My Top 10 1970s Albums (#10 to #6)

If you want to know how I arrived at this list, check out this!

 

#10 Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV (1971)

Ahh Led Zeppelin, the band that came out in 1968 and quickly overthrew The Rolling Stones as the single biggest robber of traditional blues music.

Regardless, Zep's 4th effort is one mammoth of an album and probably one of the best Rock albums ever made since.

You won't find me listening to hard-rock CDs very often (yes, Led Zeppelin was considered hard-rock when they first appeared), but you can't help but like this record. It contains 2 of Zep's biggest classics (the polyrhythmic "Black Dog" and the by-now-overplayed "Stairway to Heaven"), 2 of my personal favorites ("Rock and Roll" and "When the Levee Breaks"), and just in general, no weak tracks and the perfect balance of explosive and pastoral moments.

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#9 Fleetwood Mac - Rumours (1977)

Sandwiched between "Fleetwood Mac (1975)" and "Tusk", amongst hardcore fans "Rumours" is not consensually Fleetwood Mac's best effort.

However, it is probably the most balanced one and most known Fleetwood Mac songs to casual fans are probably in this pop-rock masterpiece.

"Go Your Own Way", "Dreams", "Don't Stop" and even "The Chain" would be enough to make any album great but this truly collective effort by the band (with Steve Nicks, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham contributing at least 3 songs each and with everybody writing "The Chain" together) resulted in an album (almost) without flaws.

The only song I consistently skip is the cringy ballad "Oh Daddy" but then again, this album also has one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac songs, the stellar fingerpicked "Never Going Back Again" so that kinda balances things out.

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#8 Van der Graaf Generator - Godbluff (1975)

Although considered by many as being in the Prog Hall of Fame and one of the top 5 most important bands from the UK scene of the 70s (another one of those appears on this list, keep reading to find out which), they never got the mainstream attention bands like Genesis or Yes did, mostly since those other 2 went on to eventually have more commercial success, catering to a different audiences.

"Godbluff" is usually considered VddG's best effort and it has one advantage over most prog albums of the era, which typically contain either a very long epic suite or multiple strong tracks with some fillers in between.

Oh no, no, no, with only 4 tracks, "Godbluff" is super concise and packs quite a punch. The album starts slowly with the ballad-like "Undercover Man" and keeps marching onwards through "Scorched Earth" and "Arrow" (my favorite here and what a rocker!) and finally finishes with the epic "The Sleepwalkers", probably one of the best songs to showcase what 70s Prog was all about. Something I always found curious was that the first song ends with "You still have time" and the last one ends with "But soon my time is ended". Deliberate?

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#7 Magma - Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh (1973)

You will be hard-pressed to find this album in any top '70s list, and it is definitely not for every taste.

As the best Prog band to ever come out of France, Magma invented a new style, called Zeuhl, heck, they even created a new language, called Kobaïan.

While in previous albums they had been playing around mostly with jazz-influenced music, due to Christian Vander's idolizing of John Coltrane, in this album, they finally arrived at what would be a career and genre-defining piece of work.

With "Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh we get everything: choral vocals ala Carls Orff, bombastic horn sections, great drumming and much more.

You can't really think of this album as a collection of songs but more like one continuous and hypnotizing movement. This is what I listen to when I want a brain massage.

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#6 Queen - A Night At The Opera (1975)

With their previous album, "Sheer Heart Attack", Queen began transitioning from their early Progressive days into a catchier style of Rock, while still maintaining their tendency for operatic and multi-layered vocals, for which they would become famous.

"A Night At The Opera" is the pinnacle of that transition and, even though the band later went on to become a hit-making machine, this is probably the album that best sums up all of Queen's facets.

It's also not a coincidence that this album contains what is probably Queen's most ambitious and famous song, "Bohemian Rhapsody" (which may surprise you, even became #1 at the time!). This song perfectly sums up this record and Queen's identity in general, the ability to blend sing-along catchiness with musically complex arrangements.

While side two, which is probably one of the best single LP sides ever made, with the aforementioned track as well as "Love of My Life" and the proggy and vocal-ladden "The Prophet's Song", is definitely stronger, side one, with its mix of rockers (like Roger Taylor's slightly silly ode to his car) and shorter almost comedic-like-numbers, which Freddy Mercury was very fond of doing at the time, can still rock your socks off.

Check out albums #5 to #1 here