Top 10 Progressive Rock albums.

[Johnny Vinyl]

ProgArchives lists these in order as their choices for the top prog albums - based on member input and their own algorithm.

1. Yes - Close To The Edge
2. Genesis - Selling England By The Pound
3. Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
4. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
5. King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
6. Genesis - Foxtrot
7. Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
8. King Crimson - Red
9. Pink Floyd - Animals
10. Van Der Graaf Generator - Godbluff

There is no doubt these are great albums, but the list seems to me to be too predictable. I think airplay, accessibility and sales were the driving forces behind the list.

Do you have an album that should be in that Top 10 list?

[lasercd]

Too many. The Internet would explode if I started...

[JCOConnell]

Jethro Tull - Aqualung

[Johnny Vinyl]

Too many. The Internet would explode if I started...

Blow it up!

[Joe Pittman]

I think I have about 100 Progressive Rock albums in my top 10.

[Alrainbow]

ProgArchives lists these in order as their choices for the top prog albums - based on member input and their own algorithm.

1. Yes - Close To The Edge
2. Genesis - Selling England By The Pound
3. Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
4. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
5. King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King
6. Genesis - Foxtrot
7. Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
8. King Crimson - Red
9. Pink Floyd - Animals
10. Van Der Graaf Generator - Godbluff

There is no doubt these are great albums, but the list seems to me to be too predictable. I think airplay, accessibility and sales were the driving forces behind the list.

Do you have an album that should be in that Top 10 list?

Not picking and I guess what I thought is progressive rock is not on there. I was thinking more like Santana , zzz top , all man brothers.
Am I wrong I know what I like but never really got the genre thing right

[Bill Hart]

I'd like to relate a story. There was an important french cook book authored in the 1970's by Richard Olney called "Simple French Food." The concept (and this coincided with so-called nouvelle cuisine and the stuff Alice Waters was doing in San Francisco) was to go back to the basics, using very high quality, fresh, local ingredients of the "real food" that real people ate. Anyway, the introduction of the book --lengthy- extolled the virtues of a proper cassoulet which was not really something on fancy French restaurant menus in the 1960's. It was peasant food, "comfort" food, and Olney lavished great attention on the virtues of cassoulet as part of this "new" look at French food, and why it was so important as an example of the kind of food he was "about." He then ended the introduction by saying that he wasn't going to provide a recipe for cassoulet in the book, because of regional variations, access to local ingredients of the type found in France and that it was all basically too complicated anyway.
That's how I feel sometimes when somebody raises a question about "progressive" music. I'm not even sure what it means. I think it is an after the fact label used as an umbrella for a lot of stuff that did not fit neatly into one category or genre. The heavy keyboard, Mellotron, synth stuff- ala Yes, ELP, really seemed to fall out of fashion pretty quickly in the UK and the States by the mid-'70s. There's a ton of more obscure stuff in that vein that is interesting, and I'm still discovering. But there's also a lot of other music that falls under the umbrella that isn't in this vein, and that's where it really depends on taste, I think. I've been mining some diverse fields in this area, and think I've barely scratched the surface. Is the classic early line up of Fairport Convention "progressive" ("What We Did";"Unhalf";"Liege")? If so, I'd vote for all three. What about Roy Harper's "Stormcock"? To me, a desert island record. And those are just "folk" oriented if you had to put a label on them. In that same vein, but extremely outre, is an album Ken turned me onto: Comus: First Utterance. It seems very odd until you really listen to it, and then it is something you come back to; I guess it is obscure (Ken?) and not easy to find without paying a price or buying a reissue.
I never really understood why Tull was considered "progressive" but since Anderson himself uses the term, who am I to argue? To me, their best record is "Stand Up," a mix of minstrel style ballads with heavy rock.
I've plumbed a lot of the Vertigo catalog and much of it fits into the "prog" label, from the keyboard centric stuff, like Gracious! to the wonderful guitar work of Ollie Halsall in Patto. Great hooks, good singing. Hell even that Lucifer's Friend album I recently exhumed is "progressive" in a heavy metal way.
I don't know if you can even use "genre defining" as a test (forget about sales and popularity, a lot of the coolest stuff is obscure), but who cut new ground? That's how I'd aim. Maybe Ken can help by looking at it that way....
PS: or if didn't cut new ground, was just superbly played.

[lasercd]

Edward Macan wrote a very good book called Rocking The Classics that I recommend highly. A bit clinically dry but overall a very good read:

https://www.amazon.com/Rocking-Classics-English-Progressive-Counterculture/dp/0195098889

He pointed out the differentiation between progressive rock and Progressive rock. Small "p" progressive rock essentially embodied forward thinking music that was an outgrowth of psychedelic rock. Capital "P" progressive rock was a more clearly defined genre whose designation was retrospective in nature. In the late 60s/early 70s there was no such thing as Progressive rock. Bands experimented with long form compositions, odd time signatures, unusual instrumentation, "concept albums" and forward thinking production techniques. Sure bands that Al and Bill mentioned would be considered progressive rock but not Progressive rock per se. That designation came a bit later when the media assigned a category to pretty much any band that that explored non-commercial forms of rock music.

Its very easy to look backwards now and compartmentalize these bands. Back then it was just rock.

Then The Ramones came along and fucked everything up. The End. 😀

[Bill Hart]

The "big" P, little 'p' distinction is helpful, if only to remove some of the fog around why so much stuff is now labelled "[p]rogressive." I just bought a copy of that book. What's crazy is, the Kindle e-version is, like 34 bucks, where a conventional print copy is cheap. Usually, it is the other way around....