Progressive Rock

Yep.

Listened to Journey to the Center of the earth and 6 wives of Henry XVIII tonight, also parts of 1984. Then went to Youtube and watched his keyboard solo video.

Queensryche - Mindcrime - Classic - too bad they had to screw it up with Mindcrime 2....

I'm still afraid to buy MC2. That bad? But I'm a quirky QR fan to my friends because I actually could get into Q2K and Tribe.

My favorite concept album is perhaps my favorite album as well: One Hour by the Concrete Lake - Pain of Salvation.

Not only is the story eye-opening. The music simply blows me away, and Daniel's vocals are my favorite in rock today.

From wikipedia: (warning - spoliers!)

"One Hour by the Concrete Lake follows the fictional tale of a man that works in the weapon industry who begins to have doubts about the morality of his occupation. He realises that he is just a part of a big "machine" and that it controls his life. He makes a New Year's resolution to discover what consequences his life and work has on other part of the world, and to break free of the "machine" that controls his life.

In the second chapter, he travels around the world and sees what his weapons are actually doing in many different places. He witnesses a war, and remembers that he was told that the weapons he helped to make would save human lives and preserve the peace. However, all he sees are human beings using weapons to shoot other human beings – which is their designed purpose. He also sees native people (specifically, native American Indians) struggling to reclaim their sacred land from the colonising white man, who also had taken uranium from the ground and put the waste back into the local rivers.

In the third chapter, he arrives at shores of Lake Karachay (in Kyshtym in the former USSR), where so much nuclear waste was dumped over the past fifty years that if one stood by the shore for one hour, the exposure to radiation would be such that death from physical injuries would occur within two weeks. The entire lake was eventually covered in concrete, however, for the radiation to be acceptable, it would need to stay there for tens of thousands of years. However, after ten years the concrete had begun to crack and split open. Also, the lake connects to many underground rivers and out to sea.

The man's quest to leave the "machine" ends as he realises that it is impossible for anyone to leave the "machine" because outside one machine there are just more machines. However, he also realises that the "machine" is only made of its "wheels", so the only thing he can do is choose which machine he wants to be part of and take some responsibility for its direction.

The meaning of the title is that for anyone to realise the immorality of the issues raised in the album, it would only require them to stand for one hour by the Concrete Lake.

The message of the album is for the listener to realise these same things."

As far as concept albums are concerned I always think of Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" with Richard Burton narrating , Phil Lynott, Manfred Mann, Moody Blues.

A recent one I've been listening to is 'In Absentia' by Porcupine Tree. It loosely based on the birth, life, and death of a serial killer. They have several awesome concept albums.

Glad to see someone else here. Notice the date of my last post and then the date on the post before that. I kept waiting for someone to show.

You are so right. Porcupine Tree is in my top five these days. "In Absentia" is the first one I picked up. I think there are two of their cd's that I still need to pick up.