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Greatest Progressive Album ever

#81
So many to choose from, but if I had to pick my favorite prog album of all time, I'd have to say Hemispheres. The title track never gets old, a rocking instrumental, and two short, catchy, beautifully-written songs to round it out. Not a weak minute on the whole album.

Besides that,
Yes - Relayer: much has been said about Gates Of Delirium, but Sound Chaser is one of the craziest, most fun prog songs out there

Genesis - Foxtrot: Watcher Of The Skies, Get Em Out By Friday, and Supper's Ready... enough said.

Dream Theater - Six Degrees... Not all the songs are gems, but The Glass Prison is bloody amazing, and the 42 minute title track is fantastic too, the songwriting is tight, the melodies are great, and James Labrie has never sounded better.

Pink Floyd - DSoTM. Completely bulletproof from start to finish. Flow, vibe, songwriting, performance, lyrics, emotion... doesn't get any better than this.

Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet. Another great start-to-finish album. The only weak link is "Sentimental," the rest is sheer genius. The outtakes EP "Nil Recurring" is awesome too, they were really on a roll.

As amazing as the songs on "Close To The Edge" are, I would take the live versions on "Yessongs" over the studio tracks any day.

Albums that I think of as progressive even if the bands aren't necessarily labeled that way:

Black Sabbath - Sabotage: Very dark, ominous and definitely progressive. Just look at "Symptom Of The Universe." One of my favorite beginning-to-end albums as far as flow and vibe.

Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier: Average song length is ~8 minutes, so it definitely qualifies. They are getting into more and more "prog" territory and I love it. "The Talisman" and "Where The Wild Wind Blows" are some of the best songs they've ever done.
 
#82
Old School

YES - Close to the Edge

As much as I would like to say "Hemispheres" CTTE is astonishing. I can't believe they recorded this so long ago. The vocal arrangements, bass tone, and mystical nature of the album are hard to comprehend. CTTE sounds like it's from another world and they were probably on one when this album was recorded :D

New School

Dream Theater - Awake

Still the best progressive metal album I have ever heard. 70+ minutes with no filler. The best lyrics the band has ever put to song, great keyboards, and an amazing assortment of riffs and solo's. John Myung was at his most creative and best sounding on this album.
 
#83
Lots of great responses here. Will "Relayer" edge out "Close To The Edge" as the greatest Yes album? What about the one epic song per side double album "Tales From Topographic Oceans"?
(Hemispheres gets thumbs up with me too)
 
#85
lucas vigor said:
Not sure I would agree with this. I think it is actually the other way around...albums like Wake of poseidon and islands, very much nodded to fusion, especially with the flutes and saxes....but middle period albums like Starless, red and larks tongues? They have all the regular aspects of prog rock...and they even had a huge influence on grunge and modern prog metal...bands like tool, soundgarden, and Kurt Cobain....clearly show the influence...even Primus....

And then later onto the 80's Crimson...I hear no fusion in that at all, and the most recent stuff, which is very, very heavy music with industrial rock elements....again, not fusion. Fusion needs to have some element of jazz in there, to be considered fusion. With the exception of musicians like Alan Holdsworth and Al Dimeola, most fusion is electrified jazz to a major extent.
Click to expand...
This is why I love KC - you never know what the next album is going to be like, but it'll still be through-&-through Crimson. IMO they're probably the only Prog band that's consistently progressed.

My vote's got to go to 'Court' though. I mean... it's yer first album 'k? Nobody really knows who you are, so what do you put as the opening track?

This
 
#87
Oh boy I am late for this party but Im chimin' in anyway!
Lot's of favorites:

King Crimson- Discipline,ITCOTCK, LTIA, Red, Thrak
Van Der Graaf Generator- Pawn Hearts, Still Life, Godbluff
Gentle Giant- Acquiring the taste, Octopus, In a Glass House
Yes- Close To The Edge, The Yes Album, Fragile, Relayer
ELP- Tarkus, Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson Lake and Palmer(1st album) and Trilogy
Ozric Tentacles- Erpland, Pungent Effulgent, Jurassic Shift
Rush-2112, Hemispheres, A Farewell To Kings

Ray Shulman of Gentle Giant is one of the most underrated bassists ever. Listen to the bass on "In A Glass House" with headphones. It'll blow your mind. And Bass isn't even his main instrument!
 
#89
lucas vigor said:
Not sure I would agree with this. I think it is actually the other way around...albums like Wake of poseidon and islands, very much nodded to fusion, especially with the flutes and saxes....but middle period albums like Starless, red and larks tongues? They have all the regular aspects of prog rock...and they even had a huge influence on grunge and modern prog metal...bands like tool, soundgarden, and Kurt Cobain....clearly show the influence...even Primus....

And then later onto the 80's Crimson...I hear no fusion in that at all, and the most recent stuff, which is very, very heavy music with industrial rock elements....again, not fusion. Fusion needs to have some element of jazz in there, to be considered fusion. With the exception of musicians like Alan Holdsworth and Al Dimeola, most fusion is electrified jazz to a major extent.
Click to expand...
This is just an interesting perspective. Court, Wake, Islands, all pre-date what I would call "fusion" by a few years. The genre had not even happened yet. Fripp had started playing in a hotel jazz dance band, and had taken lessons from an old jazz player. But, KC took that background and "fused" it with classical and some rock and came up with what later became known as "prog," which had also not been invented yet. The Bruford/Muir/Wetton band was moving in a whole different direction, perhaps more in the free jazz direction, but also song-based. Still, not fusion, but closer in some ways, and certainly away from "prog," at least to my ears. Bruford coming out of a "prog" band (Yes) and into KC was a move away from prog, not toward it, it seems to me in retrospect.

I totally agree about the '90s KC. No prog at all. The '80s band also not, but it was a different animal altogether. Philip Glass and Terry Riley, along with mid-western pop were the predominant forces in action there. What a beast! But, neither "prog" nor "fusion" it seems to me. KC was always a little ahead of the curve, and ended up influencing various genres that later got labels, rather than being influenced by them.
 
#90
A few more to throw out there:
Thanks to those who mentioned Chris Squire-"Fish Out Of Water"-love it!!!
Nektar-"Remember The Future"
Gentle Giant-"The Missing Piece"
Victor-self titled(Alex Lifeson's solo project)
Brand X-"Unorthodox Behavior"
Also, don't know if it counts as prog, but does anyone remember Zazu? Just one album that I know of, self-titled, on the Wooden Nickel subsidary of RCA records.
 
#91
SlavaF said:
Albums that I think of as progressive even if the bands aren't necessarily labeled that way:

Black Sabbath - Sabotage: Very dark, ominous and definitely progressive. Just look at "Symptom Of The Universe." One of my favorite beginning-to-end albums as far as flow and vibe.

Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier: Average song length is ~8 minutes, so it definitely qualifies. They are getting into more and more "prog" territory and I love it. "The Talisman" and "Where The Wild Wind Blows" are some of the best songs they've ever done.
Click to expand...

I thought about some metal also, especially Metallica's Master of Puppets and Justice. Complexity, classical influence, song length, almost concept albums...it's all there. (I did list Tool, which I also think of as primarily a metal band, but they're so indebted to King Crimson that the prog label fits more easily.)

As for Sabbath, anyone else notice the main riff from "Hole in the Sky" was almost duplicated by King Crimson in "Vroom Vroom" from Thrak?
 
#92
Being a huge progger and playing progressive rock for more than 30 years, I'd have to agree with many of you and say that "Close to the Edge" is probably still the peak representative recording of the genre, but exceptional contenders include:

Nursery Cryme (Genesis)
2112 (Rush)
Images and Words (Dream Theater)
Scheherazade and Other Tales (Renaissance)
Brain Salad Surgery (Emerson, Lake and Palmer)

Some of these albums aren't even the best examples of the artists, but are phenomenal prog efforts and sound as exciting today as they did decades ago.
 
#93
7flat5 said:
This is just an interesting perspective. Court, Wake, Islands, all pre-date what I would call "fusion" by a few years. The genre had not even happened yet. Fripp had started playing in a hotel jazz dance band, and had taken lessons from an old jazz player. But, KC took that background and "fused" it with classical and some rock and came up with what later became known as "prog," which had also not been invented yet. The Bruford/Muir/Wetton band was moving in a whole different direction, perhaps more in the free jazz direction, but also song-based. Still, not fusion, but closer in some ways, and certainly away from "prog," at least to my ears. Bruford coming out of a "prog" band (Yes) and into KC was a move away from prog, not toward it, it seems to me in retrospect.

I totally agree about the '90s KC. No prog at all. The '80s band also not, but it was a different animal altogether. Philip Glass and Terry Riley, along with mid-western pop were the predominant forces in action there. What a beast! But, neither "prog" nor "fusion" it seems to me. KC was always a little ahead of the curve, and ended up influencing various genres that later got labels, rather than being influenced by them.
Click to expand...

It could be a case of convergent evolution...fusion really started in 1968-69 with Miles Davis "In a silent way" (or some might say with "filles de kilimangaro")...and that was about the same time period, if not slightly before. It could be what one poster above had mentioned, that some of these burgeoning prog rock bands were definitely taking notice of the new sound of fusion taking place primarily in the US with bands like Mahavishu, head hunters, early weather report. Who knows if they heard "Bitches brew" and went "wow"! There were artists like Sun Ra, that were doing "progressive" jazz with sci-fi song titles even as early as the late 50's, and one can't but wonder how many English prog rockers heard Sun Ra's records.




But I would think that by the mid 70's, most had abandoned the sound of saxes and whatnot, and really moved farther towards the classical side of the thing. Fusion, for the most part, has a much larger degree of improv going on then say a band like YES, who although don't read music still have their songs completed, arranged and orchestrated ahead of time (they have really great memories, obviously!)


On a side note, this thread made me pull out "Tales of Topographic" oceans last night. It's an album that I think has been unfairly criticized!
 
#94
lucas vigor said:
On a side note, this thread made me pull out "Tales of Topographic" oceans last night. It's an album that I think has been unfairly criticized!
Click to expand...

+1 Even the guys in Yes in the reissue liner notes indicate that it would have been a fantastic single album, but was a bit of a stretch as a double album.

Sides 1 and 4 are classics, and as good as anything Yes has produced IMO.

And +1 to all the discussion about the relationship between early prog and fusion. I too kind of used the prog stuff as my introduction to more complicated song forms, etc., then moving to the fusion movement when it was becoming a bit more well known (i.e., the mid Weather Report years and the Lenny White/Stanley version of Return to Forever, etc.), which then opened my ears and made me aware of Bill Evans, Coltrane, etc., etc.
 
#95
Regarding the abilities of the musicians in Yes, I have never seen their specific abilities, with respect to "reading music", documented. It would be interesting to know for sure. Not that I doubt you Lucas, but it would be interesting to see in an interview or the like. I suppose same goes for other aspects of musicianship...ie knowledge of music theory. My curiosity is purely non-judgemental and just in the name of interest....wouldnt change my opinion of the band one way or another. It would certainly offer insight into their creative process and how they may have conceived some things. Certainly, if they had classical influences one or some of them may have been able to play classical music (Rick Wakeman?), which means he likely could read music.

Anyway....would invite responses on this topic.
 
#97
I should have clarified: They don't write out their songs or work from a chart....but I am sure they must read music. Chris Squire started out as a member of a church choir...and wakeman must be classically trained to do what he does...so I guess what I meant to say was they don't read music for thier own songs, but rely on memorizing very intricate song forms!
 
#98
I believe Wakeman was trained in the classics.
I seem to remember reading once Steve Howe saying he was self-taught, but can read.
Chris Squire sang in church as a lad, not sure of his specific training or reading ability.
 

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