Fifty Greatest Prog Records Ever- Part I

Ok, due to an increasing demand that I actually say what it is I like, I have decided to do a list of 50 albums chosen for their pleasing of the most important audience in the world- me. This has nothing to do with album sales, or obscurity, or critical standing (as if...) or any political bullshit or anything else than what albums I really, really think are amazing and spectacular and that everyone here needs to at least listen to once. Some may find this to be a conservative list; there are many records here that are pretty well known, and I make no apologies for liking things because I like them, and not because I bought some record at a yard sale in Skokie, Illinois in 1977 right when the Nazis were marching through town or whatever else. Also...what is below is in no particular order. I thought about doing that, but to put any of these records above the others is just an exercise in futility- if an album is particularly dear to me, you'll know it from the capsule description provided, trust me. But all of these albums are amazing, and I encourage you to kick the Bad Prog habit for just a little while and...dig on the best Rock music ever made, my brothers. - TKR

Aphrodite’s Child- 666, 1972 Absolutely overwhelming musical masterpiece from soon-to-be-pussy New Age loser Vangelis, who, at this point, was still a musical genius and clearly on many, many drugs. I don’t even know where to start with the superlatives for this album; epic in scope, pop-friendly and psychedelic at the same time (“The Four Horseman”) while also capable of a madness-wassail euphoric avant-garde (“Infinity”), this could be the single most ambitious and perfect achievement of the classic Prog age. Oh yeah, it’s also all about the Book of Revelation, and features a glimpse of Armageddon so convincing you can only hope the real thing turns out to be this gorgeously poetic- The sun was black/ the moon was red/ the stars were falling/ the Earth was trembling/ And then a crowd impossible to number/ Dressed in white/ carrying palms shouted amid the hotless sun/ the lightless moon/ the windless earth/ the colourless sky.. They'll no more suffer from hunger/ they'll no more suffer from thirst. Oh, bliss...god destroy this putrid, people-virused world now if only for a moment of pure poetry like that to be made real...

If you’ve never heard this record, seriously- put the rest of your life on hold before you do ANYTHING other than listen to it. With headphones. And drugs.

Comus- First Utterance, 1971 Undoubtedly the strangest non-Zeuhl album to make this list, these ultra-obscure British Folk Proggers have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in recent years, as the Internets have made this bizarre album more available to people willing to entertain the idea of listening to a man deliberately sing in a way meant to sound like one of a series of forest animals. No, seriously. The ethereal female vocals and intricate acoustic musicianship make this more approachable, but there is no question that Comus will scare your girlfriend, and perhaps make her leave you for that douche bag at the coffee shop who spins “lounge” music on the weekends at that bar with all the blue drinks and “Asian Fusion” noodle appetizers on the menu. Good riddance.

Tangerine Dream- Atem, 1973 Before they turned into complete fucking faggots with all of that “New Age” shit they cranked out for aging hippies to gum wheat grass to and have lots of icky old-hippie Tantric sex with grey pubic hair and tie-dyed cockrings flying all over the place, it is a fact of history that TD was the single most important Electronic music band ever. People made Electronic music before, sure; but these were serious compositions designed for one purpose: the massive ingestion of every conceivable pill, potion, powder, plant, root and elixir that was available in the free-form pharmacopeia that was the Krautrock scene of the early 1970’s. And the trip was never more perfect, in The Curator’s opine, than this moody and severe masterpiece that has as many bongos on it as synthesizers. This is a feast for Mellotron fans, and Edgar Froese puts that beloved and benighted instrument to astonishingly imaginative use on the epic (20 minute) title track and elsewhere on the album as well. Sparse and unnerving, this is the best of the “Kosmische” albums that I know of, with one possible exception (see below).

Popol Vuh- In Den Garten Pharaos, 1971 Not only one of the most gorgeous album sleeves of all times, but a feast of Acid Psych as well; so sparse that at times it’s almost not there, then back with a ghostly, sepulchral quivering organ sound from somewhere between here and wherever spirits go when they die- the music of Florian Fricke on this album is a near-perfect evocation of German Expressionism from a lifetime before, a canvas of Kokoschka’s or a set design from Murnau, spectral, ambient, other-worldly...gorgeous. This album makes me want to make love, baby. The second track- “Vuh”- is truly surreal, the plangent tones of the cymbals heralding the longest, purest and most luxuriant organ drone you’ll ever hear. The Curator loves this album very dearly, and suggests that even if you don’t like things Germans might listen to before they smoke opium and fall into huge, languorous piles of co-mingling bodies, irrespective of sex and embracing decadence in all its many glorious forms, you might like this album just fine. If nothing else...the 40-minute feast of cunnilingus “Vuh” will inspire you to engage upon will at last satisfy a Proggist’s girlfriend, and she might even stop complaining when you play your Magma from now on. Especially if you’re a real man about things, and take a trip ‘round the sumptuous corner of flesh and hips for the true connoisseur’s repast...

The Can- Monster Movie (1969), Tago Mago (1971) and Ege Bamyasi (1972) Why would you ever speak to anyone who doesn’t like The Can? Why suffer the presence and stench of someone so hopelessly marooned from all sense of artistic beauty and the gloriously liberated mind that they would pull that Hipster shit of being too “cool” for a band that doesn’t wear skinny jeans and rip off Joy Division? The kind of superfluous untermenschen who think rock “came back” with The Strokes aren’t going to “get” The Can, and that’s why I spit on their shadows and curse their names to Satan when they pass me on the street and wait for the day when total anarchy breaks out in an abruptly Mad Max society so that I can feed my wolves with sausages made from their intestines. (You better fucking believe I’m gonna have wolves in this bitch, motherfucker. Go on- come try and get my canned food stockpile and water reserves when I’ve got fucking WOLVES guarding the shit, you Indie Rock listening pack of starving pricks!) Seriously, what could you possibly have against these Titans of Krautrock who made- count ‘em- THREE fucking absolute masterpieces of Krautrock in a three-year span with two different singers, never really missing a beat, and then moving on to make an album many fans think is their absolute best- though I still think Future Days is a tad overrated. But whatever. The point it this: young people might be reading this blog, and perhaps you’ve never heard The Can. Well, now you know who they are, so put away the bullshit and give a listen to what seriously might be the best band of the entire Prog era. Just maybe. Groove. Chill. Listen to Jaki lay down those drum beats with the precision of a German funk machine. GET YOUR FUCKING FREAK ON, GODDAMMIT! Rock out and have violent sex with older men- especially in their late 30’s, especially who know a lot about really good music and know what to fucking do when a Popol Vuh album comes on (see above). All that stuff. Yeah, especially that last part...

Magma- Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh, 1973 When it was released, MDK was, quite possibly, the most original and unique album ever made in the history of rock until that point. Surely, the serious music press must have been startled to insensate blathering trying to explain this sinister triumph of one crazed genius and his vision of planetary extinction in the same year that utterly contemptible shit like 10cc and Little Feat dominated the charts. Nothing before it- not even Magma’s first two records- could have even remotely prepared the listener for the full flowering of Christian Vander’s insane Science Fiction genius, with its staggering repetition, brutally rebarbative vocals sung in a made-up language choked with umlauts and guttural phrasing, punishing, growling bass from the great Jannick Top and a brass section so oppressive and Fascistic that even Wagner and Holst must bow to the mighty cruelty that is Magma’s magnum opus. It is pointless to try to “describe” Zeuhl music, especially a work of pure Satanic genius like this; but if you can deal with this mesmerizingly grueling and lacerating music, your life will never be the same after Magma, and most of what you had heretofore listened to will fade to utter insignificance; MDK is an act of pure musical aggression, and completely eradicates all other inferior life forms and genres it encounters. One of the greatest pieces of music of the 20^th Century.

Magma- Kohntarkosz, 1974 More melodic and less purely an act of aural terrorism as MDK was, Kohntarkosz is, still, not for the faint of heart and another album that will scare children, dogs and women in equal measure. The keyboard work here of Gerard Bikialo is astonishing; listen to the first part of the suite a few times, and you will hear a series of minor chords driving the entirety of the piece forward and downward at the same time, and then everything gradually recovering as the organ switches to very powerful and decisive major chords; this is serious music from incredible musicians, and our Kobaian-singing Prog-cultist lads are so much more interesting than most of the pap on the radio from that era that any band that dare not honor Magma deserves nothing but death- immediate, unremitting and with no hope of appeal or succor. In many ways a more satisfying listen than the former masterpiece, Vander’s repetitive drone reaches new and more terrifying heights, and Top’s bass is, again, innovative and cruel; completely invalidates most artists’ inconsequential and utterly trivial work.

Black Widow- Sacrifice, 1970 Long-time readers of The Curator’s work will realize his deep affinity for the Dark Prince of The Underworld, Lord Satan, and in general his love of anything Occult, Black Magickal, or made by Hammer film studios. And there’s lots of quality Satanic product out there, surely, but none of it is as flat-out fun as Black Widow’s near-perfect 1970 release, containing what might be the most infectiously evil fun-time-doom-bye-ah sing along ever, the ludicrously catchy “Come to the Sabbat” (“SATAN’S THERE!!!”). That may be their most famous song, but there is one catchy track on this album after another, and everything- everything- from the gorgeous sleeve art to the incredibly deft and deep production to the standard of all the musicianship on the album- there’s not one bad performer here- is flat-out fucking spot-on perfect and tremendously enjoyable. A great record by a band with a legendary stage show, featuring fire, demon heads, more fire, big-ass English swords and cups of blood, again more fire, full-frontal nudity and a fucking sacrifice to the fucking Devil of said super-hot naked English chick- man, if you can honestly say you could ever want more from a rock n’ roll show, you are one impossible to please motherfucker, is all I’m going to say. Absolutely required for any serious Prog and Psych music head. One of my favorite albums of all-time.

Hawkwind- Space Ritual, 1973 There has always been a controversy as to whether live albums “count”, and should be included on lists like this. Well, it’s my list, and I’ll put whatever the hell I want on it, and to ignore what is, without question, the greatest fucking head trip in the history of Prog just because it’s “live” is fucking stupid. An enormous record- almost two hours long on the full-feature CD release- I simply defy you to not want to do drugs at some point while listening to the endless spacey grooves these guys lay down, replete with bad space poetry and epic track lengths that seem like they don’t care how long it takes to get to the cold corner of the Universe where we’re all headed- although there are no doubt plenty of friendly space drugs waiting at that place, which everyone will no doubt see the wisdom of inhaling in meta-globulous, insanely vast space quantities. If Aleister Crowley and Carl Sagan somehow managed to fuck and procreate a Star Child of an album, Space Ritual would be that cosmic trip demon. Absolutely mandatory in opium dens, coolie pits and languorous hippie brothels bursting with silk-skinned teenage girls with flower-painted bosoms and angelic and lustfully-scented adolescent pudenda...and of course in your ITunes collection as well, space cadet.

Gunter Schikert- Uberfallig, 1979 Fans of Pinhas or Achim Reichel should be aware that there was another echoplex-crazed Euro-guitarist in the 70’s, and he made an album that was the single greatest challenge I’ve had in tracking down music since I lost the majority of my life to the endless study of Progressive Rock some time ago. I mean, seriously- this is one fucking elusive album, man. The genius record collector Spacefreak (who I am proud to say reads this blog- one of the greatest achievements in my life, I must admit) posted it a couple of years ago at the absolutely indispensable Mutant Sounds, but the link was down for a while and I honestly don’t know if it’s still there of not. Schikert made several albums of Electro-weirdness and all of his work is interesting, even the curiously reviled Somnambul from 1995 (too “modern” for the uber-pissy Prog Snobs of PRIC, I wonder?). But this is the only one I’d say you really must listen to before you die, though I’d also say once you go down this road and start listening to music that is as difficult, polarizing and hated as Electro-Prog, you should maybe consider how much “happiness” means to you (or pussy, for that matter) and whether you are willing to trade it for a more perfect knowledge of the Universe and the own undiscovered country sitting unexplored behind your eyes. Trip, flip and meditate, baby.

King Crimson- Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, 1973 I’ve been listening to this album- and all it’s many live permutations collected on live concert recordings of variations of the material- for over 30 years and have never grown tired of it. Definitive statements are largely pointless, and I try to stay away from them consequently, but this is more than likely the single greatest Progressive Rock album ever recorded and I really don’t trust or like people who don’t “get it”. A perfect achievement, and without question a masterpiece of engineering and production; every little sound is there for a reason, and adds to the overwhelming experience of listening to this album while smoking a huge amount of opium (which I’ve already made arrangements for as my preferred method of demise, when that time comes).

King Crimson- In The Court Of The Crimson King, 1969 What can you possibly say about what many consider to be the very first “Progressive” rock record? Heavy, trippy, terrifying, musically astonishing and visually arresting; every band in the world wishes they could say this was one of their album sleeves, and that’s why when I see that dickhead drummer from Dream Theater wearing a T-shirt with the sleeve art on it, I get violent fantasies and prostitutes have to die. Go get your “cred” somewhere else, you fucking Neo-Prog uber-poseur cocksuckers.

King Crimson- Red, 1974 Fripp’s unabashed “guitar” record, featuring the greatest solo in the history of the instrument, the endlessly patient and tormenting “Starless”. Having said all they needed to say, the original Crimson finally split for good, leaving this document as a full refutation of the overwrought histrionics of Yes, and the preposterous bombast of ELP. A sad but necessary demise.

King Crimson- Discipline, 1981 By far the best of the “new” KC’s output, Belew and Fripp are completely simpatico on dreamy guitar excursions like “The Sheltering Sky” and Msrs. Bruford and Levin comprise a beautifully melancholy and contemplative rhythm section. This version of the band polarizes the room of KC denizens, but there is no question this is a near-perfect record and has some of Fripp’s most introspective material.

Heldon- VI: Interface, 1978 There’s really not a bad Heldon record, but this one rises above the others for the pure inhuman coldness of the title track- some of the most forbidding and terrifying music ever recorded. A schizophrenic fugue and a wall of noise, I’ve counted layers of electronic vertigo at least eight deep on this album, and have had more neighbors pound on more walls to hector me into turning the volume down on Interface than any other record I’ve ever owned. Philistine neighbor hatred being as sure a sign as possible of a transgressive triumph, this is absolutely one of my favorite albums of all time.

Heldon- VII: Stand By, 1979 The other undeniable masterpiece of Pinhas’ Heldon project, the musicianship here is as always almost unbelievable and precise, but where Stand By really goes overboard is in the absolutely fucking EPIC guitar jam of the title track, where every Fripp-trick in the great Pinhas’ arsenal is on full display for fourteen fucking minutes of pure fucking ROCK. This man could play fucking guitar, there is no question about it; essential, and probably a good place for Heldon-virgins to start, before trying to untangle the labyrinthine coldness and inhumanity of Interface.

Richard Pinhas- Iceland, 1980 Almost as if he feared Heldon was becoming a tad too “human” with the warmth and fuzziness of Stand By, Richard Pinhas decided to fly solo for his next record and produced an album of such clinical cruelty as to almost qualify as an inducement to mass suicide. I love this fucking record. Distant, lugubrious, forbidding, austere, cruel- if Iceland were a woman, I would worship her as a goddess and die at her command. For I would have finally found the creature who best knows my heart; and could shred that black dead thing with a thin, cold smile on her ice-white face.

Nekropolis- Musik aus dem Schattenreich, 1981 Ever wonder what the music scene is like in Hell? Well, the very gifted German Electronic composer Peter Frohmayer apparently made a trip there at some point, took notes, and then came back from across the River Styx and made this uplifting and deeply optimistic record as a result. Seriously, folks- your Curator is not often accused of being a very jejune and joyously serene kind of person, but this fucking album is enough to make me put the sharp objects away and behind a lock for the night. “Ghul” and “Pagan” are about as close to pure desolation those fun-loving German horror-rockers have ever actually succeeded in capturing, but the entire record is one long and disturbingly morbid trip into the mind of someone who clearly was in need of help. Thankfully, Frohmeyer didn’t get it before he recorded this album, and what we have is something of a lurid and beauteous evil as result.

Igor Wakhevitch- Hathor, 1973 All of M. Wakhevitch’s albums are amazing, and they are also something else- unique. There are a ton of Electronic composers who made music of vary degrees of intensity and intelligence in the 70’s, but Wakhevitch stands out because he would appear to be, clearly, flat-out fucking evil. And Hathor is Wakhevitch at his assuredly most Occult and Old Scratch-lovin’ best. A bizarre, relentless and terrifying album, with abstract Electronic sections punctuated with a stentorian-voiced narrator making guttural observations voiced in a menacing French, Hathor is the kind of album you will either listen to and flee in terror from or...if like me, become obsessed with for days on end, hunkering down in a darkened apartment with sorrow, longing and cigarettes, ghosts of every failed romance and lost hope battering your brain and making you wish you could see just one of your enemies die in fits of awe-inspiring pain, hoping against hope that the next time you listen to it Satan himself will finally appear in a veil of malevolence with a smile and a contract dripping blood and merely say- “You rang?”

Egg- The Polite Force, 1971 All three Egg albums are brilliant, but this one rises above the others on the strength of the opening track (“A Visit to Newport Hospital”, which Prog-o-file Eric Colin Reidelberger claims is an account of the aftermath of an attack by skinheads!) and is probably the best Canterbury Scene record not made by The Soft Machine. Jazzy and whimsical, the Canterbury good humour is there in force, but the darker edge of some of the music makes this a much more complicated Canterbury, and also an album that never fails to open more intriguing avenues of appreciation for the listener.

Univers Zero- Heresie, 1979 A few years ago I had a job tending bar at a place where I had control of what music was played for the clientele on certain nights. One of the other bartenders, who usually had that responsibility, just happened to have a floor shift that night, and he always played this despicable and cowardly Indie pop music, shit so bad it literally made my job a fucking drag to go to if him and his goddamn Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel (what a bunch of assholes, to name yourself that) were on the CD player that night. So I got him back one night and played this- what surely is the most evil record ever recorded, music so dark and desolate that it makes your vindictive Curator smile just thinking what it must have been like for this asshole and his loser friends to have to sit there and listen to the sound of the pits of Hell opened and suppurating like a sonic tumor, greyly metastasizing right in your ears and stealing your soul. Ha ha ha, indeed.

I was written up the next shift for playing such a bit of deliberately provocative terror, which didn’t bother me at all as that place was filled with losers with no taste and I was looking for an excuse to walk out, and Univers Zero and what I maintain is the best RIO record ever recorded gave me that joyous escape. And by the way- this really is a seriously scary album. Seriously. It also takes Chamber Rock in directions unknown and unimaginable up to that point, and is the pinnacle in the career of a man- Daniel Denis- whom I truly believe to be, along with Christian Vander and Richard Pinhas, one of the truly great visionaries of Avant-Garde music in the past 30 years.

Alrune Rod- Alrunes Rod, 1969 Spectacular Danish Psych-Space freakout that starts moody and lurches to true punk anarchy in fits of inspired Hammond-laced fury. From an incredibly fecund Copenhagen scene absolutely soaked in acid and free-ranging hippies, these guys were the class of the lot. Brilliant vocals and pitch-perfect Psych production make this an archetype segue from Psychedelia longing to emerge as true Progressive Rock. One of my favorite albums of all time.

Faust- The Wumme Years, 1970-73 Yes, it’s a box set, and that means it shouldn’t count, but I’m including this because it’s unthinkable to make up a Top 50 list and not include Faust, but the actual fact is that the band’s recorded output is incredibly spotty, none of their studio albums rising above moments of genius interspersed with nutty avant garde-iness that often just sounds like a bunch of Germans making noise in a room. This cacophonous comeuppance is happily rectified with this excellent box, which allows you to have the single best thing the band ever did- the BBC+ Sessions disc, the first track featuring a bizarre acid-jazz trip-out that lurches into a keyboard drone guaranteed to induce mesmeric bliss. Out-fucking-standing weirdness and quintessential Krautrock.

Barclay James Harvest- S/T, 1970 No band has probably fallen apart more completely and with such disastrous results as BJH (simply everything after 1977- a pitiful and wretched collapse matched perhaps only by Gentle Giant’s slow and sad demise) but their first half dozen records are among the best Symphonic Prog ever made. This is for your more mellow afternoons, Prog-o-nauts; excellent and tasteful use of the Mellotron and one of the single best songs of the era (“Taking Some Time On”) make this a mandatory listen for anyone interested in classic Brit Prog.

Eskaton- 4 Visions, 1979 France in the 1970’s was an extremely productive and exceptionally experimental place. While the rest of the world was making cringe-inducing Fusion jazz so lame it made Barry Manilow sound energetic by comparison, the French jazz scene was overrun with insane bands making insane music none of which can be hummed and most of which will earn you stares of complete hatred if people overhear you listening to it in public. Zeuhl is the most extreme example of that kind of Foucault-esque “Limit Experience Jazz”, and Eskaton’s first record is one of the most extreme examples of this already extreme example. Soaring and ethereal female vocals make an incongruous pairing with some of the most frenetically-paced musicianship of the era, driven by a Jannick Top-inspired bass and Fender piano taken right from Kohntarkosz-era Magma. One of the absolute best of the Zeuhl-school records, and as extreme today as it was 30 years ago.

Colosseum- Valentyne Suite, 1969 This album would make it just on the strength of the first song, the fuzz-and-wah Psychedelic excess of “The Kettle”. But the album just keeps on going, and is probably second only to the Soft Machine for taking jazz rock to since-unequalled heights of heavyness; everything about this album works, though I’m especially fond of Heckstall-Smith’s sax work, which almost makes Valentyne Suite a straight-up jazz record at times. Pretty soulful for a bunch of British guys.

Cosmos Factory- An Old Castle of Transylvania, 1973 If ever an album has completely succeeded in creating the atmosphere the band set out to create, this impressionist masterpiece from Japan’s masters of protean re-invention would be it. With section titles like “Forest of the Death” and a crushingly severe crash of piano to open the 20-minute title track, Old Castle is a perfect gothic horror and perhaps the most satisfying orgy of Hammond organ ever etched to vinyl. This is a great album, and a tremendous lot of fun to listen to as well.

Picchio dal Pozzo- S/T, 1976 From Italy, but not Rock Progressivo Italiano; Canterbury, but not English. These two contradictions don’t make a lot of sense, but fortunately in Prog not making any sense can often lead to wonderful creativity and counter-intuitively brilliant results. “Seppia” is simply one of the best things ever recorded, and the rest of the album lives up to this dark and droning dirge with lots of reverb, children performing menacing chants and flutes and arpeggios trilling and floating across a wondrously Promethean palette of sound; a wonderful dark fantasy from a band that sadly went nowhere commercially and made only a handful of records.

Centipede- Septober Energy, 1971 Another one your girlfriend is not going to like very much, and it’s records like these that make my continued enforced chastity a sure bet for the foreseeable future. Fine with me, since otherwise I might have to “branch out” or “stop being so pig-headed” as they say and listen to, oh I don’t know...things that fucking suck. No thanks. Anyway, about the record, well...pretty much everybody in the world played on it, the idea being one Keith Tippett came up with while on sabbatical from one of his many projects and which ended up having no less than 50 musicians involved (or one-hundred legs- “centipede”, get it????). Riotous Free Jazz and a buttload of brass merge with Serialist-like floating passages where the notes fade away like planks from a rope bridge falling into an abyss; bleak and stertorous, then vibrant and opaque, this is a one-of-a-kind Canterbury album that features some of the best musicians in the world all putting their egos aside to be part of something that could never, ever conceivably happen again. Absolutely highly recommended, especially since it’s so little known outside of truly disturbed shut-in Prog fans like me and my co-curator.

Collegium Musicum- Konvergencie, 1971 Marian Varga’s absolutely massive musical statement from Czechoslovakia, where playing rock music was a counter-revolutionary act and took real balls. Endlessly harassed by the authorities (who forced them to remove the cigarette from the young man’s mouth on the sleeve photograph, among other inane hassles and trivialities), CM missed out on the worldwide stardom that should have been theirs, especially as Varga is one of the greatest Hammond organ players of all time and his compositions are much, much more focused than the ELP tracks they are constantly (and unfairly) compared to. Varga’s pitch bending theatrics and rampaging solos alone make this a classic; the whole of the album may be a bit overwhelming, but it rewards patience with each listen, and makes it okay to enjoy flat-out ostentatious rondos and coruscating showmanship without having to put up with Keith Emerson’s appalling smugness.

Time- S/T, 1972 A great Croatian band that was a kind of “Super Group” for Yugoslavia at the time, these guys made very, very heavy Progressive Rock that is reminiscent of Jethro Tull, if Jethro Tull wasn’t so boring and sucked so much. First two tracks are as good as anything you’ll ever hear in the “Heavy Prog” sub-ghetto, and this is another bunch that should have been far better known in the West, had it not been for the trouble even bands in the relatively relaxed Titoist state had to put up with. Worth searching out and adding to your collection, a real gem of heavyness and mature song writing.

Pink Floyd- Dark Side Of The Moon, 1973 Yep, it’s on the list, and it’s fucking staying there and don’t even bother to send complaints or try to vandalize the site by posting “clever” comments about how this selection clearly indicates my fondness for sucking cock or wanting to own a Hummer and live in LA or whatever else, as I have an automatic screening device installed for this blog which removes any occurrences of a personal insult in proximity to the search term “DSOM”, or “Dark”, “Side”, or “Moon” for that matter. So don’t fucking bother and fucking get over yourself; it’s an absolutely brilliant record. Why this album is so detested by the “serious” Prog community is a complete mystery leaving me totally baffled; it’s also an irrelevancy, as I consider DSOM to be a near perfect trip, and an album ideally suited to taking a Percocette, drinking a glass of red wine, and getting under the covers on a cold rainy day and fucking staying there, in a complete and happily desolate oblivion. Bonus Fact: girls actually will listen to DSOM, making it virtually unique on this list of boys and their “stuff”. So you do what you want, but I’ve still got erections that need attending to and life is more than collecting B-sides of Indonesian chamber jazz ensembles and selling your car to buy a new turntable. You fucking freaks, anyway.