Okay, I guess we all are musicians who can enjoy music with an edge, music that showcases the skill of the players. So let's all share our favorite prog rock albums.
In random order.
1. Pink Floyd "Dark side of the moon"
Obvious one, I know but I love it, one of the very few albums I can listen in full without the notion to skip a track. David Gilmour is an awesome player but don't forget Rick Wright, nothing less but sublime keyboard passages and unusual chords, such as the one in "Breathe" where they modulate from G to E minor that chord played in between, a very weird but cool chord.
2. Genesis "Selling england by the pound"
In my opinion the ultimate expression of Genesis during the Peter Gabriel era, killer songs like "Dancing with the moonlit knight", "I know what I like", "Firth of fifth" and of course "Cinema show" I recently found out that Mike Rutherford has a really strange tuning on his Rickenbacker electric twelve string (from low to high: F#F#-AA-DD-F#F#-F#F#-F#F#) which explains the droning etherial quality of his rythm work. I also love Steve Hackett's solos on this record, he's an amazing player who really should be there with the greats.
3. Focus "Moving waves"
With Focus it's really the jazz element that does it for me. "Eruption" is no matter how you put it, a Jazz song, the long solos over a repeated theme and the the whole feel is just so jazzy. But Keyboard player Thijs Van Leer also comes from the Dutch cabaret and that also plays a BIG role in the resulting sound on this album, and was the calling card of Focus, the influence of Dutch cabaret masters like Louis Davis and Wim Sonneveld was uniquely theirs.
4. Genesis "A trick of the tail"
If "Selling England by the pound" was the ultimate Gabriel fronted Genesis album then this must be the ultimate Phil Collins fronted Genesis album. Again it has killer tracks employing that strange tuning of Rutherford's on tunes like "Squonk" and "Dance on a volcano" but you can also hear how easy it was for the musicians to come up with it. The spontainity is evident on all tracks and you could amost imagine them jamming and coming up with the riff to "Squonk" and going "Blimey, that sounds good, can you play it again?"
5. Rush "Exit stage left"
Let's be honest, Rush is the ultimate power trio. And when I first heard their music I went "no way, there's gotta be more people on stage with them if they wanna perform those songs live." I was wrong this album corrected me. And let's be honest Rush's music sounds so much better live.
