Prog Rock

Listening to the UK debut. Didn't realise this was the result of an attempted King Crimson reunion. Doesn't seem that special as some fans say but I love the opening suite, awesome chorus "Iiiiiin the dead of night, in the dead of niiiiiiiight!" then the payoff of "byyyyyyy the light of daaaayy, in the dead of niiiiiiiight!"

Jobson really shows his Zappa background in places.

i really don't like holdsworth's guitar tone. myself i have a greater love for their follow-up, where they pull out some serious soft rock moves, which, of course, makes the True Progheads hate the record, but for god's sake Wetton was born to be a lounge lizard!

There's a lot of live albums.

Iiiiiiiiin the dead of niiiight! Iiiiiin the dead of niiiiiiiiiight!

The whole album is growing on me too.

was it an attempted crimson reunion? I hadn't heard that. anyway first UK album is good. second one is ok too.

kind of bummed I missed the bozzio lineup on tour a few years back

Supersister's "Wow" doesn't seem to have a studio version. It's pretty funny, maybe they changed it all the time?

Again about UK's "In The Dead Of Night", the keyboard solo near the end is amazing. The album grew on me a bit. Really not what I was expecting. It's pretty gloomy.

i think there was a 7" studio version of "wow" in '73... after they released a live version on 1972's "Superstarshine Vol. 3".

I guess it's on my Iskander as a bonus track.

That UK album is pretty good.

Supersister's Pudding En Gisteren isn't as good as the first two albums. "Radio" and "Psychopath" are entertaining. "Judy Goes On Holiday" and "Pudding En Gisteren - Music For Ballet" have gorgeous flute and piano passages but I find them a bit uninteresting for too much of the time. This band has a thing for pudding and custard.
The bonus track "Wow (Live Version)" is brilliant, longer, with more parts and probably better than the studio version. So much fun. "WOWOWOWOWOWOW WOWOWOWOWOWOW!!!"

Again about UK's "In The Dead Of Night", the keyboard solo near the end is amazing.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 1 March 2016 21:24 (4 months ago)

I think this has become one of my favourite epics.

I know there's a thread dedicated to 'prog 2.0' or something like that but I can't find it, I think this would have fit in better there.

Anyway, is anyone else interested that Cheer-Accident have a new album? On first listen I'm not blown away but it does neatly tie together most of the creative strands they've toyed with - neo-RIO, progressive pop, studio experimentation, even hints of the jagged Chicago math-rock sound they had throughout the 90s. Definitely ordering the CD of this and spending some time with this.

Full stream here:

https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/putting-off-death

cheer accident are total rolling attention deficit material, will stick em there if you don't. & will check this out later

Interview with Dave Weigel on his new prog rock book

http://www.vulture.com/2017/05/david-weigel-prog-rock-book.html

*record scratch*

"Led Zeppelin weren’t super inventive. They were not a band that was trying to push boundaries that much. They were just a very loud rock band."

in any case i'm def interested in his book and look forward to reading it, nice to see a shoutout to third by soft machine

that's kinda true tho about Zep??

They were totally weird and inventive, that's basically the only defense of their rampant borrowing.

That is not true about Led Zeppelin!

yep, that's the kind of thing you say about AC/DC, not Zep.

haha weird. I guess I just don't see them that way. like what boundaries did they push? they don't seem weird to me at all

looking forward to this book but weigel's a bit glib in that interview. "carouselambra" is one of the last great prog epics of the '70s

if nothing else, they completely destroyed the boundary of what rock bands sounded like, just on the production front. Nobody sounded like them, and yet everyone who came after them had to contend with their sound.

As far as the music itself, they played blues (obv), proto-metal on their early stuff, folk rock, brought in Middle Eastern elements, orchestral arrangements, played James Brown beats (in 7 no less), tacked reggae, samba. Zep were about as progressive as a rock could be without actually being considered prog. Compare their output to, say, ACDC mentioned, Foreigner, BTO, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith. As straight up rock music goes, none of those bands could really compete with any aspect of Zep's sound or reach.

Compare their output to, say, ACDC mentioned, Foreigner, BTO, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith. As straight up rock music goes, none of those bands could really compete with any aspect of Zep's sound or reach.

Absolutely agree, 100%. But compare them and their tricks* to, say Yes, or King Crimson, of Soft Machine and they seem pretty straight forward.

*feel like 90% of their tricks are Bonham based, i.e. the fucking awesomeness of the drum sound, his different beats etc

I agree that he's off base w/r/t Zeppelin, but I like this quote:

I’d start with King Crimson’s Red or In the Court of the Crimson King. Both of those have really accessible riffs and rock structures and then zoom into outer space. And if you listen and say, “I wish they’d just get rid of the violin and flute sections,” then maybe progressive rock is not for you.

"They were just a very loud rock band." (xp)

xp
Sure, and compare them to Magma, and they're just a boring blues rock band. They weren't a prog band -- but I contend they certainly could have been if you nudge them one or two degrees in any number of different directions.

carouselambra" is one of the last great prog epics of the '70s

see, Carouselambra sounds pretty straight forward to me, not proggy at all.

Was just listening to "Down By the Seaside," and even that weird-ass song goes from kind of lazy river country to this strange minor key hard rock bit before going back to country.

Question: is Led Zeppelin more or less prog than Pink Floyd? imo, yes.

omg no

Yeah, I dunno! I know PF gets tagged prog, but a lot of the things I think of as prog they don't really do. Proto prog?

Bluesy space rock? Can a band be prog without a virtuoso drummer? Is that a prog paradox?

they may or may not be prog but they are way more prog/have more prog elements/leanings than zep!

The Who are proggier than both.

(ok, probably not, but there's no "Baba O'Riley" or "Who Are You" equivalent in LZ or PF's oeuvres)

"stairway to heaven" is one of the catchiest three-movement prog rock suites, right up there with "starship trooper"

"But I think John Wetton’s lyrics for King Crimson were dark and interesting."

what? king crimson is your favorite band and you wrote a book on prog. when did john wetton write lyrics for king crimson?

weigel whiffed that interview imo.

Oops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starless

I think that interview does a good job at highlighting some of the contradictions inherent in "defining prog" in 2017. Because prog's defenders, on the one hand, have a strong interest in defining progressive rock as a uniquely creative musical form, and on the other hand feel compelled to draw those lines so as to defend the definition created by, I don't know, the early '80s, a definition which was not based around "creativity". And the reason Zep got left out was not because they didn't employ the genre tropes associated with prog - mellotron, instrumental virtuosity, long songs, songs in odd time signatures - but because throughout their career they worked in a style defined as antithetical to prog: Blues. This is how Robert Fripp gets to be a prog avatar, because he's one of the least bluesy electric guitarists of the 20th century. This is why one of the unsigned reviews of Weigel's book questions his assertion that Jethro Tull were a prog band, on the grounds that they played blues.

So we have a situation, with prog, where the key signifier of the genre is exclusionary, and none of the genre's defenders will acknowledge or even recognize this.

Said it many times but a lot of neo-prog and prog for the core audience since then just sounds like generic rock.

If you think Soft Machine (whom I adore) are the really weird, hardcore, difficult stuff then you probably have no business writing a book about prog

I embrace the core sentiment that prog is the sibling of punk though

I know there's a lot of people who stick to the English stuff and a few other heavyweights but it seems to me that a lot of prog fans try to have an international grasp of the genre.

He never said Soft Machine were at the far edges, he just said they're less accessible than King Crimson and Yes.

I like this clip of Dan Britton explaining what makes "Stairway" sound so proggy, I love these kinds of breakdowns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jK1bpJvmVc

jimmy page and jp jones were both virtuosos. the key signifier of the genre is sci-fi / fantasy exploration, i'd say, with transportive/transcendent/progressive (as in political) lyrics and trippy (oftentimes virtuosic but not exclusively) music framing those expeditions. zeppelin is 'not prog' when they sing about banging chicks. they're prog when they're fighting the battle of evermore, moving through kashmir, watching the mighty arms of atlas hold the heavens from the earth

they're dorks either way. sometimes they stumbled on decent tunes

More than that, Zep were progressive because they had a total willingness to step beyond of the trappings of blues rock. In fact, there's an old John Paul Jones quote how about when III came out, he was glad nobody was ever going to compare them to Black Sabbath anymore. They were a band who wore "eclecticism" well, even when wrongheaded critics of the time thought they were just stealing stuff from other artists. The way I see it, Zep seemed a lot more open minded about music than, say, Yes, who would spend months recording every possible permutation of a chord sequence just to appease the various egos involved.

i have one of those archival soft machine cds, i forget which one, there's like a million, and in there is an interview with mike ratledge in which he expresses interest in moving into areas that are "not necessarily 'progressive'". this is an interview from 1969. from what i've read i kind of take from that that what we think of as "progressive rock" is not necessarily in line with what people thought about it when it was new. particularly the primacy of gabriel-era genesis, who don't seem to have been any more popular than van der graaf generator when nursery cryme came out, and were at some point elevated to the level of stadium bands like ELP and Yes.