Help Me Find Classic Progressive Rock: - Page 2

No, they are not similar. The Mahvishnu Orchestra is absolutely incredible, get both The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire. The Mars Volta is overrated.

Seconded, except for the Camel recommendation but only because I could never get into any of their albums. The rest of these are must-haves by the respective artists.

2nd favorites from each are:
Yes - The Yes Album
Genesis - Foxtrot (I like Lamb Lies Down but it's very very dense and hard to really digest, I've never truly "gotten it" and like most double album epics it could use some editing)
Mahavishnu - Apocalypse!
Gentle Giant - All of their albums IMO have a couple of very strong tracks and a lot of slower stuff that doesn't really turn me on that much. My favorite way to listen to GG is in a compilation form with the hardest rocking tracks from each album, this coming from a guy who strongly believes in the album format.

Mars Volta - Overrated and so horribly recorded that I can hardly listen to them, but I can appreciate a some of their music. "Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt" or whatever the hell that song is supposed to be called contains an all out King Crimson tribute. The mellotron section in the middle is very much like a lot of the improvs and written music by the 69 KC crew. Then comes the Fripp-off guitar lick (played with hardly the finess of Fripp but definitely inspired by Fracture and other 70's KC tunes), and then evolves into the heavily processed sound of pure MV, followed by fiddly jam-band crap that's as unnecessary as the 40 other minutes they've screwed around with on the same album.

Yes'

Close to the Edge
Tales from Topgraphic Oceans

I like TMV, but I concur with the poster who said that Mahavishnu is nothing like them. Not because one is good and one is bad (which is sort of a pointlessly unhelpful statement to make), but because TMV is fundamentally a rock band and Mahavishnu is much more deeply a jazz-rock fusion band.

If you like TMV there are plenty of modern prog bands with a kind of dark edginess that will probably also appeal to you. Check out Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, for one.

TMV is prog rock? Maybe I missed something, but I always assumed they were alt.

I would define prog as something more along the lines of Rush / Dream Theater / some later Iron Maiden.

But yeah.. If Rush hasn't been reccomended.. definitely give them a try.

Personally my favorite "prog rock" band is Symphony X. If you've never heard these guys I highly suggest it.

try "Symphony X - The Odyssey" (album)

Specific songs from other albums you might want to listen to would be-
"Symphony X - Candlelight Fantasia" - Probably their best song
"Symphony X - Lady of the Snow" - Amazing...poetic..just great
"Symphony X - A winter's Dream"
"Symphony X - The Accolade (1 and 2)" - Roxxursoxxoff
"Symphony X - Through the looking glass"
"Symphony X - Evolution"

It's all very good. There's a new album coming out in a couple months that I for one highly anticipate. "The Odyssey" is one of their heavier albums. However they also have an interesting "concept" album entitled "V - The new Mythology Suite" It's basically the story of atlantis, and it's highly entertaining.

I could not agree more with these recs.

You may want to pay a visit over to www.progressiveears.com

Too many good discussions on prog over there and there is always something about the good old days.

In addition to many that were already mentioned I would suggest the following, some more proggy than others but all with that element included:

Santana - Abraxas
Who - Quadrophenia
Pink Floyd (pretty much anything)
King Crimson - Red, In the Wake of Poseidan
Deep Purple - Made in Japan
Traffic - Low Sparks of High Heeled Boys, John Barleycorn
Moody Blues - (almost anything from those days)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Uriah Heep - best of
Gentle Giant - (most anything, an acquired taste though so be patient)
ELP - Brain Salad Surgery
Return to Forever - Romantic Warrior
Mike Oldfield - Amarok, tubular Bells
Alan Parsons Project - Turn of a Friendly Card, I Robot
Gong - You
Saga - Worlds Apart
Brand X - Masque
Crack the Sky - Live Sky
Renaissance - Sheherazade
Happy the Man - Live
UK - UK
Frank Zappa - Apostrophe, Overnight Sensation
Focus - Focus 3

Tha is a good list from BobMcN though a better site might be Progarchives. New reviews of old and new stuff added daily and even a good video repository.

A good start to old prog should perhaps include The Nice.

Andy80F

If you like early Genesis, Steve Hackett stuff is sweet. Toyko Tapes Live

Steve Hackett- Firth of Fifth guitar solo
YouTube - Steve Hackett - The Steppes

The Progrock link above is an excellent site to experiment with the different sounds of progressive rock.

This thread is over 3 years old... but then again classic progressive rock hasn't really changed since then.

Well the classic stuff hasn't changed, except that a lot of the old geezers are coming back on tour again

But I beg to differ on the new stuff. There seems to be some very good things coming out in the last 2-3 years. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence, which is a good thing because what's playing on the radio is such utter computer guided middle of the road crap. Much of it is from overseas, so it doesn't get the promotion that you might otherwise hear over here in the States. You've got to keep your ears to the prog-related forums.

It's all still basically Indie to some extent, but much good music is.

You might want to try The Doors album, and start with "The End"
.

I'm with Justin on this one. In our devotion to the ProgRock canon, we've forgotten a heap of mainstream or 'otherwise' bands that were clearly progressive and experimental at one point.

Like The Velvet Underground, for instance. Go for TVU + Nico and White Light White Heat if you want some proto-punk noise. Lou said that they were trying to do for rock what Ornette and Company had done for jazz. 'Can't get no more prog than that. Go for the delightfully quiet The Velvet Underground for very proggy acoustic riffs.

I haven't seen anybody mention Roxy Music yet. I might have missed it, but I did look.

Last, offered with a bit of contemptuous defiance, ELO's early albums, Eldorado among them, are quite progressive and remain pop goldmines. I'm no great advocate of "The Battle of Marston Moor," but then it takes all kinds, and Levellers must have their early-70s prog-pop too.

**It's a Fact!**: Son of Sergei Starostin, who was Russia's foremost authority on comparative linguistics, Georgiy Starostin "has worked at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where he also teaches, as well as serves as head of the Department of Far Eastern Philology at the same institution; specializing in Dravidian, general Nostratic, Sino-Tibetan (mainly Chinese), Yenisseian, and Khoisan studies." More to the point, George Starostin created the fabulously opinionated, incomplete, but voluminous source of 60s, 70s, & 80s online rock criticism, Only Solitaire. Georgie is like the cool but infuriating older brother you thought was god in 1979: his site is a remarkable goto guide for all things classic rock. You may vehemently disagree and curse his foolishness to the high heavens, but you never walk away from Only Solitaire without having learned something new.

From the Intro Overview to ELO: Electric Light Orchestra is certainly the world's readiest candidate for 'Most Grossly Misinterpreted And Most Unjustly Despised' band of the past thirty years. And that's a fact, baby. I can't even say that this happened because of the world not being properly acquainted with ELO - most of their hit singles that used to 'pollute' radio waves for years on end were pretty typical of their material, and a normal 'greatest hits compilation' would be able to give any listener a pretty adequate, if certainly incomplete, picture of the band's identity. But somehow, based essentially on the critical disillusionment about the band, their image has been dirtied up so much throughout the last decade that nowadays, ELO often stands for the ultimate example of 'cheesy boring sappy crappy pap' or something like that. It might be possible that this also has a lot to do with obvious gaffes like Xanadu or that idiotic parody on the band, Electric Light Orchestra Part Two, that have been dicking around for a large part of the Nineties, but let's face it with dignity - the world actually listened to 'Evil Woman', 'Telephone Line', 'Sweet Talkin' Woman', and other songs of their type, and intentionally turned away from them.

Which was a dreadful and unforgivable mistake. With all sincerity I state the following: Electric Light Orchestra are, in fact, one of the best, most creative, inventive and productive bands of the Seventies, a band of truly giant stature and nearly limitless potential; no other band in the Seventies could put out excellent records with a minimal amount of filler as consistently as ELO did since about 1973, and even in the Eighties they managed not to suck entirely.