In case you consider the historical past books, the idea album was deader than a dodo by the Nineties. Whereas the nice beasts of prog’s golden period – Thick As A Brick, Tales From Topographic Oceans, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway et al – have been a distant reminiscence, there have been nonetheless up to date outliers keen to hitch advanced, clever music to wealthy narratives or thematic spines. In 2018 Prog introduced our choose of 10 nice idea albums of the 90s.
Roger Waters: Amused To Demise (1992)
As Pink Floyd’s majordomo, Waters was the king of the idea album – even the data that didn’t have a definite storyline have been tied collectively by very sturdy themes. however his first three solo albums every had a clearly outlined focus, from The Execs And Cons Of Hitch Climbing’s time-stamped fever dream to Radio Okay.A.O.S.’ “paraplegic hacker practically destroys the world” storyline. Amused To Demise was Waters] grand touch upon our countless urge for food for mass televisual leisure, spinning it out into his typical matters of ire: warfare, politicians and faith.
Porcupine Tree: Voyage 34 (1992/1993)
Strictly talking, it is a two-part single – however because it lasts for half-hour, it qualifies, and it was later spun out to over an hour with two extra remixes. Lengthy earlier than David Gilmour labored with The Orb, Steven Wilson was imagining what Floyd would sound like with a drifting ambient makeover.
Constructed across the hilariously sonorous narration from an American anti-drugs P, it’s a journey by way of the thoughts of a hapless acid casualty named Brian, who begins the music by consuming LSD-saturated sugar cubes and ends it assembly himself ‘coming down an up staircase.’ Wilson himself might need abstained from psychedelics, however it’s protected to say that Brian positively wasn’t having journey.
David Bowie: 1. Outdoors (1995)
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The 90s stays Bowie’s nice neglected interval, and 1. Outdoors was his nice underappreciated album of the time. Not solely did the he reunite with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti – the dream group behind his fabled late-70s Berlin trilogy – however it discovered him serving up his first full idea album; or, in Bowie-speak: “non-linear gothic drama hyper-cycle.”
Set in a dystopian future the place homicide has turn out to be a literal artwork type, it centres round enigmatic investigator Nathan Adler as he explores the dying of a child. Lyrically opaque and intentionally disjointed, discordant and jazzy, the consequence comes throughout like an excellent gloomier, extra opiated Blade Runner – and it’s not an enormous leap from this to his remaining album, Blackstar, 19 years later.
Camel: Harbour Of Tears (1996)
Camel are such masters of the idea album that they even managed to drag one off – The Snow Goose – that didn’t have any lyrics. However Harbour Of Tears was a special beast completely: its Far And Away-style idea was impressed by the real-life story of vocalist/guitarist Andy Latimer’s grandmother and her household leaving Eire.
The situation of the title refers to Cobh Harbour in County Cork, a port from which 1000’s of emigrants departed throughout the 1800s and 1900s. It’s this private contact, along with its evocative Celtic thrives, that lends the file a real emotional undercurrent.
Radiohead: OK Pc (1997)
The large daddy of 90s idea albums – at the very least gross sales sensible – Radiohead’s third launch was a landmark treatise on trendy tradition and technological alienation that confirmed them to be heirs to the nice conceptualists of the 70s.
The grandiose Paranoid Android was simply the proggiest No.1 single of the last decade, if not ever, and it shaped a part of a twisting, floating, fractured murals that summed up the strain and ache of life on the sting of the twenty first century.
Mansun: Assault Of The Gray Lantern (1997)
Mansun have been the lacking hyperlink between Syd Barrett and Pulp – a pop band with maverick ambition. Their debut album was really solely half an idea albuml mainman Paul Draper had began writing a narrative primarily based round a faux superhero known as the Gray Lantern earlier than losing interest and abandoning the concept. However we’ll nonetheless take half an album of gloriously batty, brilliantly pretentious prog-pop any day of the week.
Fates Warning: A Nice Shade Of Gray (1997)
Though they predated Dream Theater by few years, Fates Warning have by no means acquired their dues for serving to forge the prog metallic template. Guitarist and mastermind Jim Matheos ploughed on regardless, and in 1997 served up this conceptual basic.
Darkish and intense,A Nice Shade Of Gray is one 54-minute music damaged into 12 untitled components. And whereas the idea – broadly, of a person drifting out and in of sleep, subconsciously trying again over components of his life – is enigmatic and indirect, it completely fits the music that frames it.
Ache Of Salvation: Entropia (1997)
The Swedish prog metallic band got here out of the gate flying with this debut, an idea album primarily based across the story of a war-torn household within the fictional world of Entropia – a hybrid of “entropy” and “utopia.” It took in such intense themes as parental duty, governmental conspiracy and people reacting to excessive conditions. The band’s Daniel Gildenlöw admitted that it took severe focus to observe: “It’s a really advanced idea that’s fairly arduous to understand,” he mentioned. Hats off for ambition.
Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Reminiscence (1999)
Essentially the most exceptional factor about Dream Theater’s fifth file is that it took them so lengthy to make an idea album. Once they lastly did, they immersed themselves in it fully – conceived as an elongated sequel to 1992 observe Metropolis Half 1: The Miracle And The Sleeper, the file charted the journey of the principle protagonist, a person named Nicholas, as he underwent regression remedy.
What adopted was a cycle of homicide, habit, obsession and reminiscence. If any album was a 90s model of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway when it comes to scope, this was it.
Opeth: Nonetheless Life (1999)
Mikael Åkerfeldt had dabbled in idea albums earlier than this, when Opeth have been nonetheless broadly perceived as “solely” a metallic band – albeit one given to lengthy, intricate musical passages. However the Swedes’ fourth album discovered him taking up extra than simply the musical trappings of prog.
It was an anti-Christian tract that advised of the principle character’s return to his hometown after being banished for his lack of religion, taking in love, homicide and revenge. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t finish fortunately.
