CAPTAIN BEYOND

Captain Beyond's self-titled album combines hard rock heroics with prog-derived song suite structures to offer up a memorable trip. With Rod Evans adding a quintessentially hard rock voice to proceedings and Larry Reinhardt delivering a similarly muscular performance, this certainly isn't one of the more delicate or pretty prog albums of the 1970s, but it does deserve to sit alongside the early Queen albums as a good example of how prog song structures can rock with the best of them.

The album was dedicated to the late Duane Allman, who had helped convince Capricorn Records to take on the supergroup, and there's definitely a certain bluesiness to the riffing here and there - to the point where I detect a hint of Jimi Hendrix's Manic Depression in Raging River of Fear. If you wanted to hear what Hendrix, Allman Brothers, or Cream would have sounded like had they turned their music in a proggier direction - or what would have happened had Deep Purple listened to more jazz fusion - this album might just answer that question.