Short-ish iconic studio albums 70s

 

I only used the word "noodling" once in an album review. Never again. Although I didn't mean it disrespectfully. I just prefer "keyboard wizardry" or some such similar term of praise to voice my approval.

This has probably been said somewhere above, but I think rock albums - and perhaps especially prog  - benifited from the constraints of the LP era.  Rock grew up with a typical 40 minute album 'limit', and I think that's part of its DNA (yes, artists like Klaus Schulze squeezed 30 minutes a side onto vinyl, but the sound quality starts to drop noticeably if you do that with something with a lot of dynamic range)

Quite apart from those physical considerations, an LP has four pivotal tracks: the first and last tracks on side A and B. I'd dare to say all great rock albums were sequenced with this dynamic in mind. The coming of the CD means we lost two of those pivot points, and with streaming we pretty much lost all of them.

I have to admit I don't really miss changing LP sides, nor do I miss the slow deterioration of vinyl, but I do believe old LPs on CD often suffer from the absence of that dramatic structure; probably more so if you don't remember the original vinyl sequence.

And for sure, too many artists suffered a drop in quality when they transitioned to trying to 'fill up' a CD with material. I'm also of the opinion that 70-80 minutes is often just too long to maintain peak level of concentration for many styles of rock, without some sort of fatigue setting in.  This may be less true for prog than many other forms. 'Tales From Topographic Oceans' is arguably an album that would like to have had access to a CD running length - though, again, the framing device of 4 side-long songs on a double LP  of vinyl is essentially the same pattern as a more conventional album with the four structural points I mentioned before. Quite possibly it BECAME a work of four movements because of the constraints of vinyl, and had it come out with no need to impose a structure of that sort, it would probably have been a completely different work.

YMMV. Maybe this is just because the vinyl  album structure is what I grew up on, and it feels instinctively right. But when I hear 'Dark Side' on CD, I always mentally register that 'Money' is the start of side two.