City Paper. As a result, I can sort of hum at least one guitar riff, which you can listen to below (and nobody hums to prog unless that prog is Rush).

But I’m not sure if listening to an album as many times as I did is good for the review process. Stuff that I didn’t like the first time around grew on me, though that fact didn’t make it into my review (the 400-word limit doesn’t leave much room for a discussion of personal listening habits). On the other hand, aspects that stood out at first–red-hot guitar solos and great screaming come to mind–gradually faded as I grasped the significance of the album as a complete composition. Compared to other media for criticism, it’s easy and–taking  a random sample from the music critics I know personally–commonplace for us to fall for the music we’re supposed to be reviewing skeptically. (Why is it that good film critics seldom have this problem?)

However, I can think of some great albums (Say Anything’s …Is a Real Boy) and great bands (Radiohead) that I had to listen to over and over again before I saw what was so great about them.

For your listening pleasure, a few seconds of “A Strange Conversation,” the second “chapter” on FoT’s Phantom on the Horizon:

And here’s a snippet from the review (or you can just read the whole thing):

“[I]t’s a worthwhile listen for anyone looking to dip a toe a into contemporary mainstream prog scene led by Coheed and Cambria, blending screamo vocals and mathcore rhythms with punk antics and an art-school sensibility. That’s a lot to pack into a tune, and Fall of Troy has recorded plenty of inaccessible or just plain noisy music in the past. (“Whacko Jacko Steals the Elephant Man’s Bones,” from 2005’s Doppleganger, oscillates between cacophonous technical sections and tuneless, distorted interludes.)”

I want to clarify that I don’t think Coheed (who I used as a gold standard of sorts) is mainstream, or that there’s any such thing as “mainstream prog,” but that within prog you can find accessible and less-accessible music (big, resounding “duh”). Coheed and Cambria, the Fall of Troy, and–to a lesser extent–the Mars Volta are easier listening than Dream Theater and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Behold…The Arctopus–that’s what earned FoT and Coheed the mainstream tag.

I still haven’t decided if Phantom will make my top-10 list. I’d like to include at least one experimental/prog act, and I’m currently considering Idiot Pilot’s reissued EP Heart is Long–even though it falls entirely on the experimental side.

Would anybody care to plug a 2008 prog album?