As I say, I haven't heard it yet, and I may never hear it, who knows... Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus are my favourite ELP albums... and it may be uncool these days, but I love Fanfare For The Common Man and Pictures At An Exhibition.
I love - well, I should say I like it a lot - the single version of Fanfare. The full album version, not so much. Sometimes less is more.
I don’t think I’m familiar with you, so I didn’t know it was at least partly in jest. Thank you for the heads up!
I wonder if Jean-Luc Ponty's "A Taste for Passion" suffers from the same syndrome. Aside from the title and a cover with a photo where he's sporting a shiny shirt and leather pants instead of one with a vaguely sci-fi/cosmic theme, it's really similar to its seemingly more highly-regarded predecessor Cosmic Messenger. If ELP had called the album The Gambler or Canario gave it a less cheesy cover, I don't think people would have dismissed it so readily.
I suppose it's when they couldn't even sell their noise to the die hard prog fans. At the end of the 1970s, the problem with prog wasn't that it was too complex, or too compositionally advanced, or too well played, it was that they'd run out of ideas.
I had no idea who/what the op was talking about. But yes I have this album at my antique shop table. Actually I have a bunch of E,L & P albums and dang it nobody seems to want them, even at $5, cleaned, and in new sleeves! They just sit there month after month.
I've seen it here in numerous threads about terrible album covers, but I'm not a big ELP fan and I never noticed the album title. I got the gist of the thread even before looking it up, though.
I'll give both the album and the cover model a 4/5. Much rather look at her than Ron or Russ in drag!
Well then... It's lucky for us prog fans*, that prog has gone in so many more directions since the 70's, and new ideas are plentiful. There are quite a few different subgenres of prog, and each one sounds drastically different than each other, and different than much of the prog of the 70's. Avant-prog, Zeuhl, prog-metal, technical-metal, prog-fusion, are just a few subgenres, which are far from being without ideas. And at least with prog, bands can explore an even greater range of: time signatures, rhythms, chord progressions, instrument combinations, atonality, and more. Prog musicians can continue to mine more and more musical theory.
Yawn. None of this is relevant to the fact that in 1977-1979, prog was very much a spent force. Various neo-prog eruptions since then do not negate that fact.
Spent force commercially. Far from a spent force artistically. And as far as any sort of commercial viability of contemporary prog (which is far more varied than neo-prog)
