The 2024 12 - Part 1: 70’s Prog Gems
In 2023 I bought about 175 records. Come 2024, with storage space tight, a growing one-year old, and a cross-country move on the horizon, a radical shift was self-evident. “Twelve records for the year,” I looked up from the Excel spreadsheet detailing my excesses down to the penny and exclaimed to my wife. “One record a month, what do you think about that?” The initial response was deeply skeptical - “don’t make promises you can’t keep.” But DJ Bex loved the sound of a good challenge (even with it being on me) and warmed up to the idea after hearing my enthusiasm.
It’s been a fascinating and rewarding experience. With each purchase having so much weight on it, I found myself sitting, waiting, and really thinking about each record. How much does this mean to me? Do I really need it? Will it make me happy?
This is the first in a series of posts about my “2024 12”, the twelve extra special records that left a mark on this year. Today’s LP’s are both Progressive Rock albums from the 70’s which have melodies and songs that have been stuck in my head for years, but because these albums were harder to find or relatively expensive to pick up, they waited for years on my Wantlist. Check out the first two of my 2024 12…
Cult Classics Of 70’s Prog
666 by Aphrodite’s Child (1972). This is the culminatory (and financially disastorous project) of Greek savant Vangelis’s prog and pop rock outfit. Released after the band had already disbanded, this wild, ambitious, and provocative experiment captured my attention probably about 15 years as I was on a deep dive for all things Prog, especially from Europe as I was setting to make that continent my home. The loglines for 666 immediately captured my attention: A Greek concept album about a circus show performing a flamboyant take on the New Testament’s cryptic apocalypse prophecy - meanwhile the actual apocalypse has commenced outside the circus tent only for the fantasy and the reality of brimstone to finally merge as one. Like what?!
Absurdity and bombast aside, the album delivers with cuts that are moody but catchy, wildly diverse in genre but somehow congruent in their totality. Babylon sinks a hook in immediately with its galloping bass line, horn and audience overdubs reminiscent of The Beatles’s George Martin, and a kind of Abba-like pop sensibility. You get a hypnotic piano ballad on Loud, Loud, Loud, rolling, fuzzed out guitar soloing on The Four Horsemen, Jethro Tull-esque jazzy jamming on tracks like The Lamb and Battle Of The Locusts, and religious sounding Greecian interlude tracks like The Seventh Seal and Seven Bowls. The jewel to me is Aegian Sea - part meditative sound bath and part soulful guitar solo as if Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played through a heat stroke somewhere drifting between Crete and Rhodes. And that’s all just Sides A & B. Side C amps all that up and audaciously puts a female orgasm to mantric percussion on ∞ (credit to Irene Papas a returning collaborator in Vangelis’s career). Side D is dominated by the 19-minute All The Seats Were Occupied which kind of melts into a collage of sounds and jams from the rest of the album coming together in a sort of chaos that implies reality imploding on itself.
While it’s definitely not easy listening or an album to casually pull off the shelf, it manages to be catchy and varied and bold and fun without being pretentious or feeling impenetrable unlike so many other Prog albums where you can’t help but feel like the band is just showing off.
Having listened to this a ton digitally, I consider myself lucky to have come across a practially mint copy from a 1975 run while at a vinyl market fair in Dana Point, California. I’ve also just now learned this was repressed just this year but new copies just about the same $50 I spent getting a vintage copy.
It’ll All Work Out In Boomland by T2 (1970). This is simply a jawdropping feat of guitar and rhythm gymnastics that balances stunning musical virtuosity with airy and stirring British pop/rock melodies in the vein of Cream and The Moody Blues. I think I originally discovered this album around the same time as 666 above, probably digging down those European Prog rabbit holes. This album was essentially a one-and-done affair with the original group sadly dissolving soon after its release. That backstory, its strong reputation, and structure of three 6-8 minute songs on Side A and a single 20-plus minute epic on B made the album enigmatic enough for me to check it out in the first place.
I bought this record on Discogs after - like so many times in the past years - melodies from this album powerfully resurfaced in my consciousness for no explainable reasons. An absolute treasure that captures its time so well, it feels like a worn carnival ride jolting you with twists and turns derived by some kind of mix between the blues-born psychedelic experimentations of the 60’s and the larger-than-life excesses of the 70’s. My copy is a 2010 reissue that was reasonably priced under $30, versus the original press copies selling in the hundreds.
More To Come
That’s two records down and ten to go… Next time I’ll cover a couple of audiophile pressings (my first)!
