Best album with only a few tracks? (6 max)

Best album with only a few tracks? (6 max)

the guy on the right is david bowie

Bucket's Pike series are usually short and steady

bump

Prog in all seriousness isn't that good.

Fuck off, Christgau.

not best but good right?

>The birth of prog can be traced to the Beatles' 1967 masterpiece "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club". The album's swirling, colorful textures and abstract themes proved that rock-and-roll could be serious art, not merely loud, amelodic racket for teenagers to dance to. With that, the gateway for prog was opened.

>Aside from the proto-metal sounds of Hendrix and Cream, prog added disparate influences from every corner--jazz, folk, classical, and more. Unlike conventional rock, prog rarely got into love and sex, instead immersing the listener in the surreal and arcane, places where giant hogweeds had their revenge, man versus technology, wars between species of trees.

>The rock-and-roll single as defined in the 1950s was under 3:00 in length, but prog tracks could number 10+ minutes in length, sometimes 20, often divided into subsections and passages with odd time signatures. Then there was the visual aesthetic. If, in its early days, rock was the tough kid at school in a leather jacket, smoking in the bathroom, prog transformed that kid into a nerdy math whiz who was flourishing in Drama Club. So take the tight trousers of Robert Plant, the open shirt of Roger Daltrey, and replace them with the rental costumes for a Renaissance festival. Add capes and codpieces. Or in the case of Peter Gabriel, the original singer of Genesis, bat wings.

>posts Rush
>not Permanent Waves

Please reconsider

>A certain subset of young males in the 1970s, the type included to wear wool coats and read "Hadon of Ancient Opar", found this combination irresistible. Prog was a genre centered on excess; Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson played smoking flute solos — while balancing on one leg. Carl Palmer played a stainless steel drum set — outfitted with electronics — that weighed 21 / 2 tons. Not to be outdone, Keith Emerson would take a solo turn at the piano, which seemed rather sedate until it began to lift and spin upside down, with Emerson still pounding away.

>Tacky? It may well have been, but prog musicians were typically highly skilled at their instruments as well, being able to shift from balls-to-the-wall rock and roll to folk to jazz effortlessly. Lengthy solos were an essence, not simply lead guitar, but bass and drum solos could also drone on miles and forever. At its height, prog sold millions of records and bands played to packed arenas.

>Not surprisingly, rock journalists sharpened their knives for prog. They said it was silly, bloated, self-indulgent, that it took all the raw edge and simplicity out of rock and turned it into a caricature of JRR Tolkien meets your local Renaissance fair. One Rolling Stone Magazine critic wrote "Most progressive rock has a drastically limited appeal, its initial glitter proving in the long run to be more technical bravado, and its lyrics some of the emptiest ‘poetry’ ever."

less than 6

>Conventional wisdom holds that punk rock swept in like an earthquake in the late 1970s and sent the bloated edifice of prog tumbling into the abyss. The truth is more complicated than that. Quite a few prog bands simply failed to adapt to the changing times and disbanded or else receded to the county fair/nostalgia circuit. Others such as Yes, Rush, and King Crimson bravely fought punk rock by adopting new sounds and styles. Post-1976 Genesis got tighter, simpler, and made shorter, more radio-friendly songs.

>Prog bands tried to fit into the brave new world of the Reagan years. They shot MTV videos and traded their padded silk robes for mullets and skinny New Wave ties. Yes rebounded back to the charts in 1983 with the slicker and more pop-flavored "Owner of a Lonely Heart", the title track of which shot to #1 on the Billboard Singles chart. The band even won a Grammy for the first time. Old prog fans were less than impressed, sometimes feeling that bands had abandoned them.

Echoes

I think you mean Meddle?

...

>So how does the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame explain its near absence of prog? Lauren Onkey, vice president of educational and public programs, says that prog was not well-liked by critics in the 1970s however popular it may have been. "I think for a lot of critics, it was too pretentious, even anti-rock in a way. It was almost like 'Well, if you feel the need to progress past rock, then it's not rock at all.'" Others thought prog was straying too far past rock's origins, possibly even adding an element of racial stereotyping like the old prejudice that European music was about melody and intellect while African/African-American music was about rhythm and physicality.

>The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not as cut-and-dried as the various professional sports halls of fame. For example, if an NFL quarterback accumulates high enough career stats, he's a first ballot hall of famer. But many popular musicians are not in the R&R HOF no matter how big they were. Kiss for instance sold 100 million albums yet are conspicuously absent.

My dad played in various local bands in the 70s-80s and he said prog was a big influence on a lot of young musicians back then. A lot of those guys had loads of chops.

The thing you must realize is that most "professional" music critics were/are Bohemian hipsters who didn't even play music themselves. Christgau has never written a song or picked up an instrument while Lester Bangs was a frustrated failed musician.

Also nominating Dopesmoker

Animals, Wish You Were Here, and Atom Heart Mother are 5 tracks long.

Also Meddle is six tracks long

It always seemed to me that prog bands were trying to fill the demographic niche jazz had occupied in the 50s-60s, but unlike jazz, people couldn't take them seriously because too cartoony/campy for their own good.

Meddle is fine, the criteria was a maximum of 6 tracks, not less than

Hemispheres is flawless fuck off

>Not 2112

The Concept [Cotillion, 1978]

While pioneering funk groups like Funkadelic and the Commodores, manned by veteran musicians, clearly evolved out of existing black-music formats, the younger ones often resemble third-generation rock groups in concept and spirit. Unless you prefer Kansas to the J.B.'s, this is not a compliment; profound thoughts like "Now will always be forever" might well grace the back of a Starcastle album. This is a Starcastle kind of band, too, right down to its general derivativeness and pretensions to content. But it doesn't make Starcastle music. Despite moderate tempos, the first side of the band's third and best LP chugs by smartly without once pausing to pose--it's fun, and it's interesting, too. Lesson: if the play of rhythms, textures, studio tricks, and vocal techniques constitutes the real content of your music, black is as beautiful as ever. B

desu Starcastle were pretty shitty as were most American prog bands

Yeah, that's what I meant. Just mentioned it with the replies because other people had already said it.

itcotck

...

Mah boi.

Additionally, Tales from Topographic Oceans, Wish You Were Here and Fear of a Blank Planet,

Citation needed