GuideConcept & Special
The Best Remastered Prog Rock Editions
A reissue is a claim about a record: that it can sound better, or that something was left off, or that the original mix was a compromise nobody has had to live with since. This guide to the best remastered prog rock editions names five below and, for each, exactly what you are buying — the edition as issued, the year, the disc count and what changes relative to the original. The two years in each heading are the album and the edition, in that order. Reissue contents are among the most misreported facts in music writing, so every claim here comes from the release itself.
Popol Vuh — Hosianna Mantra (1972/2004)
One disc, in a four-panel digipak on SPV Recordings, remastering the 1972 original from the German Pilz label and adding a single previously unreleased track, originally cut as a solo single the same year by the album’s vocalist. Nothing else changes: the eight-track running order is untouched, which is the right decision for a record this carefully sequenced. It is the most restrained reissue on the page and a useful counter-example to the modern habit of burying an album under an hour of alternates.
Il Balletto di Bronzo — Ys (1972/2001)
One disc, a card mini-LP replica with an obi strip, on Polydor through the Japanese arm of the catalogue, remastering the 1972 Italian original and adding two tracks that were not part of the album’s five-movement suite. The Japanese paper-sleeve series is worth knowing about generally: for a long stretch of the 2000s it was the only way to get a great many Italian and German records in decent transfers with the original artwork reproduced properly, and the packaging is still the standard other reissues are measured against.
Comus — First Utterance (1971/2018)
One disc on Esoteric Recordings, remastering the 1971 original from the Dawn label and adding four bonus tracks that were not on the album. The release does not document where those four came from, so we are not saying — they are additions to the reissue, and beyond that nothing is verifiable. The album itself is one of the genuinely unclassifiable records of the period, and the remaster is the reason it can now be heard rather than guessed at, because the original pressing was quiet and the source material unforgiving.
Renaissance — Turn of the Cards (1974/2020)
Three compact discs and a DVD in a clamshell box on Esoteric Recordings, with a sixteen-page booklet. The 1974 album is remastered on the first disc and joined by two tracks new to compact disc, one of them recorded on 23 March 1974 and previously unreleased. The second and third discs carry the band’s Academy of Music concert in New York with a twenty-four piece orchestra, newly mixed from the original sixteen-track tapes; the DVD carries high-resolution stereo and surround mixes made from the same tapes. One correction worth making: the packaging calls that disc a DVD-Audio and it is a DVD-Video carrying high-resolution audio, which is not the same thing.
Gentle Giant — Three Friends (1972/2011)
One disc, in a three-panel digipak with an eight-page booklet on the band’s own Alucard label, remastering the 1972 album in New York in 2011 and adding four pieces that were not on it: a previously unreleased live recording of the opening track, plus a studio rehearsal, an alternative guitar solo and a soloed vocal chorus from the sessions. That last category is the interesting one — isolated stems presented as listening rather than as curiosity, which is a habit reissues have only recently acquired. One warning: the packaging dates the live track to a New Orleans show in June 1972, and the band’s June 1972 dates were British engagements, so do not repeat that date. The band’s whole catalogue was later collected in a much larger box.
Where to start
Start with Hosianna Mantra if you want to hear what a remaster is actually for: an album whose whole effect depends on quiet detail, finally audible. First Utterance is the same argument made more dramatically. Ys is the one to buy for the object as much as the sound. Turn of the Cards and Three Friends are the fuller productions, and both are worth it only if the album underneath already matters to you — which is the honest test for every box on this page.
Go deeper
Reissues of single albums are one thing; whole careers repackaged are another, and The Best Prog Rock Box Sets covers those. Where the extra material is live rather than studio, The Best Prog Rock Live Albums of the 1970s and The Best Live Prog Rock Albums of All Time are the natural next pages.
Two of the albums remastered above are Italian and German records that spent decades hard to find in decent sound, which is the subject of The Best Hidden Gems in Italian Prog and The Best Hidden Gems in Krautrock. For the records themselves rather than their editions, see The Best Prog Rock Concept Albums of All Time and The Best Prog Rock Debut Albums of All Time.
Band guides for Popol Vuh, Il Balletto di Bronzo, Comus, Renaissance and Gentle Giant are on the site.