Building a Prog Foundation – Five Starter Albums

We have arrived at the point in our show where, having set the stage with a brief history and addressed some “what and why” questions, we are ready to get down to brass tacks and give consideration to a variety of prog rock artists, albums, and songs. In forming this list I worked from the assumption that the average Kuyperian Commentary reader would have little to no familiarity with progressive rock. So my recommendations are geared toward the prog newbie and not so much toward a seasoned listener familiar with every nook and cranny of the genre.

If you are a seasoned consumer of progressive rock you will undoubtedly look at my list and find a quibble here or there. “I wouldn’t have recommended ______ by _______. I would recommended _______ by ______ instead.” Recommended lists are by no means definitive and I am assuming that. However, someone has to be the navigator on this prog journey and and I’m the one wearing the tour guide hat, coat, and dungarees. Nevertheless, prog fandom inspires vigorous debate like few other rock music genres. Proggers are a spirited lot, active on Internet message boards, able to write thousands of words about the glories of mid- 70s Italian prog, or argue to the death that everyone but them has completely overlooked obscure prog artists like Ozric Tentacles or Grobschnitt. Let’s just say that, if you’re looking for a series of recommendations from the skinny branches of the prog rock tree, prepare to be disappointed.

Finally, when compiling lists like these, I try never think in terms of a “best of” list. Therefore, this list (nor any other lists in this series) should not be misconstrued as being my picks for the “five best prog albums ever.” Leave the “best of” list discussions for athletic competitions and the Guinness Book of World Records. This is all about my opinions of what would suffice as suitable listening for a Kuyperian Commentary prog newbie. Your mileage and recommendations will surely vary.

This list is meant to address foundations. The following are five albums that I believe I could give any prog rock newbie and they would come away feeling as if they had a solid knowledge and understanding of what makes for good prog rock. If you look at the picture above you’ll see a spoiler snapshot giving away my choices for this list.

Let’s consider briefly each album in chronological order and then, over the next five posts, we will attempt a deeper, track-by-track dive into my “foundational five albums of progressive rock.”

Close to the Edge – Yes

The band’s previous album (Fragile) was their breakthrough, helped along by the massive radio airplay for the song “Roundabout.” However, in every way, Close to the Edge is a better album–tighter arrangements, better interplay, a band more sure of itself after a long tour, and not one second of filler to be found. Drummer Bill Bruford summed up his feeling about the album thusly, “The angels were looking over us: Close to the Edge was completed and it was a huge hit, but, more importantly, it remains a classic of the genre. I don’t understand how we did managed it, somehow we got lucky. To this day it seems to have the perfect form, and form is everything. Maybe it was karma for all the grief we had been through during the first three or four years. I loved the record, hated making it, and was immediately certain I would never try to do that again.”^[1]

Selling England by the Pound – Genesis

Along with Yes and King Crimson, Genesis was the other great prog rock band to emerge from England during progressive rock’s first wave of popularity. Selling England by the Pound was the band’s most quintessentially British album of the Peter Gabriel-era, which ended in 1975. The album is filled with quirky, madcap characters: a “unifawn” (whatever that is), a lawn mowing man who knows what he likes and likes what he knows, sheep (sheeple?) that remain inside their pen, and “The Battle of Epping Forest.”

Genesis would only make one more album with Gabriel as their lead vocalist (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) after which he would depart the band for a distinguished solo career. Genesis would never again sound a distinctly British as they did on this album, making Selling England by the Pound a towering achievement in the band’s early catalog.

Moving Pictures – Rush

The first three albums by Canadian prog rockers Rush failed to live up to the expectations of their record company. The band finally hit pay dirt with the fourth album (2112) and went on to release two studio albums that featured longer songs with lyrics that walked a fine line between Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi and Ayn Rand objectivism. Feeling like they had followed the “epic prog muse” as far as it would take them, Rush streamlined their sound somewhat on their 1980 album Permanent Waves. Their 1981 album Moving Pictures solidified their new direction, captured massive radio airplay, and caused the band’s tours to move from small halls into stadiums and sports arenas.

Moving Pictures contains seven songs. Only two of the songs are longer than five minutes (“Red Barchetta and “The Camera Eye”) and “The Camera Eye” clocks in at just over ten minutes. By the time Moving Pictures was recorded, Rush’s prog sensibilities were found in their lyrical concepts, their fearless musical experimentation, and in their virtuosity on their instruments.

Most hardcore prog rock fans opt for either 2112 or Hemispheres when they speak of go-to Rush albums. And, from a prog purist standpoint, that is entirely understandable. However, Moving Pictures is the perfect entryway into all things Rush and should make anyone’s short list as one of the greatest albums of the 1980s.

V – Spock’s Beard

The list of American prog artists in existence during the first wave of progressive rock is pretty small. In fact, after the band Kansas and perhaps Frank Zappa, there aren’t many American prog bands of note. Things began to change in the 1980s as American bands like Queensrÿche, Djam Karet, King’s X, Fates Warning, and Dream Theater arrived on the scene. In 1992 the American prog band Spock’s Beard formed and went on to establish themselves (along with Dream Theater) as the most successful American prog band of the decade.

Named after the infamous episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock grows a beard, Spock’s Beard has gone through three distinct phases. The first phase lasted from their inception until 2002 when founding member and lead vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Neal Morse began confessing Christ and left the band soon after to pursue a solo career. The second phase lasted from 2002-2011 where the band was fronted by drummer Nick D’Virgilio, who took over the singing duties from the departed Morse. In 2011 D’Virgilio announced his departure from the band and Spock’s Beard has carried on fronted by new singer Ted Leonard.

The album V was (not surprisingly) the band’s fifth and the next-to-last album to feature Neal Morse as a frontman and D’Virgilio back on drums. The album is bookended by two prog epics (“At the End of the Day” and “The Great Nothing”) that are brimming with spiritual ideas and (in retrospect) hints of where Morse was headed in his spiritual life. In 2007, Morse stated that he rejects the Nicene-Constantinopolitan understanding of the Trinity and so his relationship to orthodox Christianity is tenuous (at best). However, the Neal Morse years with Spock’s Beard continue to be a high-water mark in the history of American prog rock.

English Electric: Full Power – Big Big Train

The band Big Big Train actually formed in England in 1990. They generated a few ripples with their debut studio album in 1993 (Goodbye To The Age of Steam) but eventually lost momentum, failed to find an audience, and all but disbanded in the late 1990s. After languishing for the first few years of the 2000s things began to turn around with the release of their 2007 album The Difference Machine. In 2009, the band hired new vocalist David Longdon and released the critically acclaimed album The Underfall Yard. Soon the band would add guitarist Dave Gregory (formerly of the band XTC), and drummer Nick D’Virgilio of Spock’s Beard.

In 2012, the band released English Electric, Part 1 which was followed by English Electric, Part 2 in March 2013. Both albums were combined into one and four additional songs were added to create English Electric: Full Power, which was released in September 2013. According to the album’s liner notes, “The songs on English Electric tell a number of different stories. The cast of characters includes a keeper of abbeys and a curator of butterflies, tunnel divers, engine drivers and an infamous art forger. There are songs about love and friendship, and stories drawn from family life. Many of the lyrics are set in the English countryside and feature the communities of men and women who have worked on and under the land and helped to shape the landscape.”

Although the album is less than a year old as of this writing, I am quite confident that English Electric: Full Power will go down in the annals of prog history as one of the great albums of the genre, sitting favorably alongside Close to the Edge and Selling England by the Pound. The songs are deeply moving, profoundly incarnational, and (whether intentional or otherwise) working from a deeply Christian worldview. The lyrics are not sci-fi, they are not steeped in traditional English cynicism, they are not philosophical, and they are not Tolkien-influenced. And yet, in many ways, the lyrics are Tolkien-esque in their celebration of ordinary people accomplishing huge things against overwhelming odds. This is the kind of music that J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, or Wendell Berry would have created had any of those men played a Rickenbacker bass or a Mellotron.

Over the next five posts I will explore each one of these great albums in-depth and look for truth, beauty, and goodness in all of them as we begin exploring, as Christians, this great genre called progressive rock music.

1. Bruford, Bill. Bill Bruford: The Autobiography: Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks, and More. London: Jawbone, 2009. pp. 57-58.

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Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>продвижение интернет апродвижение ов и реклама в интернете

big big train, genesis, Grobschnitt, Ozric Tentacles, prog, prog rock, rush, spocks beard, yes