Best french prog album

I'm interested to get an album by Ange, but there's just so much on my list

I actually think that "Caricatures" was just as original ... and then "Le Cemetiere des Harlequins" ... all in all, I think they cleared up something that made it different from Genesis ... and all you have to hear is Dechamps whispering to you ... ecoute ... ecoute ... even in the live version on Tome VI ... and you know that this is about acting ... not just a song, as it became later. You can hear the strength of this acting/story right there ... and Peter Gabriel kinda gave up after Lamb ... and just did songs.

 

In many ways, Ange had an insipiration that was not show and tell, and then it appeared that Genesis was neither literary, or historical ... since it not only stopped, Peter did not extend it! Ange, with DEchamps, never quit and even though some of us might find the later stuff not as strong and quite diluted. I think that they ended up disillusioned more than once, when seeing other bands doing much inferior work, but getting more recognition ... that's when bands end up falling apart.

 

I also thought that when the lyrics in "Lamb" finally got to rock'n'roll that the meaning of the whole thing kinda went south for me, and that was the least favorite piece in that album for me ... and the one that lowered the value of the whole piece for me! Ange, at least, never did that or quit like that. They tried to continue what would be considered a story line with "Par Les Fils de Mandrin" ... which I thought was kinda cool and a finger to Genesis ... here is a story for your children! and fingeryou for your inspiration!

 

But, in the end, I don't really like comparing these things much. But I do think that the French, with their "laissez-faire", or "I don't give a poop attitude" towards so many and so much of the art scenes, would help create more individualistic things ... and I really felt they did ... in many ways, by the time you hear Stivell, Heldon, Ange, Malicorne, Gong, that unreal off-off-kilter jazz scene and then the pop music scene, you have one of the most wide and wild scenes around. By comparison, London was way too commercially minded and too "composed" to be as original!