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Acceptable face of prog
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Lugia
970 posts

Re: Acceptable face of prog
Jan 19, 2004, 18:50
Hm...Genesis thru "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" is fairly acceptable, I think. It was after Gabriel's departure and their turn to the 'dark side' of AOR pop that their name became a four-letter word, IMHO.

Van de Graaf Generator has to go in here, especially for "H to He..."

Gong, natch. The PHP Trilogy still stands as a prog masterpiece against the bore-nality of the better-known stuff.

Soft Machine, if only on the strength of "3" alone.

An early interstice between psychedelia and prog that's interesting is Egg, with the other Dave Stewart.

And of course, Hatfield and the North and the aforementioned National Health.

Most of the lesser-known Italian scene turned out stuff that's worth listening to. I also seem to remember a band that was possibly a French/Italian hybrid called Le Orme that could whip out some very complex, dense stuff.

Too bad you can't quite say the same about the Germans. The only quasi-acceptable stuff out of there that comes immediately to mind is Novalis, and even they have some super-embarrasing moments.

And one thing that deserves revisiting is Focus. Their "Moving Waves" album, despite the presence of the pop single "Hocus Pocus", contains a real side-long gem in "Eruption". True, they could turn out some junk...but when they were on, they were quite on, indeed.
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