I like Rush. Their sound is fairly heavy, and certainly closer to commercial prog like Pink Floyd or Supertramp; not as exprimental. Despite that, their songs are very tight and catchy, with great vocals, guitar, and drums (Neil Peart is actually one of my favourite drummers, though Carl Palmer from ELP is better IMO). I don't really like them enough to buy more than their best of, though ("Retrospective 1" I think the collection was called).
That material is wonderful, but on the prog site I noticed that each album tends to be under 35 minutes (which is a bit of a ripoff) and when I did download some of the other tracks not on "Retrospective 1" I wasn't really impressed. So between buying other albums from better bands like Yes, King Crimson, Frank Zappa etc., and the short albums (whose best material I've got on the best of collection), I haven't bought any other of their main albums.
If I were to get some of their actual albums, which would you suggest?
Also, which songs by Ayreon do you reccomend? Because I've just downloaded a bunch of them off Limewire, but I need to know what represents some of their better material. All I need is the song titles, and if I have some of the ones you recommend, I'll tell you what I think after. So far I find they have a newer, heavier sound, and they also pay great attention to production, so there's a lot of synths, guitar soloes, and altered voices. I listened to "2084" and "My House on Mars" which I found too heavy for my tastes, but "And the Druids Turn to Stone" was actually quite impressive.