Short-ish iconic studio albums 70s

ForestFriend wrote: Gentle Giant were the kings of short - but dense - prog. None of their studio albums were over 40 minutes, and I don't think they even made a song longer than 10 minutes (not counting live stuff). I have a fairly short attention span, so I find it tough to get into an album that's close to an hour or longer. Although I don't have the attitude that every album must be listened in full every time, so often I have better luck listening to individual tracks than the whole thing.

 

M27Barney wrote: Whenever a poster castigates a song with adjectives "noodling" or "rambling". They surely realise that, most of us, as prog fans, welcome and embrace most noodling and rambling as essential for the genre....short is for commercial pop....let us celebrate the need for length....extension is good...

Edited by Psychedelic Paul - February 20 2020 at 14:28

verslibre wrote: BaldFriede wrote: "Rubycon" by Tangerine Dream.   Stratosfear is just a tad shorter (time lengths on previous page).

I don't know why but that's one of the few TD albums I really need to have another go at. I don't know, it just seemed to pass me by.

Sean Trane wrote: chopper wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: M27Barney wrote: Battle of Epping forest fits the concept perfectly. A triumph of lyrical comedic social comment. But non brits tend not to get the zeitgeist... Oh, we non-Brits "get it". We got it in the first couple minutes of the song. Unfortunately, a 4-5 minute song that drags on with errant rambling and noodling for nearly 12 minutes wrecks the pacing of what otherwise is a brilliant album. One of the few songs of that era of Genesis that bores me to tears.     Well I like it.   Actually, it's a self-proclaimed pure brit (LAM-SGC) that seems to have the most problems with it. personally I think every minute of the epic opera is great.

Pure-Brit? Hardly, I'm actually Irish :) And I live in Sweden. London was my inbetween spot, from age 5 to 34, moved to Sweden in 1996. I'm only a pure-Brit in music taste...perhaps.   

Edited by LAM-SGC - February 20 2020 at 10:44

LAM-SGC wrote: Grubert wrote: Vrooom is one of my favourite Crimson albums, Thrak not. So I made, yes, yes, yes, my own album, by adding some of the Thrak stuff to Vrooom, and in that version it is the best Crimson album ever, better than In the court, better than Red, better than Discipline. . Steady on sir, better than Red? I must hear your version.

"Rubycon" by Tangerine Dream.

Edited by Grubert - February 20 2020 at 02:18

For me, in most cases, I find it good that there were limitations to the length of an album, and that bands didn't have the urge to fill up more and more time just for the sake of doing so. Though there are indeed cases of wonderful longer albums nowdays, and perhaps bands could have done some great stuff back then without limitations (I can think of Shine On you Crazy Diamond from Pink Floyd, which they had to divide because it didn't fit in one side of a vinyl... or perhaps they might even have included "You gotta be Crazy" and "Raving and Drooling" on wish you were here if the CD format existed back then, instead of leaving them for the next album). And then, there's Dream Theater, whom are among my favourite bands, but I find it hard to choose a really great album from them, because they always have songs that don't satisfy me... however, if I leave out the weaker songs (talking about albums still with Portnoy), I find that it could still have been a whole album from the 70's for it's length. Still, if they had limited themselves to such times, who knows if they would have chosen the songs that I chose.