

"We wouldn't have all those beautiful tracks like 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,' and we probably wouldn't have Tubular Bells - a lot of things, really - without drugs," Oldfield later told The Guardian. Recorded by 19-year-old English prodigy Mike Oldfield, two 20-minute-plus sections play out variations on almost every theme that could form in the head of a young LSD voyager. The opening sequence of Tubular Bells is most widely known as The Exorcist's foreboding theme, but many of this album's freakiest moments come much later. The 12-and-a-half minutes of "Cicatriz E.S.P." - complete with a helicopter interlude - show 21st Century prog's heartbeat to be as irregular as ever. Produced with Rick Rubin, De-Loused also featured low-end rumbles from stand-in bassist Flea and drumkit pyro from current Queens of the Stone Age stickman Jon Theodore. The oft-grotesque lyrics - about a man who overdoses on morphine and rat poison and goes into a coma - are repeatedly ruptured and stitched back together with a desperate flair by Rodríguez-López. Emerging from the vitriolic ashes of Bixler-Zavala and virtuoso guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López's art-punk project At the Drive-In, the group manically aligns triumphant metal, psychedelic rock and Latin jazz. Even a semi-monastic hour (and 51 seconds) of listening reveals a satisfyingly twisted universe within these Texas oddballs' first full-length suite, De-Loused in the Comatorium. "Our music demands.at least an hour out of your life, and with complete silence and with complete devotion," Mars Volta vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala once proclaimed. The Mars Volta, ‘De-Loused in the Comatorium’ (2003).And the 23-minute "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers (Medley)" makes King Crimson sound like the Ramones, with its gaping, spacey interludes, freeblown solos, jarring shifts, and lyrics like, "When you see the skeletons of sailing-ship spars sinking low/You'll begin to wonder if the points of all the ancient myths are solemnly directed straight at you." These guys tried to channel all the myths at once, making for music that was pure prog id, minus any cohesion or concision to hamstring the majesty.
On "Man-Eng," singer/idea machine Peter Hammill showed off his operatic chops over processional keyboards and rollercoaster drums, then yowled, "How I can be free!" during a stampeding middle section that evolves into six minutes of kiting sax and keyboard abstraction. But Pawn Hearts turned out to be a confusingly heady trip for even the most attentive listeners.
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The third album by Van Der Graaf Generator won over prog fans by featuring King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.

Heavier and hairier than most of their Krautrock contemporaries, the band melded elements of the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and Quicksilver Messenger Service with African, Asian and Indian influences to create something deeply personal and even more deeply weird. Described by Lester Bangs in Rolling Stone as "Germany's great psyche-overload band," Amon Düül II delivered some serious mind-fry on their sprawling second album.
