Welcome again my pals…
With the finest progressive rock albums, you have been on fairly protected floor judging the guide (really the file) by its cowl. As you’d most likely hope, with somebody behind so many such covers, the artist Roger Dean has an excellent tackle how the entire progressive rock album bundle – the music, the brand, the futuristic icescape on the sleeve – all fitted collectively.
In a discipline so typically criticised for extra, Roger sees the providing extra by way of generosity. “What we have been doing was making an built-in and holistic present,” he instructed me in 2019. “The LP cowl was a improbable present to provide and obtain. If an album got here with a plastic toy it was seen as an necessary icon.”
On this increase time for the music enterprise, the bundle, and the music inside it expanded – and that is the place our newest Final File Assortment takes its place. The 200 Biggest Progressive Rock Albums…Ranked! is stuffed with new improvements, and widened horizons. Discovering themselves missing the charisma and conventional magnificence and showmanship of a Mick Jagger, a progressive musician may extra comfortably retreat behind his futuristic art work, emblem, or banks of keyboards, the higher to focus on growing the music.
This music now accommodated an enormous new vary of influences past rock’s conventional base in rhythm and blues. Literary inspirations. Classical motifs. Conceits just like the Genesis double The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Whereas a listener’s thoughts wandered into the improbable panorama of a Hipgnosis or Roger Dean sleeve (bonus Roger reality: he was at artwork faculty with the Hipgnosis guys and shared a flat with Syd Barrett), musicians stretched themselves into unusual new shapes past the map of conventional songs. You interact with a progressive album much less like a file and extra like a guide: ready for a journey and anticipating the sudden. No surprise it was a style that thrived on the college circuit.
“It was almost all the time good enjoyable,” Roger went on to inform me, nonetheless having fun with his recollections of this expansive interval for music. “There hadn’t been a theatrical stage earlier than. There have been plenty of firsts.”
Benefit from the journal. It’s in outlets now. Or you may get yours from us right here.
John Robinson, Editor
