Prog Progress 1968: Soft Machine - The Soft Machine

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

You can divide the classic era of British progressive rock into two basic camps—well, to be fair, you can divide it into a lot of different camps, but here's one division that's relatively cut-and-dried: in 1960s and '70s prog, there were classicists and there were avant-gardists. On prog's more classicist end, you have bands like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, whose primary ambitions laid in lending a classical-music-esque grandiosity to the realm of rock music, while with prog's avant-garde, you have the likes of King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, whose fractured, dissonant sounds are much more akin to the angularity of 20th-century classical and post-bop jazz.

I don't want to oversimplify stuff here; there's a lot of crossover between these two prog impulses—for example, King Crimson's '60s output has about as much classicist material as avant-garde, and Yes has a very clear avant-garde edge to its early '70s work; honestly, the entirely project of prog itself, even at its poppiest, is nothing if not experimental and semi-dissonant, at least when compared to some of the more populist genres at the time. But generally speaking, these are the two broad ethoses at work in the early goings of prog.

Which then makes it interesting to look at Soft Machine's first album right on the heels of the Moody Blues' Days of Future Past from last time, as these two debuts do a pretty great job of contrasting the two main directions prog would go in the following decade, the Moodies embodying the classicist impulses while the Soft Machine heads up more avant-garde propensities. As with Days of Future Passed, I'm not sure that The Soft Machine[1] is a full-blooded prog album, at least not by the standards set by the most famous examples of the genre—I think we've still got one year to go until a release truly crystallizes that sound[2]—but we're close enough that I'd still count it. What's that expression? Horseshoes, hand grenades, and prog rock?

Anyway, about this album. I'll go ahead and get the negative out of the way first: The Soft Machine is one of those records that's way more historically significant than it is interesting. I mean, it's an alright album on its own, if a little stilted in the way it stitches its various tones together, but it's far from what I'd call Soft Machine's artistic peak (which, for the record, I'd peg a few albums down the line at 1970's jazz-fusion opus Third). So we've kind of got a Snow White-Disney situation here, where I don't think anyone would ever call the debut the best of the bunch, but it's almost unquestionably the most important. And I mean really important. What The Soft Machine is is a more or less direct evolutionary link between psychedelic rock and progressive rock, which makes it a pretty big deal in the scope of this blog series.

Except for maybe "Nights in White Satin," Days of Future Passed is a collection of just slightly tipsy pop tunes wrapped in some pretty straight-laced orchestration, and while the incorporation of that orchestration is as important an innovation as any for the general principals of prog's state of mind, it's hard to say that it's a natural outgrowth of the prevailing psychedelic sound vibrant in the UK in the mid-to-late '60s—think Cream, think early Pink Floyd, think the Jimi Hendrix Experience, all bands that are expanding the boundaries of rock music through extended repetition, improvisation, and electronic distortion, not string instrumentation. Enter Soft Machine[3], the weirder, hipper, more literate[4] cousin of all those bands. What's so important about their debut album is that it takes the premise of psychedelic rock and tries to give it new form by applying an organizing ethos to the recordings. That organizing ethos is to draw on not just blues archetypes (as had been the standard for other psychedelic bands) but also jazz. And it blows the possibilities for psychedelic rock wide open.

The true habitat of psych rock in the '60s was always in its live setting, where the performances had a vivacity and strangeness that bands often had trouble translating to records. The most common result is that psychedelic LPs ended up sounding a lot more poppy than their deranged live versions—just compare Piper at the Gates of Dawn to live recordings of Pink Floyd from the same era and you'll know what I mean. Bizarre, sweeping jams become condensed into 2-3 minute tracks, etc. It seems as though the members of Soft Machine were aware of this possible pitfall and had even fallen prey to it themselves; if you listen to early Soft Machine releases (for example, 1967's "Love Makes Sweet Music"[5]), you'll hear mostly conventional, albeit hazy, pop/rock structures, despite that by this time, the band had already established themselves as a standard-bearer for imaginative, outré live sets. By the time of the recording of their debut, though, the band had found a solution to that problem, and, interestingly, that solution bears a striking conceptual similarity to what the Moody Blues did in Days of Future Passed: link the pop-song kernels of their music with suites of non-pop, though in the case of Soft Machine, the non-pop at play was not classical but jazz. In doing so, The Soft Machine becomes the earliest album I know of to successfully replicate the spirit of live psychedelic music in the studio.

Arnold Shaw, writing on the original album sleeve, says that "the [band's] drive is to synthesize the diverse sounds of jazz and rock in an electronic continuity. 'Continuity' is the precise word, for even in personals, the group's sets are like suites, with an organ-drum interlude serving as a bridge to the next tune." Shaw's absolutely right: "continuity" is the vital word here, and for more than what he's talking about. Sure, there's sonic continuity in that each side of the LP has extended suites of continuous music, sans the normal breaks between songs, with instrumental jazz improvisations filling in the space between the more conventional melodies. But that's not exactly an innovation; the Moody Blues with their classical interludes had sonic continuity, too[6]. What makes The Soft Machine special is that it builds sonic continuity out of instrumental continuity. By that I mean that unlike the Moodies' orchestral passages, the connective tissue between Soft Machine's formal songs is played on the same instruments as the songs themselves are, which gives the impression that these non-pop flourishes are flowing naturally from the songs as opposed to interrupting the songs (as is sometimes the case on Days of Future Passed). As a result, the band manages to pull apart the boundaries of the songs themselves, and everything kind of blends together into this odd sea of instrumentation that feels bigger than pop music. That's huge for progressive rock, this ability to disassemble the components of pop and reconstruct them into larger, more continuous pieces. You heard it from Soft Machine first.

It also helps that the core songs are a lot weirder than anything on Days of Future Passed, meaning that the improvised sections don't feel as out of place as they might have on, say, a Mamas & the Papas album. This, coupled with the strong jazz touches, is what I'm talking about when I refer to The Soft Machine as being an early ambassador for prog's avant-garde side of the family. Tracks like "We Did It Again" and "So Boot If At All" are chock full of these out-there sound collages and instrument distortions, and "Why Are We Sleeping?", with its repetitive harmonies and organ-guitar breakdowns, is unclassifiable as anything outside of some primordial mash-up of heavy metal and krautrock. It's a strange-sounding record, to say the least.

So that's all cool. But, as I said before, a lot of it is more historically and conceptually cool than it is actually fun to listen to. That's not to say that there aren't good moments ("Why Are We Sleeping?" comes to mind as a particular highlight) or that the album is bad, per se, but the seams definitely show. It's unfortunately obvious that Soft Machine was pioneering new sounds and techniques here, because the mixing at certain points—especially transitions between songs—can be rough and often awkward. I'm thinking specifically of "A Certain Kind," a slower, sweeter song that closes out side one and that jars the flow of the album pretty badly. That's the worst instance, but there are other examples all over the album. And while I'm complaining, I might as well bring up the Robert Wyatt's vocals, which I find strained and occasionally grating throughout the album. Listen, Robert Wyatt is a very talented man[7], but I'm afraid singing is not among those prodigious talents. It might be more endurable on this album if the lyrics were anything worth our time, but for the most part, they're just boilerplate '60s rock: lots of "baby"s and "love"s with a touch of pseudo-mysticism. Thankfully, future Soft Machine albums would move away from vocals entirely. 

I really don't want to be too hard on this album. It does some heavy lifting for prog while still managing to be a good album on its own right. Still, knowing what's to come (both for the band[9] and the genre as a whole), it's hard not to think of this album as a sort of pit stop rather than a destination of its own.

But what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Feel free to contribute to anything I've said here (or heck, go off on some other tangent) down in the comments. As always, discussion is great.

Until 1969!


1] Later known simply as Volume One, in keeping with the numerical scheme of the band's later albums.
2] Aw yeah, y'all know what it is. It's going to be great.

3] Or, as they were known at the time, The Soft Machine, since an unwritten rule of British rock of the '60s is that all bands must have a definite article at the front of their name. It happened to Pink Floyd, too, who were The Pink Floyd until the '70s.

4] The Soft Machine is the title of a William S. Burroughs novel.

5] Which, by the way, is a great song, even if it's a crappy distillation of live psychedelic music.

6] As did the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper and the albums immediately following. Continuous sound was pretty mainstream.

7] In addition to being a major creative figure in Soft Machine, he'd also contribute to several other ambitious avant-prog bands over the next decade or two, including Henry Cow[8] and Matching Mole.

8] Best prog band name ever? Perhaps.

9] I forgot to mention this earlier, but Soft Machine would go on to become a central group in the not inconsequential "Canterbury" subgenre of prog, which makes the band doubly important as innovators. In fact, The Soft Machine is a pretty decent introduction to the Canterbury prog sound: heavy jazz influence, heavy avant-garde tendencies, fleet moments of weirdness and whimsy. That's another reason I wanted to cover Soft Machine here; I wasn't sure if I'd have a chance to write about anything else from the Canterbury scene later on, since the early '70s (Canterbury's heyday) get pretty crowded with classic releases from prog's mainline.

Prog Progress 1967: The Moody Blues - Days of Future Passed

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

Is Days of Future Passed really the first progressive rock album? I'm actually not sure, which maybe makes this album's place as the first album review in a series about the history of prog rock seem a little strange. In fact, there are a number of albums that predate Days of Future Passed that could in equal fairness be called the first real progressive rock album: The Doors, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Procol Harum—all these albums show bits of prog DNA beginning to emerge out of the flurry of mid-'60s psychedelic rock. And honestly, none of them (including Days) sound purely prog either. There's an entirely reasonable argument to be made that in 1967, prog still didn't exist and that I should have included all these albums in my previous post about the roots of the genre. And believe me, I thought about starting somewhere later—maybe 1969 with In the Court of the Crimson King—at a point where prog would arrive a bit less embryonically.

But it always had to be 1967, because that, for some reason, is the year when all of psychedelia's children arrived. To mix metaphors for a second, let's imagine that the British (and occasionally American) rock scene—now largely white and urban-based, having unceremoniously shrugged off the vital black and rural innovators from the earlier decade—in '65 and '66 is a primordial pool filled with a variety of organisms that, while distinct, all stay within that same pool. Well, '67 is when the first creatures venture out of that pool on new-found legs and discover that they can run in almost any direction they please. And do they run. In 1967, a proliferation of rock sub-genres exploded onto the recording industry, including (just to name a few) noise rock, space rock, avant-garde rock, jazz rock, symphonic rock, art rock, and (you guessed it) progressive rock. Not all of these sub-genres emerged from the pool fully formed (in fact, if you weren't a sub-genre included on the Velvet Underground's debut, you probably had at least a year or two to go), but '67 is crucial in that it saw the first notable releases by bands that would soon identify themselves exclusively with one of those sub-genres. Before '67, you had renaissance dabblers like the Beatles; after '67, you have specialists.

Which brings us to the Moody Blues and Days of Future Passed. Of all the possible other contenders for this post that I listed way back in the first paragraph, the Doors and the Beatles are genre dabblers, flitting from style to style without much emphasis on a single aesthetic. And neither of the two remaining—Procol Harum (by Procol Harum) and Piper at the Gates of Dawn (by Pink Floyd)—sound nearly as close to what would soon become prog as the Moody Blues are in Days of Future Passed, Procol Harum being still too close to conventional pop and the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd still very much in a purely psychedelic vein.

And so we have Days of Future Passed, which is actually the Moody Blues' second album but the first one with the classic Moodies lineup and the first one really worth caring about[1].

The first thing you'll probably want to know is that it's a concept album, which already checks off one of those prog boxes. This is definitely an album, not a collection of songs, and each side of the record is a continuous suite of music[2] that all links together over a central idea. That idea? The passage of one day. Not like in Ulysses or Do the Right Thing or anything with characters; no, this album is about simply the physical process of the sun rising in the morning and moving across the sky until it sets in the evening, which is only a little bit more thrilling than I just made it sound[3]. 

Look, I've been calling what I'm about to do here a "review," so I might as well start with the evaluation: the central premise to Days of Future Passed is kind of dumb—well, "dumb" might not be the right word to use, since there's nothing especially unintelligent about it; the folks in the Moody Blues at least execute it accurately, naming each track, appropriately, after the corresponding time of day: "The Day Begins" is the first track, then "Dawn," then "The Morning," "Lunch Break"[4], etc. until the record ends with "The Night." It's all pretty literal and on-the-nose, and it's not helped by the often thudding lyrics (sample: "When the sun goes down/And the clouds all frown/Night has begun for the sunset"). 

So lyrically, the album's not winning any prizes. Well, mostly not. I should qualify and say that at exactly two points, this album's concept pays off nicely. Those points are actually what yielded the album's two singles: the "Afternoon" and "Night" tracks, subtitled respectively "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)"[5] and "Nights in White Satin," where, for the only two times on the album, the lyrics break from observation of the day cycle to discuss the singer's feelings. And it's actually quite moving in both cases, especially in "Nights in White Satin," where the sight of the earth plunged into darkness seems to arouse an acute sense of longing and even regret in the singer, causing him to cry, "I love you" in a way that seems both romantic and a little bit desperate. It's sad and sweepingly grand, and it ends the album on one of the unequivocal high points of '60s prog rock. "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)" isn't quite as great, but it's still an interesting bit of introspection linked to the post-lunch hours, with melancholy refrains linked by a bouncy bridge evoking the Beatles' "A Day in the Life."

"A Day in the Life" is actually a useful touchstone for this album overall, since musically, Days of Future Passed shares quite a lot with the Beatles' song, as far as sonic ambitions go. After its structure as a concept album, probably the second most important thing to note about this record is that it's a fusion of the classical symphony with psychedelic rock (there's another prog check-off). Like "A Day in the Life" (only about 36 minutes longer), Days of Future Passed alternates between traditional rock instrumentation (guitars, drums, Mellotron[6], etc.) and a full-blown orchestra. 

I mentioned back in my "Before Prog" post that progressive rock tends to appropriate classical music more in the abstract rather than its literal instruments, but oh boy, that is not true at all of Days of Future Passed. You would be forgiven for thinking, upon listening to the first few minutes of the album, that you'd accidentally turned on a classical music record instead of one of the most influential rock LPs of all time. It takes nearly six minutes of symphonic overture before anything resembling rock music pops up, and the rest of the album runs about half-and-half between rock/pop songs and lengthy instrumental orchestra passages linking the songs together into a suite. The results here with the music are a lot more successful than the lyrics are. With the exception of the plodding "The Sun Set," every one of the proper songs is good-to-great musically (my favorite non-single track being the psych-rock gem "Peak Hour"), and the orchestra between the songs gives the album a fleet-footed feel of coherence that works even when the actual music of the orchestration is a bit thin. In fact, to get critical again, the orchestra segments aren't really good for much more than gluing the album together (although as glue, they're great). Ideally, in an experiment like this, the orchestration would have been just as compelling as the rock music, but that's not the case here. Except in the admittedly exciting overture at the beginning, the orchestral music sounds less like a symphony and more like a middling movie score from the '50s, which is a shame since that middling score comprises nearly half the album.

The other problem is that except for one case that I'll talk about in a second, the orchestration and rock arrangements are mixed entirely separately—when the rock song ends, the orchestra begins and vice-versa. This makes the album's music feel more like a genre relay than a true fusion of styles, and that relay often feels a little stilted. The exception is, again, "Nights in White Satin," which is the only place on the album where the orchestra and rock instrumentation coexist. The results are stunning, the orchestra strings weaving around Graeme Edge's somber drumming and Justin Hayward's mournful vocals in a way that feels truly epic. The whole song justifies the whole orchestra-rock concept.

Days of Future Passed is definitely a transition album, both for the prog genre as a whole and for Moody Blues specifically, and like most transition album, it's a bit rocky. Later bands and records would prove much more adept at creating music of this scope; the following year alone would see the Moodies ditching the orchestra for a more Mellotron-heavy sound that both streamlined and improved upon a lot of the sonic ideas here[7]. Still, there's something undeniably exciting about the ambition of this album. It's the sound of a band realizing just how spacious a rock LP could be, which is both cool in the abstract and legitimately compelling when that muscle-flexing stumbles across something truly powerful like "Nights in White Satin." It's maybe not the true beginning of prog, but it's a major step there. And as steps go, it's not a wholly bad one.

But what do y'all think? Do you love this album? Hate it? Something in between? Let me know! I'd love to hear your comments.

Until 1968!


1] Their debut album, The Magnificent Moodies, is a mostly dull collection of R&B covers interspersed with a handful of mostly dull R&B originals. It's rightfully forgotten.

2] In fact, if you listen to the album on CD (which is what I did), it's continuous music for the entire 42 minute runtime, not having to pause to flip the record or anything.

3] In all fairness, though, had rock music actually produced an interesting idea for a concept album at this point? I mean, the whole premise for Sgt. Pepper is pretty much, "Everyone knows this band is called the Beatles, but what this album presupposes is... what if it wasn't?"

4] Lunch is the only meal mentioned explicitly on the album, which is maybe more disturbing to me than it should be.

5] Which became just "Tuesday Afternoon" as a single. A wise choice, I'd say. 

6] At the time, the Mellotron wasn't considered a "traditional" instrument, but largely thanks to how intently the members of the Moody Blues evangelized on its behalf (Moodies keyboardist Mike Pinder reportedly introduced the instrument to the Beatles), it soon became a standard part of the lineup, at least among the artsier, stranger corners of rock (e.g. prog).

7] Starting with their next album, In Search of the Lost Chord, the Moody Blues would also begin to incorporate one signature influence on their sound that's missing here: Eastern mysticism as filtered through lots and lots of LSD.