MASTERPIECE

I'm happy the Masters Apprentices are on this site, but proto-prog is the wrong place for them. They actually spent the 1960s jumping on every bandwagon except prog - garage R&B, psych pop, and hard rock - while other bands such as Levi Smiths Clefs, Tully, Tamam Shud, Copperwine, Sons of the Vegetal Mother, and even (briefly) the La De Das and Chain did more to get the prog ball rolling locally. The Masters finally caught up with developments when they released Choice Cuts in 1971 - admittedly they caught up in great style, releasing a couple of the best albums to come out of the Australian scene in the early 70s, but they were hardly the pioneers.

Masterpiece was recorded in late 1969, with a couple of single sides from 1968 also thrown in. It captures them at the height of their psychedelic pop period, and is basically a collection of very gimmicky songs with very gimmicky production, the biggest gimmick of all being the use of annoying orchestral interludes to link the songs on side one. If you need an international comparison, then they were probably aiming for something like Forever Changes or Odessey And Oracle or The Who Sell Out - it's not proto-prog unless you want to argue that the use of orchestra makes this Australia's answer to Days Of Future Passed. Nevertheless, it has it's entertaining moments, and on it's own merits probably deserves three stars - but not on a prog site.