Category Progressive
1974 COUNTDOWN | #69 — #65
#69 LOU REED — SALLY CAN’T DANCE Eternally suspicious of, well, everything actually, Lou Reed was not exactly overjoyed by the unexpected success of Sally Can’t Dance. His acidic comment ran thusly: “It seems like the less I’m involved with a record, the bigger a hit it becomes. If I weren’t on the record at […]
1974 COUNTDOWN | #74—#70
#74 MACKENZIE THEORY — BON VOYAGE How fitting to begin another COUNTDOWN voyage with an album called Bon Voyage. How ironic saying “Hello” to another epic trek through more than six dozen albums (selected from a pool of around three hundred) with a ritual phrase of farewell. How ambivalent was your correspondent about attempting this […]
KALEIDOSCOPIC GLORY
Transatlantic are a genuine progressive rock supergroup, albeit a part-time one. Comprising members of Spock’s Beard (Neal Morse) Dream Theatre (Mike Portnoy) Marillion (Pete Trewavas) and the Flower Kings (Roine Stolt), the band released its first album, SMPT:e in 2000. In February 2014 Kaleidoscope, their fourth studio album, appeared. Another huge opus blending symphonic prog […]
ALBUM COVERS | JADE WARRIOR
Tony Duhig and Jon Field created art rock band Jade Warrior at the birth of the 1970s. After three albums on Vertigo, they shifted to the Island record label and produced a fascinating quartet of albums between and 1974 and 1978. Characterised by an eclectic range of influences and instrumentation, their albums presaged ‘Fourth World’ […]
TAKING THEM TO TARKUS
There is nothing like a great three minute single. A song that grabs you, thrills you and then is gone. It’s been the staple of rock and pop music for over sixty years and shows no sign of becoming extinct, as we saw recently with the success of the Nuggets fiftieth anniversary box set. Yet […]
1973 COUNTDOWN: #73 — 71
After initiating planning and sorting for 73 FROM ’73 in the middle of 2022, somehow the project got delayed; again and again. A number of the schedule blowouts arose from life intruding on music activities, annoying incursions I hoped had been redirected towards more gainfully employed bloggers as I mooched towards retirement; but in fact […]
INOCULATE AGAINST FEAR
One of the most popular on-line music guides lists more than 50 adjectives to describe the last album by progressive-metal masters Tool. This tells you a lot about the complexity of their 2019 eighty-minute epic. Some of the descriptors are pretty obvious… dramatic, powerful, intense, heavy… words that fans of the band will see as […]
GOOD(BYE) FRIDAY
Jeff Beck 24 June 1944—10 January 2023 🖤 Yukihiro Takahashi [YMO] 6 June 1952—11 January 2023 🖤 Renee Geyer 11 Sep 1953—17 January 2023 🖤 David Crosby 14 Aug 1941—19 January 2023 🖤 Tom Verlaine [Television] 13 Dec 1949—28 January 2023 🖤 Burt Bacharach 12 May 1928—8 February 2023 🖤 Wayne Shorter 25 August 1933—2 […]
HEY JOE
Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? Hey Joe, I said, where you going with that gun in your hand? I’m going down to shoot my old lady You know, I caught her messing around with a hair metal band Back in the 1970s I found Colosseum a tad bombastic. But […]
QUIETLY URGENT
Decked out in silver platform boots and a feather boa, Brian Eno first rose to prominence as a member of art rockers Roxy Music, appearing on their first two albums. Yet he is probably best known as a producer and for his solo work, particularly in the ambient genre. In fact, Eno is often credited […]
PROG BOT: VINYL CONNECTION DIVES INTO AI
I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, the AI language program everyone is talking about lately. Having read Bill Pearce’s thoughtful piece at pinklightsabre this morning, I thought I’d check out its facility on the topic of rock music. First I asked for the top Rock albums of 1973, thinking that perhaps I could short circuit […]
73 FROM ’73 | AN INTRODUCTION
From the time I first extracted the more than three hundred 1973 albums in the VC collection I knew that 73 FROM ’73 would be a challenging project. And that was before I’d even researched the holes in the stash. No New York Dolls! Betty Davis overlooked! Where’s Aerosmith? Oh, the shame. Then I mulled […]
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