So, I was having a conversation on Facebook with Robert Pashman, where Saga was mentioned, and I lamented that their catalog was out of print, after the label that reissued everything went belly up. Robert pointed in the direction of one of those "Five Original Albums" sets, that has most of their early albums in it, and while looking around on Amazon, I found a couple of the others, on their own, at reasonable prices.
So in the space of a couple weeks, I went from having no Saga on CD (and only one, Worlds Apart, on LP), to having all of the first six albums, plus a later record called The Pleasure And The Pain (for some reason, that was included in the Five Original Albums set, along with the first album, Silent Knight, World's Apart, and their first live album, In Transit). Heads Or Tales has one bonus track, but there's no fancy packaging or liner notes or anything else "deluxe" about any of them. Well, at least I can listen to the music as I please, now.
So a sizeable chunk of what I've been listening to the last week has been those albums. I need to give them more listens, but I mostly like this music. I remember MTV playing On The Loose and Don't Be Late a lot back in the early days, and I'm sure somewhere I must have seen the Wind Him Up video, as when I saw it years later on Much Music it somehow rang bells of familiarity for me. Did MTV ever play Wind Him or Amnesia? I remember knowing there was a video for Amnesia, I think it was mentioned on something like Entertainment Tonight (wait, that can't be right, I must hallucinated Saga being profiled on ET, right?!) but I never actually saw it until I got the Silhouette DVD.
Would it be right to call Saga a "neo-prog" band? I kinda hear a similar vibe I get from some of the 80's bands from the UK, such as IQ, Pallas, and Fish era Marillion. That is, you seem to have this almost mainstream-ish rock sound mixed with more elaborate arrangements, which I've always liked. A lot of Saga's music sounds like it was "built for stadiums", if you know what I mean, but then there's instrumental bits that sort of push it back into the prog rock direction, which I like.
It's a damn shame that it's taken me this long to follow through and actually hear the band's albums properly, given that they've just broken up. (Shrug) But I'm definitely digging what I'm hearing.
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