Prog Rock

that is dope

Foxtrot is the best Genesis LP.

supper's ready is a fucking mess. thank god they never did a "side-long" (*not actually a side-long) number again.

sorry you are wrong, it must be lonely in your supper's ready hating bubble.

i can forgive them willow farm or i can forgive them the greengrocer's apostrophe, but not both

"greengrocer's apostrophe" I have no idea what that means but ok?

Idg that either. "Supper's Ready" = "supper is ready", surely?

"Horizon's"

oh, "lover's leap" presumably, which I believe is how it's written out on the jacket.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lover's%20leap

Supper's Ready really does sound like a compilation of castoffs or various sections that didn't fit into other songs (similar to the middle section on The Battle of Epping Forest). Still one of the best sidelongs of the 70s.

Gross apostrophe abuses unlikely among the crymes of these poshos.

The return of the opening motif after the tense 9/8 standoff and Gabriel straining his high register is massive and cathartic.

yes, i meant "horizon's". both "supper's ready" and "lover's leap" are perfectly grammatically correct.

my loathing of "supper's ready" really does come down to "willow farm", which was, i'm told, inserted in there just so people wouldn't think it was another "stagnation" (really? how deaf would you have to be to confuse it with "stagnation"? we're not exactly dealing with an "in the wake of poseidon" situation here, guys).

the older i get the more i come around to it - though damn near every "side-long epic" could stand to have at least six minutes cut from it (probably including even "a plague of lighthouse keepers", which i love and all but i can't remember anything between "presence of the night" and "where is the god that guides my hand?"), and though "willow farm" is very much the musical equivalent of the magical underpant gnomes' "????", it's not _quite_ as compositionally incoherent as all that. it sure as hell isn't close to being as well-constructed as "close to the edge", but very little prog is, and at least genesis could always write a good tune.

the other thing, and this is snobby, but genesis before "selling england by the pound" come off as cheap and underrehearsed, which to be fair they were. for a genre as chop-heavy as prog they sure did sound sloppy - phil collins, who i know for damn sure is an excellent drummer, manages to make 9/8 sound as leaden as pink floyd. it's really odd how much more apocalyptic the "evil jam" (usually dismissed as second-rate wankery) is than "apocalypse in 9/8".

Huh, was it spelled that way on the original vinyl? It's "Horizons" on my digital version and in anything Google turns up for me.

I really enjoy "Supper's Ready", even though I don't think it's in the same class as "Close to the Edge" in composition or performance.

Tbh, if anything offends me on Foxtrot, it's probably the mess they made of Bach's G major cello prelude in "Horizons".

i like willow farm. nothing wrong with a touch of whimsey.

the most offensive thing about foxtrot is that it's not very well produced.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23/prog-rock-pomp-and-circumstance/

Prog rock should get an additional pass because it spawned nothing. It came and then it went. Subsequent generations weren’t saddled with nutty synthesizer solos and odes to each and every one of King Henry’s wives. Prog rock remains a curio, eminently easy to avoid, to disregard.

what I learned from this paragraph, towards the end, is that the author is unaware of metal

this is the only decent sentence in the whole thing: "Prog rock was stoner music, pure and simple."

posted the article because i'm still shocked to see any attention paid to prog

It's definitely true that you never hear Pink Floyd or Rush anymore.

Yeah, you know with Pitchfork's recent best songs of the `70's list, there was zero representation of prog (maybe a single Pink Floyd tune?). If a person had no prior knowledge of `70's popular music and used that list as an accurate representation of the landscape back then, they would just assume that prog had next to significance.

*next to no significance

Have another cup of coffee, Austin. Don't mind if I do.

thank you, austin! personal confession: my favorite music magazine is 'mojo'. prog rock (besides floyd) may as well never have existed according to them

If a person had no prior knowledge of `70's popular music and used that list as an accurate representation of the landscape back then,

Huh, people use Pitchfork this way?

pitchfork kids, you know, they use it as a primary source on all music.

Yeah, you know with Pitchfork's recent best songs of the `70's list, there was zero representation of prog

gonna say that there's a real obvious reason for this as prof is a zero-sum albums game, much as i voted for "roundabout"

er prof = prog

I still don't understand how 'Roundabout' didn't make a best songs of the `70's list.

The tone of these articles seems so weird to me (although, interestingly, I think their basic premise about rock history and canonization stands in contradiction to Amanda Marcotte's). I mean, Yes was just inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. A lot of these bands still get airplay and fill large venues. There are plenty of people, especially musicians, who take the music seriously, even if they don't generally overlap with the set of people who write for Pitchfork or Mojo (or The New Yorker), which is fine; music journalists can write about whatever they want.

qualmsley I'm listening to the magic city and I like it but it's like...new wave? can you bear out the progginess of this record?

You can hear it a little in "Revolution of Hearts pts I&II" and "Clementine".

what sund4r said. plus in the interest of contradicting myself and calling out attention paid to prog, here's stereogum ~

As epic pop-prog moves go, The Magic City remains an unparalleled marvel, 50 gamma-ray soaked minutes of Medieval chords, rampaging keyboards, pedal steel, and Timony finding a greater confidence in her vocals. Veteran hand Mitch Easter engineered City at North Carolina studio Fidelitorium, but these tunes may as well have been cut to tape somewhere in California; there’s a lightness and buoyancy to them that’s light years removed from Pirate Prude, albeit the sound remains quintessentially Helium. From the cosmic country lilt of “Aging Astronauts” to fantastical caper “Devil’s Tear” to “Vibrations”‘ Ren Faire word salad-cum-scale-climbing confection to the syrup-flow transcendence of “Ocean Of Wine,” this was Helium at their most distinctive and their most accessible.

http://www.stereogum.com/1942561/from-helium-to-ex-hex-a-guide-to-the-music-of-mary-timony/franchises/sounding-board/

my favorite music magazine is 'mojo'. prog rock (besides floyd) may as well never have existed according to them

― reggie (qualmsley), Sunday, 25 June 2017 18:03

Wasn't it them who did a big Jethro Tull feature? Uncut and Mojo mix in my memory.

Didn't they do a Jethro Tull feature and get Nick Cave to contribute?

their coverage of jethro tull over the years has been overwhelming

http://www.mojo4music.com/search/jethro+tull

uncut seems to me at least to be operating in the 'let's use YES as a slam' vein. for instance, the review of the new fleet foxes album prioritizes this r. pecknold quote bit at the beginning ~

“I feel,” he wrote, “like 2009, Bitte Orca/Merriweather/Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.”

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/fleet-foxes-crack-reviewed-100543

kudos to uncut though for putting out that GENESIS special edition a few months back. i was shocked when i saw it

Didn't they do a Jethro Tull feature and get Nick Cave to contribute?

― Stevolende, Sunday, 25 June 2017 21:31

Yeah, which resulted in Ian Anderson presenting Cave an award at a Mojo ceremony. Cave was praising Tull's lyrics and it was suggested that he named his second son after the band, though he never said that himself.
He had a funny story about Fripp being one of the weirder people he'd collaborated with in another issue of Mojo or Uncut.

Pretty sure Mojo did a thing on Genesis too.

“I feel,” he wrote, “like 2009, Bitte Orca/Merriweather/Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.”

what does that even mean? that yes used to give away too much free shit?

"Please - I couldn't possibly accept one more guitar melody! It's too much!"

“like 2009, Bitte Orca/Merriweather/Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.”

GAPDYes

d-longstreth had no taste for yes back then

http://www.avclub.com/article/dirty-projectors-david-longstreth-doesnt-think-the-35143?permalink=true

or so he claimed . . . but merriweather totally sounds like an homage to "lightning strikes" on the ladder (which starts out with a bite from the kinks ("phenomenal cat"))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R0vQryCqw0

is that really a Kinks sample or did they sample it from the Melltron? I never really thought of that particular soundbite as a Kinks thing.

all those people (fleet foxes, dirty projectors, animal collection) are fucking charlatan cunts

My fave prog at the moment is southern rock prog of barefoot jerry

Mojo had at least one prog special that I have somewhere. Didn't they cover Patto recently too?

i swear Mojo did an article on Van Der Graaf Generator once

"Pretty sure Mojo did a thing on Genesis too." Yes, they had Gabriel wearing a face stocking on the cover.