What are the best comeback/late career prog albums?

I'll let you define 'prog', 'comeback', and 'late career' however you like (though I guess 25 years on from their debut is a good guideline), but I'm looking for albums where the band really did manage to recapture the magic, because that seems to be fairly rare in prog.

The one major example I can think of right now is Magma's K.A, which is maybe even their best studio album and by the way totally insane for them to have released 30 years after their most famous work.

i'm listening to Faust's Ravvivando right now and it is excellent. though maybe they don't count as prog with a capital P.

oh no you can totally count that one - that album singlehandedly got me excited for every new Faust album that came afterwards but none of them are even close (in my opinion)

I think the Comus comeback was great. The Bobbie Watson track(s?) sounded like the band hadn't changed but Roger's voice was very different.

I remember really liking Faust's Rien at the time, but I haven't listened to it in forever.

I would also put Yes's Magnification up for consideration - no keyboardist, and a full orchestra. When I ranked all of their albums for Stereogum, I put it at #10 (out of 34):

Magnification is a fascinating experiment on Yes' part. Following 1999's The Ladder, keyboardist Igor Khoroshev left the band, and when they reached out to Rick Wakeman (again), he blew them off, so for the first time in their history, Yes were left with nobody on keys. They were a guitar-bass-drums rock band, reduced to their core of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Alan White. Well, clearly that wasn't gonna get the job done, so for the first time since 1970's Time And A Word, they brought in a full orchestra to accompany them.

Still, the album is one of the band's most stripped-down efforts, ever. Most of the songs are midtempo rockers, with a lot harder guitar and a lot more interaction between Howe and Squire than is typical. White slams the rhythms home instead of frittering around the kit, and the orchestra has a surprising amount of muscle; the string stabs on "Spirit Of Survival" sound like something from a James Bond movie soundtrack. Squire takes the lead vocal role on "Can You Imagine," which is surprising and cool. The album's two epics, "Dreamtime" and "In The Presence Of," come back to back at the end of the album; the former sounds uncannily like what Opeth are doing in 2015, while the latter is a sweeping, epic ballad. Magnification was Jon Anderson's final studio album with Yes, and honestly, it's probably their best one since the '80s.

Related question: what was the last "classic" prog record? Going For The One, perhaps, or something by Genesis?

There should be a fake canon in general. "Movement VI: The Respondent by the Flying Borf encapsulated the late 70s amateur prog scene in Randolph, NY."

90125

lol

how many albums has Peter Hammill put out since the 80's? 30? I'll bet one or two of them are great.

I really like Renaissance's 2000 album Tuscany. Mostly good songwriting, and Haslam is perfect. They get proggiest in the closing track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN2Trmt9MgI

Keen to hear that but lol, throughout the 70s it was all 'THE WORLD IS DYING', then in 2000, 'Tuscany!'

I have a Univers Zero album from 2010 which is pretty good, though nowhere near as ominous as their earlier stuff. Will have to listen to the Magma album frogbs mentions in the first post since I finally got into Magma fairly recently.

Pretty much every solo Peter Hammill album since the 80s is great. The same can't be said for the four post-reunion Van der Graaf Generator albums, which are all fairly patchy.

I reviewed the latest VDGG here; it is, indeed, not good. Have never listened to any of Hammill's solo material.

then in 2000, 'Tuscany!'

One of the better songs on the album is a celebration of Edwin Henry Landseer.

I completely agree with pdf's review there, sadly

what are the good 90's and beyond Hammill albums? I've heard a few - Fireships, Roaring Forties, X My Heart - they're okay. I assume his more recent ones are better?

Late period Soft Machine isn't really looked on well, especially after Mike Ratledge left in 1976, but I'm obsessed with 'Soft Space' from 1978. It's basically a jazzy rip-off of I Feel Love, in a sort of test card music style, but somehow it's just brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IFdnMXeidQ

Hmmm. I'd say it's rare in any genre. From the first wave, I guess Magma is the big name to beat. There are good reunion records by Happy the Man and the Muffins, but yeah, most of the first wave bands fell apart as studio acts. There are plenty of post-'70s bands that have stayed consistently strong over the years. Thinking Plague are a very depressing band to listen to, but they're also consistently very good. Anekdoten too- they're not quite at 25 yet, but they've been around for a very long time by this point.

I have to disagree in the most strenuous terms with the opinions up-thread on VDGG reunion stuff. Hammill, Banton, and Evans continue to do vital work (no pun intended) and my opinion is that their records keep getting better, though their appeal does seem to elude most of their target audience.

As for the last "classic" prog record, I'd put that sometime around '78 or '79 with the second records by a couple latecomers: Happy the Man's "Crafty Hands", National Health's "Of Queues and Cures", UK - well, if you count "Danger Money", and I do, I'd say "Danger Money". By '80 things had changed enough and something like "Drama" by Yes, though a fine album by Yes standards, doesn't quite count as "classic" to me.

2 cents type thoughts,
I think the general perception of Thrak-era KC was good, and was certainly a comeback record for them. In retrospect, not sure if it was really a great comeback, or just demonstrating they might have reached the end of being able to reinvent themselves.

For prog guys, you can you usually tell who is still pushing the envelope individually as an artist, but the bands themselves either just never reunite due to personal reasons, or because (gasp) the musicians don't want to retread old ground. I think guys like Charles Hayward and Fred Frith are like this, because they could certainly put together new versions of This Heat/Camberwell Now or Henry Cow if they really wanted to (albeit not with all original members).

Magma is a great story. I will say that if you look close, Christian Vander never stopped following his muse. It just wasn't in "Magma" for several years.

wow @ that Soft Machine track. I have the first four albums, never figured they were going to go down this path

well, vander's "muse" is a... problematic thing. two reasons i think k.a. was such a success:

1. old material - k.a. consisted of material entirely written around 1973 - easier to record and release a "classic prog" record when you've already written it. felicite thosz and slag tanz have their fans i guess, but are simply not of the same quality.

2. a stable, well-established band. the band up from about the time antoine paganotti joined until the departure of borghi, antoine, and himiko (again, vander's "muse" is problematic) was the best lineup of the band ever to exist, bar none - vander _never_ had such a long period of creative stability in the '70s.

There are plenty of post-'70s bands that have stayed consistently strong over the years. Thinking Plague are a very depressing band to listen to, but they're also consistently very good. Anekdoten too- they're not quite at 25 yet, but they've been around for a very long time by this point.

Yeah I noticed this too - while the original proggers all seemed to fizzle out (or shift years entirely) after five years or so, there are bands like IQ, Marillion, Echolyn, and Glass Hammer, all of whom have put out great albums over two decades into their career.

I would imagine the new Anglagard album would be eligible for this thread, but I haven't actually heard it :/

As for the last "classic" prog record, I'd put that sometime around '78 or '79 with the second records by a couple latecomers: Happy the Man's "Crafty Hands", National Health's "Of Queues and Cures", UK - well, if you count "Danger Money", and I do, I'd say "Danger Money". By '80 things had changed enough and something like "Drama" by Yes, though a fine album by Yes standards, doesn't quite count as "classic" to me.

Kinda wonder how Rush fits into all this. But yeah I think that's about right. Steve Hackett's Spectral Mornings seems like a good cut-off point. Looking at the RYM charts for '80 and '81, it's like 80% Italian and Polish bands at that point.

Kinda wonder how Rush fits into all this.

I didn't want to be the one to bring it up, because I worked for their label when it was released, but Clockwork Angels is a genuinely great album, easily one of Rush's best. (Also, I saw them on that tour, when they had the nine-piece string section, and it was seriously breathtaking at times.)

1. old material - k.a. consisted of material entirely written around 1973 - easier to record and release a "classic prog" record when you've already written it. felicite thosz and slag tanz have their fans i guess, but are simply not of the same quality.

just curious - do we know anything about how much of K.A was actually written back then? cuz it's strange to me to think that Magma had this incredible epic in the can for decades that nobody knew about. unlike E-R you don't really hear pieces of it popping up during the live shows. my impression was that it was based off pieces or fragments that Vander had written way back but not really assembled into an album until 2004. sorta like Fly From Here by Yes.

best band is of course debatable. I will always go for the '75 era, once the ORIGINAL Paganotti got on board. I'm also one of those Felicite Thosz fans (and Slag Tanz, had it just been appended to that album would have put it on top as far as 21st Century Magma for me).

KA tying together old strands of Magma was very cool. Emehnteht-Re did the same thing, but most fans knew that music already from other records. Performance-wise, I think Emehnteht-Re is the better record. Production wise, I think KA is actually the worst of the comeback records. But I love all Magma :)

xp
Vander says it was ALL written, and there are snippets available on the Inedits record, and live bootlegs.

do anglagard have one post-viljans oga? yeah, that record is brill, but as a band anglagard seem to be congenitally unstable.

i'm part of the old school that doesn't recognize bands like rush or kansas as "prog"- mostly this works to rush's benefit, honestly, as "prog" as a genre, particularly "classic prog", is a little too constrictive to really apply to their music.

Dude, Kansas is nothing if not prog. If your band has a full-time violinist, it's prog.

hmmm which bootlegs are those?

I admit I never listened to Inedits more than once, so I guess I wouldn't have recognized any of it. Will have another listen now though.

and yeah Viljans Oga was the album I was referring to - now I see it's not quite 25 years but that fits the spirit of the thread, they just disappeared for two decades

do think that THRAK is a good mention, though I wonder if anyone would seriously put it alongside Larks or Red as must-have Crimson? Always felt to me more like a "won't disappoint fans, but it's not a patch on the classics" sort of album

_All_ of KA was written back then, and we have complete (if unpolished) recordings of the entirety of the material. Now, there are no recordings of the piece being performed in its entirety as presented on the album, but at the same time we are not dealing with something like Brian Wilson's _Smile_ where the primary obstacle to completion was figuring out how to sequence and arrange the material. There's a live recording from '73 including more than half the record, including the entirety of K.A. III and one of the other chunks (I think K.A. I but I can't remember), and lengthy rehearsal bootleg recordings of the bits that weren't played live.

(If you're looking for bootlegs, the ones you want are "K.A. Rehearsals", and a show from '73 that unfortunately goes under a number of names- I think the actual recording date is from May 1973, Les Ponts de Ce, Angers)

The interesting thing about K.A., actually, was that between 1973 and 1974 the piece actually _turned into_ Kohntarkosz through a slow process of evolution. By the time they got around to recording the Kohntarkosz album, all of the material Vander originally wrote had been replaced. You can track this through the bootlegs.

Re: Thrak- I liked the original VROOOM EP, but I feel like King Crimson failed to live up on the promise of those original sessions and came up with something that sounded too much like an overt attempt to merge their '70s and '80s sound.

*stops trying to find out which bootlegs have which material* thank you!

work almost done so these are short notes:
also agreed on Thrak. When the Vrooom EP came out, it was such a surprise to hear them playing like that, particular on the improv stuff they did within Thrak. So noisy, metallic and chaotic. It was awesome.

haha no on violin making you prog. I feel like Kansas had a violin because they wanted to be like Dixie Dregs or Mahavishnu Orchestra, but POP. There are certainly prog fans who like Kansas, but I am not one of them.

Rush never had to "come back", and even though I don't like most of what I've heard of their 90s and beyond material, it's hard to argue they ever stopped trying to do something "new", at least for them. Because of this, I find it very difficult, and kind of sad, to hate on Rush, even when I don't care about their music that much anymore.

xp - Thanks, I'll definitely be looking that one up. I'm familiar with several of the AKT bootlegs - but if it was played between '73 and '74 then I missed it. btw when listening I always try to piece together how it relates to Kohntarkosz and can't quite figure it out. though it doesn't surprise me that's the case - there are some early takes on MDK from '71 that are quite interesting

the evolution of mdk is an interesting story as well. there are just some fantastic tapes from '72-'74, and so many of them are of just terrible quality unfortunately, but a _lot_ of stuff has come out in the last decade and it's an absolute goldmine for obsessives. in fact i'm just going to nerd out here about magma tapes from between the AKT '71 brussels release and the AKT feb '74 release:

early '72 sees an extention of the 1001 centigrades band, particularly when it comes to mdk. the weird jazz intro and the freaked out "terrien si je t'ai convoque" interludes mark this intro. we do actually have a ground zero for something approximating the album version of mdk - it's the chateauvallon show from '72- a festival and the last performance of the 1001 centigrades band. a bunch of the jazz guys in the group revolted when giorgio gomelsky, introducing them, made uncomplimentary remarks about certain jazz cats and quit. mdk isn't exactly in its final form, and the band is obviously vastly different, but it's close enough. this show is also interesting because they encored with "klaus kombalad", the only known live recording of that single.

after that vander had this super stripped down band featuring a bassist who didn't know how to tune his bass, doing interesting stuff like "undia" from the univeria zekt album. here is where "sowiloi" really starts to turn into a monster. there's a pro-shot video from late in this era of them doing a brief ten-minute rendition of mdk, close to the final version. this era is also where the "ka rehearsals" tape is from, i believe.

by may, jannick top, who did know how to tune his bass, had joined, and the set gets weirder. this is the first appearance of k.a., parts i and iii. a big chunk of wurdah itah also turns up live. this is the longest-circulating tape from the era, and quality is not very good. lots of strange improv- the top-led second part of "sowiloi" isn't part of the set yet, though.

there are, amazingly enough, _three_ tapes from july '73, two in good quality. there's a pro recording of their '73 jazz fest performance - the band is not as unhinged as they normally would be due to the expanded lineup (including the brecker brothers). vander is still doing his "nebehr gudahtt" vocal solo as part of mdk, which he would drop by the end of the year. aside from mdk they do a five minute chunk of the climax of kohntarkosz (which at this time is part of k.a., the first part of the eventual kohntarkosz to make it into the piece).

the next tape is sanary, july 23 - the tape of this is horrible and keeps breaking up, which is a shame because the performance, particularly of mdk, is far superior to the new york jazz fest performance. the tape from the day after, from marseille, shows sowiloi at its amazing best. top's KMX piece has emerged fully formed, and the tune clocks in at about half an hour. the version on "inedits" doesn't come close.

by september '73 kohntarkosz is in its early '74 form, as heard on the '74 archive releases. "om zanka" and "gamma anteria" from k.a. iii are still part of the piece, but the head has evolved from that strange little interlude in "k.a. part i", and the climax is present as well. new to the set is "theusz hamtaahk", a very early version with a long thrashed out ending- the song would be revised to add more material in the middle and significantly shorten the ending by the feb '74 archive releases.

some brief notes post-'74: the version of "kohntarkosz" performed in beynes on may 10, 1975 has a rare appearance of the coda as recorded on the studio release (which was recorded before vander had written the more familiar finale), preceding the coda from "live". the pre-june '75 shows had some unique material, too, including "om zanka" as a stand-alone piece (as heard on "inedits") and a very long, trippy version of "lihns" (dropped basically forever after the june '75 shows). "om zanka" would make one last standalone appearance in the set in the early '77 shows, transformed from its somewhat ethereal original nature into a fast-paced monster jam. the creteil performance from march 1977 has an extra unknown song appended to it, though this isn't part of the piece in june.

what are the good 90's and beyond Hammill albums? I've heard a few - Fireships, Roaring Forties, X My Heart - they're okay. I assume his more recent ones are better?

I think all three of those are fantastic, but then I'm a fan and will proselytise for everything he does so I'm probably not the best person to answer the question. Thin Air, Clutch and Singularity are my favourites from the noughties.

great post there rushomancy. I've started to delve into the boots a bit so it's fascinating to hear all this. Magma are really one of those bands like King Crimson and Ween where you can never have enough live albums.