Category Progressive
DUNES
Been an eternity since a cover art post. What better reason to dust off some interesting album covers than the current ‘Dune’ series? So don your hat and sandals, slop on some sunscreen and let’s get sandy! THE ALBUMS Gong — Shamal [Virgin 1975] Helmet — Dead To The World [Ear Music 2016] Uriah Heep — […]
DUNE, CHAPTER ONE
Have you ever gone on a bender? Not an over-imbibing, CH3-CH2-CH2-OH-God-Where-Did-That-Stethoscope-Come-From escapade, but the pop-cultural kind. Where you discover—or re-discover—an author and simply must immerse yourself in their world. So it was with your correspondent and Frank Herbert’s Dune, sometime last year. It went like this… I’d been listening to X, the tenth album by […]
DARK SIDE OF THE MOOMIN
Having had a less than stellar university career the first time around, it would be fair to say I was a little nervous about returning to higher education a mere three years after having been shown the door. Trepidation notwithstanding, back I toddled for another crack, this time via the Creative Arts stream in an […]
YOUNG AND FRESH
First albums by bands are always interesting, though not necessarily essential. Sometimes the artist is feeling their way, often the vision is a work-in-progress, occasionally it’s “All Change!” after the first effort. The two 1968 debuts we’re looking at in this post cover most of the bases mentioned above. Both are worthy of attention; both […]
DADDY, WHERE DID PROG COME FROM?
Released in November 1968, Ars Longa Vita Brevis was the second album by The Nice. Their first, 1967’s The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack, has some classic psychedelic songs (“Flower King of Flies” is a personal fave) and clear progressive characteristics, exemplified by Keith Emerson’s keyboard work on “Rondo”, but you could not call it a […]
LIFE IS SHORT, ART IS LONG
“When did prog rock begin?” is a question that gets trotted out periodically and always invites a storm of opinion, most of it generating more heat than light. A big part of the problem is a lack of shared understanding around the terms. What is prog? Is it different from progressive music? And what constitutes […]
MARS ATTACKS!
There is a wind-up alien on the cover. The title is Attack Of The Martians. No record label; it was self-produced in 2004. Eccentric Orbit is the name of the band. They come from planet Synth. This intriguing CD was part of a recent haul, a whim-purchase based on half the quartet playing electric […]
YES, MR WILSON
After my first listens to Steven Wilson’s remixes of five core seventies albums from the Yes catalogue, I confess I was ambivalent. It was not easy to pin down what was preventing a full-hearted embracing of Mr Wilson’s work. Perhaps it was simply different, and I was uncomfortable with the changes to sounds I’ve enjoyed […]
TALK, IT’S ONLY TALK
I In 1974, Robert Fripp broke up the band he co-founded in late 1968, one of the most innovative and restless to achieve widespread success. King Crimson’s final release in this period was Red, arguably one of the band’s finest and most consistent and certainly one of my favourites. II In April 1981, Sounds magazine […]
AN EDGY GENTLEMAN (2)
The delay and decay guitar experiments Robert Fripp used as the foundation for God Save The Queen / Under Heavy Manners were recorded in 1979, with the album being released in January 1980. A couple of months later, Fripp started rehearsing a new band in—according to the back cover of the subsequent album—“a 14th century […]
THE KING HAS ABDICATED (1)
It was always worth checking out Allans sales. Although determinedly mainstream and totally in thrall to the hits of the day, the music shop occasionally ordered—and got stuck with—oddities, outliers and obscurities. These ended up in the SALE bins, usually at excellent prices. I loved those sales; you could take a punt of three or […]
DOUBLE LIVES
SIDE I I’ve just walked out of a record shop in Mont Albert clutching the 2018 re-issue of Pink Floyd’s Pulse. Four vinyl records and a 12” x 12” hardcover book in a handsome slipcase. No flashing light on the spine but it still cost a bomb. I’m thinking, Why? Sitting on the shelves at […]
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