Led Zeppelin's fourth album, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and Deep Purple's Machine Head have stood the test of time as the Holy Trinity of English hard rock and heavy metal, serving as the fundamental blueprints followed by virtually every heavy rock & roll band since the early '70s. And, though it is probably the least celebrated of the three, Machine Head contains the "mother of all guitar riffs" – and one of the first learned by every beginning guitarist – in "Smoke on the Water." Inspired by real-life events in Montreux, Switzerland, where Deep Purple were recording the album when the Montreux Casino was burned to the ground during a Frank Zappa concert, neither the song, nor its timeless riff, should need any further description…
Decades after its release, Tales from Topographic Oceans is still the most controversial record in Yes' output. This was the place where Yes either fulfilled all of the promise shown on their previous five albums or slid off the rails in a fit of artistic hubris, especially on the part of lead singer Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe, who dominated the composition credits here…
Two years after Thick as a Brick 2, an explicit 2012 sequel to the 1972 prog classic, Ian Anderson embarked on another ambitious journey, this time assembling a concept record called Homo Erraticus. A loose – very loose – album based on a "dusty, unpublished manuscript, written by local amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt (1873-1928)," Homo Erraticus is an old-fashioned prog record: it has narrative heft and ideas tied to the '70s, where jazz, classical, folk, orchestral pop, and rock all commingled in a thick, murky soup…
This is one of the first Symphonic albums to come out of Germany. And it's nothing like TRIUMVIRAT or even NOVALIS for that matter.This is melancholic and plodding with plenty of synths and mellotron. There are basically two side long suites with the first side being divided into two parts…
Original 6-eye mono pressing in nice shape.