Progressive Rock

RIP to John Wetton of King Crimson and Asia. First Chris Squire, then Greg Lake, and now him. We’ve lost 3 of the best bassists in progressive rock in just 2 years.
I’ve been listening to Larks’ Tongues In Aspic and Red quite a bit since I got the news yesterday…

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And Invi’s gettin’ hit with the news all at once. :C

I’ve actually never listened to Red all the way through…think I may do that today.

Interesting. I’ll have to turn put it on again and see if something similar happens for me. :stuck_out_tongue:

Huzzah! Can I put you down for the Duke fanclub? :stuck_out_tongue:

I definitely think those albums aren’t really bad so much as they suffer by comparison to Genesis’s best work. But Genesis made so much awesome music, it’s kinda inevitable that those ones will be at the bottom of most peoples’ lists.

What a bummer man, I heard about that yesterday. His highlights for me are definitely The Great Deceiver and then the whole Red album, but definitely also Asia’s self titled. That one is so fun.

THAT IS A CRIME, YOU BETTER HAVE LISTENED TO IT[quote=“John_Smith, post:82, topic:2807”]
Huzzah! Can I put you down for the Duke fanclub?
[/quote]
I never said I didn’t enjoy it! It’s just my opinion of the “worse” tracks got better. Also, I’m liking Phil’s cover of Behind the Lines more too.

Also, decided to put together what I think is my list of worst to best, and I separated them into categories to give a better idea, that I do in fact like almost everything.

15. Calling All Stations
GOOD

14. From Genesis to Revelation
13. We Can’t Dance
12. And Then There Were Three
11. Invisible Touch
10. Trespass

This was a hard group, because it seems kinda unfair they are so low. I like these ones a lot and 10 through 13 I feel are in very interchangeable spots for me. All of them have really powerful, catchy moments.

BETTER

9. Abacab
8. Genesis
7. Wind and Wuthering
6. Duke

With this group I’m pretty confident in their placings, maybe 8 and 9 could trade places. 6 and 7 is definitely a toss up, I’d say 6 is just not as weird as 7. Its sound isn’t overly progressive or digital, so the grounded sound is a major deciding factor for me. :smile:

BEST

[spoiler]5. A Trick of the Tail
4. Nursery Cryme
3. Selling England by the Pound
2. Foxtrot

  1. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway[/spoiler]
    This part is so unfair. These ones are all so good. I put 4 above 5 because while my heart wants to say 5 is better, 4 has the better “epic” songs. 3 and 4 have the most sweeping epics out of the group, and 2 and 3 I’d say are almost interchangeable for me. But I don’t think I’m gonna change my mind about 1.
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Agreed. A lot of prog snobs look down on Asia, which is really a shame imo.

Just fired it up! XD

Oh, I didn’t mean to insinuate that you didn’t like it, just that it’s moved up for you. :stuck_out_tongue: I didn’t know Collins did a cover of Behind the Lines; will have to look into that.

Neat list! I like how poor CaS is just sitting there all by itself. :stuck_out_tongue:

Tresspass below Abacab?!? I need to give them both another listen before I can fairly critique that, though. :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, I really like how it’s a happy medium between their 70s and 80s output.

This is really shallow of me, but I think I’d put ATotT ahead of NC just because the production quality is so much better. (Though less shallow-ly, most of the non-epic songs on NC never clicked for me.) It’s definitely close, though.

Honestly, I’d say any of the top 5 are reasonable contenders for the number one spot. Personally, I’m split between Lamb and Selling England.


Since both you and Deka have made lists, I should go through all their albums and make my own. May take me a bit, though.

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Trespass is good, but it takes too much time and attention for me to enjoy (as much) since it’s very relaxed. The tracks all have really good moments but they’re found in between so many calm passages. Abacab is simple fun that doesn’t take much thinking. And the majority of the tracks are pretty good.

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That makes sense, though it also makes me pretty sure that I’ll still like Trespass better when I compare them. :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, ran across this:

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Well, it’s been a while. Prepare for a long post.
So I looked at the top 100 highest rated albums over on the website ProgArchives (a fantastic site), and the top ten really intrigued me. They were:
10: Van Der Graaf Generator - Godbluff
9: Pink Floyd - Animals
8: King Crimson - Red
7: Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon
6: Genesis - Foxtrot
5: King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
4: Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
3: Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
2: Genesis - Selling England By The Pound
1: Yes - Close To The Edge

Now, overall, I agree with this list. I’d say that these albums represent progressive rock at it’s absolute best. However, they aren’t all my personal favorite prog albums, and that got me thinking about what were.
So, I decided to gather my top 10 personal favorite prog albums of all time (so far, at least), and limited them to one per artist to make it more fair. This list was extremely difficult for me to compile, as I hate to pick favorites when it comes to music. Please note that a band’s album being higher than another’s doesn’t necessarily mean I like that band better. I don’t really pick favorites with musicians and bands at all, and mostly like all of the ones I listen to equally. Anyways, without further ado…

Number Ten: Kansas - Leftoverture

Ah, Kansas. Me and my dad have talked about prog and introduced bands to each other for a while now, but Kansas was really the first band that we truly bonded over. My dad suggested them to me, and then he personally went out and bought the newest reissues of their albums to help introduce me to them.
Now Kansas were special back when they were first starting out, as prog was more of a British thing. But for an American prog act, they were fantastic, blending prog with southern rock influences as well incorporating the better parts of AOR and arena rock. Their proggiest (and best) album by far was Leftoverture. Right from the opening vocals of “Carry On, Wayward Son”, this album pulls you in, and just gets better and better throughout with fantastic tracks like “The Wall”, “Opus Insert”, and “Questions On My Mind” before climaxing on the appropriately titled “Magnum Opus”, an 8 minute prog epic that’s truly a masterpiece. The Emerson-esque keyboards at about 3 minutes in give me chills every single time I listen to it.

Number Nine: Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd only at number 9? Blasphemy!
Much like some of the later albums on this list, this is an album I can only ever listen to all at once. Listening to individual songs just doesn’t do it justice, and not only because they all segue into each other. Right from the beginning we get a masterpiece with the first half of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. Everything about this piece has already been said, so I won’t elaborate too much on it. It’s brilliant. I especially love when the saxophone comes in towards the end, before the song segues into “Welcome To The Machine”, which is also brilliant. “Have A Cigar” is a great blues rock-ish song, and Roy Harper does great on the vocals. I know a lot of people love the title track, but for whatever reason I just can’t get into it. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, I just feel like it’s weaker compared to the rest of the album. But anyways, after the title track, we get the second half of Diamond, which is even better than the first half. The opening guitar solo is brilliant, and I love how it leads directly into the vocal passage by playing the vocal melody right towards the end of the solo. After the vocal passage is the wonderful jazzy keyboard section and the uplifting finale, both of which are magnificent.

RIP Richard Wright

Number Eight: Emerson, Lake And Palmer - Trilogy

ELP’s first 4 (or 5 if you count Pictures) albums are all masterpieces in my book.
But yet, out of all 4, I find myself coming back to Trilogy the most. Not sure why. Could it be the absolute wonder of the “The Endless Enigma” suite? The beautiful ballad “From The Beginning”? The comical country of “The Sheriff” and “Hoedown”? The triple punch of the title track, “Living Sin”, and “Abbadon’s Bolero” all at the end? I’m not sure. But one thing I do know is that this will always be ELP’s best album to me, even if I don’t know exactly why.

RIP Keith Emerson and Greg Lake

Number Seven: King Crimson - Red

As much as I love the first 4 King Crimson albums and how well they sit together, I can’t deny how great the Wetton era was.
But even if Larks and Starless were fantastic albums, they both felt like something was missing. And whatever was missing was then found on Red. Every song on the album is perfect. The proto-prog metal of the title track, the incredible sadness of Fallen Angel, the heavy, energetic “One More Red Nightmare”, the experimental “Providence”, and the breathtaking grand finale “Starless”. This is King Crimson perfecting the heavy experimentation that they started with on Larks (and eventually took too far on THRAK), and it’s beautiful. If King Crimson hadn’t returned after this album, I would’ve been content, as this album perfectly sums up and ends that era of their music.

RIP John Wetton

Number Six: Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing

Steven Wilson is a godsend to prog fans. A man that makes 70s prog in the modern era. His music is so good, and me being a fan of him is the closest feeling to what I assume a prog fan in the 70s felt like. All of his solo albums are wonderful (except for maybe Cover Version, if it even counts), as well as his work with Porcupine Tree, but so far he has been unable to top this album.
A concept album about ghost stories, this album pays tribute to all the great prog artists of the 70s: Yes and Jethro Tull on “Luminol”, Genesis and Pink Floyd on “Drive Home”, King Crimson on “The Holy Drinker”, Yes on “The Pin Drop”, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull on “The Watchmaker”, and finally the title track is the only song that resembles his more conventional solo work. Nearly every song is a masterpiece, and the only one that I don’t find myself coming back to is “The Pin Drop”.
Any fan of progressive rock should check out this album, as it’s the album that singlehandedly assured me that modern artists can be just as good as older ones. It was released in 2013, yet sounds like it could’ve been released in 1972.

3/2/17 EDIT

Well, I got a bit sidetracked, so sorry it took so long to finish this. Hopefully you guys will see this, as I can’t double post.

Number Five: Rush - A Farewell To Kings

Ah Rush. I was genuinely surprised to see that some people don’t consider them to be full-on prog, as they have albums like this, Hemispheres, Permanent Waves, and Clockwork Angels that are all dripping with progressive rock elements. I love all of Rush’s work (save for maybe Hold Your Fire and Vapor Trails), but this album has always been my absolute favorite, right from the moment I heard it. Right from the start you get the awesome title track, followed by the epic “Xanadu”, and the acoustic ballad “Closer To The Heart”, but where this album really shines is in it’s second half. Many people regard “Cinderella Man” as the most commercial track of the bunch, but I love the way the song (in true prog fashion) shifts it’s moods throughout. It reminds me of the way bands like Gentle Giant, Supertramp and 10cc would condense prog epics into normal song lengths. The calmer “Madrigal” provides us with a short breather before we get hit with (in my opinion) the best track Rush ever created, “Cygnus X-1, Book I: The Voyage”. Right from it’s atmospheric intro it draws you in, before Geddy’s fantastic bass lines signal the song’s true start. The rest of the song is a true masterpiece, that gives me chills every single time I listen to it. I’ll never forget the first time I listened to this track, and how I just sat in awe after it was over. A masterpiece.

Number Four: Dream Theater - Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory

I was also surprised to find that many people in the prog community don’t like Dream Theater, as they’re one of my favorite modern prog bands. Sure, they have a lot of hit or miss albums, but I don’t think any true prog fan would deny that their rock opera Metropolis Pt. 2 is fantastic. It’s my all time favorite rock opera, and obviously my favorite Dream Theater album. The album’s story is really good, and very easy to follow without taking away from the music. I’m not going to go track-by-track like with the other albums, but I’ll just say that my favorite tracks would have to be “Regression” and “Overture 1928” (the way that Overture 1928 sounds coming directly after Regression is just amazing), as well as “Beyond This Life”, “The Dance Of Eternity” and my absolute favorite, “The Spirit Carries On”. This is another one of those albums though, where I have to listen to it all at once. Listening to the songs on their own just doesn’t do this masterpiece justice.

Number Three: Genesis - A Trick Of The Tail

I’ve already talked about this album a ton in this thread, so I’m just going to say one thing about it: This album is one of those very few where I would consider every single song on it a masterpiece. While the next two albums in this list are also this way, it’s not as impressive for them, since they both have less than 4 songs. This album has 8. Eight masterpieces. That is all.

Number Two: Yes - Close To The Edge

Yes, it’s the quintessential prog album. Three tracks, all masterpieces, and all of them are complex, interesting, and unique. The title track is of course my favorite of the bunch, as it’s yet another one of those songs that just leaves me in awe after every listen. It’s beautiful. This track alone is what pretty much singlehandedly made me as big of a prog fan as I am now. “And You And I” the mellowest track of the bunch, is also very beautiful, but in a different way than the title track is. “Siberian Khatru” is a brilliant, funky song that to me seems to invoke multiple moods. It of course has its happy tone, but there’s something about the orchestral-ish keyboards towards the song’s start that seem to evoke a kind of melancholy, or sadness. Regardless, this song is just as brilliant as the other two. I do find it kind of sad though, that Yes put this out so early in their career that pretty much anything else they ever released afterwards just seemed inferior when compared to it.

RIP Chris Squire

Number One: Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick

Jethro Tull… The first prog band where I collected their entire studio discography myself. When I started getting really into prog, I already knew quite a bit about Jethro Tull, and knew of their reputation, but was shocked to find that neither my dad or my brother had any of their albums. So, I had to buy them all myself. And oh was it worth it. I listened to their discography chronologically, so I was already impressed with “Stand Up” and “Aqualung”. However, I wasn’t expecting Thick As A Brick to be as good as it is. I was definitely intrigued by it before, as it was an entire album that was just one song. I had never seen that outside of ambient music. So, one night I listened to it for the first time. After it was over, I immediately listened to it again. And then again. And then I went to bed, of course. But over the course of the next few days I had already racked up around 20 listens to the album. Heck, the morning after first listening to it I had to listen to it again because I wasn’t sure if I had just dreamed up such a phenomenal album. The album is everything I love about prog: the complex song structures, the deviation from the norm, the fantastic lyrics, the amazing virtuosity of the musicians involved. This album is perfect. It’s just a shame that their follow-up didn’t work as well (though it was still a fantastic album). Now, Thick As A Brick is a concept album, but I don’t know what the concept is (and I don’t really care either. It’s still amazing). From what I can gather, the album is meant to be a satirical poem “written” by the fictional character Gerald Bostock, and seems to have an overarching theme of being yourself and not letting others control the way you live (which is also what Aqualung’s overall message was). Like Close To The Edge, it is unfortunate how early on this album was released, as all of Jethro Tull’s albums released after it just look extremely inferior by comparison. The only ones that even come close to it for me are “Songs From The Wood”, and “Minstrel In The Gallery”. Now, I realize now that I haven’t really said THAT much about what I like about this album, and that’s really because this album is so great that it’s extremely hard for me to put into words why I like it so much. All I can say is that if you’re a fan of progressive rock or even rock in general, you owe it to yourself to listen to this album, at least once.

So that’s it. My top ten favorite prog albums of all time, all summed up in one extremely long post. Perhaps I should’ve put this all into some sort of blog post and linked to it in order to save space. Oh well. Anyways, I’m curious to hear your guys’ feedback. I put a lot of work into this and I think I did a pretty good job summarizing why I love these wonderful albums so much.

Oh, and here’s some honorable mentions! I’m not going to elaborate on them as this post is already long enough, but I will in a separate post if you guys want me to.

-Frank Zappa - Hot Rats
-Supertramp - Brother Where You Bound
-Gentle Giant - The Power And The Glory
-Godley & Creme - L
-Camel - Mirage
-Van Der Graaf Generator - Godbluff
-Opeth - Pale Communion
-Kate Bush - Never For Ever
-Queen - Queen II

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Wait, when did Greg Lake die? I know Keith Emerson died last year, but I though the other two were still alive.

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He passed away on December 8th, 2016.

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:open_mouth:

Yikes. Poor guy.

Also, I just realized something creepy. When Carl Palmer kicks the bucket, they’ll have died in the order Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

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so I’ve recently been listening to a more recent Prog Rock band by the name of Evership

this is one of my favourite songs by them

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^ I’ll have to check them out but I have been listening to like the opposite of prog rock lately.

Though this last week was cool, my friend finally caved in to listening to in the Court of the Crimson King. The same day I hooked him up with KC’s discography, and then two days later he went ahead and spent $22 on a late 80s vinyl of Court. Holy cow it was so good. So I guess I have been listening to King Crimson.

I think tonight I’m going to relisten to something I have a hard time listening to : Tales From Topographic Oceans. I figure since I’ve been listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums of equal length lately, I might as well give it a shot. Again…

EDIT: Holy crap I actually enjoyed TFTO this time. Like I think I’d actually give it a 4/5. But just barely because it’s so much to trek through

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I still haven’t forgotten about this

My response just isn’t ready yet XD

This is pretty nice! I dig the orchestral touches.

That’s crazy…he must be a 21st century schizoid man.

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I totally forgot to say I actually gave the album a listen after you posted. It wasn’t too bad

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So much hype! Got the new Ayreon album, and it’s the most awesome album I’ve heard in quite a while if I may say so.

Though, you know you’re a prog fan when you look at the back of the CD case, and frown because there’s only one song longer than 10 minutes :smiley:

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There’s plenty of long songs that aren’t prog, though prog definitely contributed to me being desensitized to songs being so long. My friends are baffled by the fact I could listen to something so long (or even an album), but it’s like, cmon… you probably have your normal music running for the same amount of time anyways.

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Oh yeah, and I listen to plenty of other stuff that is historically long. But (like you said), Prog got me used to it being normal, despite vast amounts of classical in my background. Although, you really know that (in a good way or bad way, depending on how you look at it and who you are; I think it’s good, my siblings think it’s crazy) you’ve gone off the rails when really like listening perpetually to that one hour song in your playlist.

On the other hand, it never ceases to make me laugh when I listen to a ‘normal length’ (3-3 and a half minute) radio song, and think to myself how short it is, when six minutes used to be madness, and 8+ didn’t exist in my musical universe.

It reminds me of this thing Rick Wakeman said in an interview lately about Prog Rock, the gist of which was, ‘we don’t need your pop music strategies to make something people will listen to and like. We’re here to make art, not money.’ Which, ironically, they got both in the end …

But I digress.

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That certainly rings true for me, especially since there’s a specific 44 minute song that I never tire of, and have probably listened to more times in the past year than any other musical recording in my entire life…

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jojo made me find progressive rock

Not gonna lie like 4-5 years ago I was baffled by how many comments were in Japanese or comments about JJBA on Roundabout YouTube videos… I had no idea what they were talking about. Nowadays I appreciate what the series has done… to an extent. : P

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