I go through summers where I find myself being sucked towards a particular genre and being obsessed with certain albums as the season plays out.
A couple of years ago it was the Great Blues Summer. I beefed up my CD collection with some classic Muddy Waters albums, as well as some more contemporary takes on the blues. This summer I seem to have unwittingly been sucked into prog. Oh dear.
Prog gets a really bad name. I’m not sure why. It’s basically jazz music for rock bands. I think a lot of the shit around it comes out of the whole stereotypical late sixties to early seventies scene, and the not-so-flattering looks that accompany it.
King Crimson’s Larks' Tongues in Aspic is a worthy listen - or at least I thought it was. It was on their 1001 albums to listen to list. I must have been served this some time in the past couple of years. I added it to my eBay daily watch list. They drop each day, clocking in anything between £10 and £50 or so.
And then one copy dropped for a grubby fiver at the start of this week. I’ll have a bit of that, I thought. A clickety click here and there, and job’s a good ‘un.
Lark’s Tongues in Aspic arrive this morning. I did actually give it a stream before I hit the purchase, just to make sure that my musical judgement from a couple of years ago hadn’t slipped. It had. It wasn’t the masterpiece I had remembered.
But still, a prog summer is a prog summer. I do love this kind of music to play whilst I get on with other tasks. I wouldn’t call it background music, but you try getting to grips with a particularly prickly work project when you’ve got some west coast hip-hop blasting out.
