The Nice – America & Other Classic Tracks (1990)

I only own three store bought cassettes and this is one of them. I don't even have a cassette player anymore, so I'm not really listening to this anymore. When I was growing up, cassettes played a huge role in my life. I used to record a massive amounts of mix tapes to be listened to both at home and especially in the car during journeys. All of these times are behind now that cars have CD-players or mp3-players and you can just create playlists on your computer, i-Pad or on Spotify. I think this cassette ended up to me from my father who had an extensive collection of cassettes. I only took a couple of those cassettes that were in good enough condition and had good enough music on them. The Nice is one of the most intense progressive rock bands out there. It's all about rhythm changes and playing around with crazy organ melodies.

This compilation album features Keith Emerson on the organ, who I mostly know from the legendary band Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The Nice has a bit more hippy tone to its music. There are some songs with clear 60's Pink Floyd Influences on this album. There are also some melodies that are ripped off some classical music songs and some sequences that sound like medieval music. This is all too familiar to anyone who's ever listened to prog rock properly.

The players in this band are incredibly talented musicians, but some of these songs sound quite corny from today's perspective. The guitar and organ solos and even drum solos are almost absent in this kind of form from modern music. 

The album title even mentions the song America, so I must talk a little bit about that song. If someone were to ask what is progressive rock, you could just play them this song and they would know. This has all the progressive rock cliches and at the same time I think it's fairly awesome song. Here's a live performance of the song. It is amazing to see how accurately each note is played on this song. 

It is sometimes mentioned that only people who play an instrument themselves is interested in progressive rock. I don't know if that's exactly true, but I can understand that you might get more out of this kind of music if you understand how difficult it is to play this kind of music. I used to listen to lots of progressive rock in my teenage years while I was learning to play the bass and the guitar. Later on I haven't really thought about music as thing where skill matters quite as much. People make really good music all the time where they are not technically that good players. But I guess that phase of admiring skills was essential to learning to play.

I don't listen to this kind of music nearly enough anymore. I know it's not that cool to listen to progressive rock these days, but I truly enjoy some of these songs. I have also noticed that there are a couple of modern progressive rock bands out there, so who knows, maybe there will be another time for prog rock coming at some point.

Listen to songs from this album on Spotify.