Gentle Giant
“Who?” – Everyone I know
“Iron Butterfly and Black Sabbath were topping the bill. Although we got off to a good start, the audience was clearly not into our kind of music. That became apparent when a fire cracker landed among us.” – Kerry Minnear
“That's why they got me in, 'cos I could hold it down.” – John “Motherfucking Bad-Ass” Weathers
Albums Reviewed:
The Official Live: Playing The Fool
If you’re a prog-rock-a-holic, a regular reader of a number of sites within the Web Reviewing Community (and not just mine), or just an amateur music scholar, you are no doubt well aware of the existence of Gentle Giant and are probably wondering why the hell I’m reviewing them before tackling Genesis (too many albums), Jethro Tull (too many albums), or ELP (hesitancy to kill myself). If you’re one of my friends or someone else who peruses this site solely because of some sort of connection to me, however, it’s very likely you have no goddamn idea who the five ugly men pictured above are and why I’ve deemed them worthy of my reviewing time. And to be honest, I don’t even know. I guess it’s that I sense a general lack of prog-rock on this site (only Yes and King Crimson have full pages at this point), I don’t want to do the other three real famous groups for the reasons listen above (although I do have Genesis’ discography in a monstrous BitTorrent file on my computer somewhere), and all their records are like 35 minutes long. Plus, I mean, look at them. The balding dude in the front is clearly stoned, the guy with the glasses in the back obviously rides the short bus, and the smirking dude on the right is undoubtedly a child molester. Come on.
Anyway, Gentle Giant started out as a most likely ridiculous R&B combo called Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, featuring the band’s eventual nucleus (the brothers Derek (or “Simon Dupree,” as he was known at the time), Phil, and Ray Shulman) and a bunch of other dudes no one cares about. They even scored a Top 10 single on the British charts in 1967 with the Moody Blues-wannabe pseudo-psychedelia tune “Kites” before calling it quits in 1969 (and no, I am not making any of this up). Soon afterwards, however, the brothers Shulman recruited guitarist Gary Green, classically trained keyboardist Kerry Minnear, and some shitty drummer guy to form the band I am reviewing on this particular webpage. And that’s all I have to say about Simon Dupree.
Describing Gentle Giant’s music is an exercise in utter futility, since they were somehow able to become the most “prog” and least “prog” of their genre at the same time. On the one hand, many of the most complex, most dissonant, and least “conventionally melodic” songs and passages in all of progressive rock come from this band, and it often seems as if they are simply making music as jerky, screwy, and hectic as possible in order to confuse and even piss off untrained listeners. On the other hand, their songs were usually over in five minutes, their longest ever clocks in at around nine, and the number of truly masturbatory solos you will find in Gentle Giant’s catalog numbers somewhere between zero and none. One the one hand, their lyrics are often indecipherable to the listener and frequently about very obscure topics. On the other hand, they composed two songs, for two different albums, for a nonexistent and exceedingly silly rock opera based on the literature of Francois Rabelais, and the topic of their only easily-identifiable concept album (Three Friends) is so simple, cute, and naïve that a middle-schooler could have come up with it. On the one hand, there is not a single virtuoso in the band of the caliber of Robert Fripp, Keith Emerson, or every single member of the YesLineup that made Fragile and Close to the Edge. On the other hand, most band members played something like fifteen different instruments and freely switched between organ, mandolin, vibes, cello, etc. during concerts, leaving their stage looking like something designed for a 20-piece orchestra. On the one hand, the number of influences you can find in Gentle Giant’s musical stew is just about limitless: jazz, rock, classical, folk, metal, a cappella, medieval gallivanting, Gregorian chants, avant-garde dissonant piano-bashing goof music…it’s all here, and more often than not in the same song. On the other hand, look at their “mascot,” which you can see on the album covers of Gentle Giant, Three Friends, and Giant For a Day!, and then think: how seriously could these guys really take themselves?
Needless to say, Gentle Giant are screwy. On any given album of theirs, you could easily find a song with an a cappella opening followed by a metal guitar riff followed by a dissonant piano bashing interlude followed by a medieval lute ballad, all done in less than two minutes and all played in different time signatures, none of which are 4/4 (although, weirdly enough, this immeasurably unique approach results in a long string of albums that don’t sound all that different from each other and don’t differ greatly in quality…oh well). While this approach certainly is not for everyone (why they never sold that well should be painfully obvious to anyone within five seconds of putting on just about any album of theirs), and someone who has not yet had the opportunity to delve into the often ridiculous world of seventies progressive rock would not want to start with this band, I often find it immensely impressive that these guys can write songs this willfully weird, avant-garde, and uncommercial and actually make them sound good, sometimes even great. Most of the band’s albums have a few such moments, and Octopus, their obvious (to me, at least) career peak, is absolutely stuffed with them. The band has blatantly obvious flaws present on all their records, though, the combination of which means a 9 is the highest rating they could ever hope to get. First, while their songwriting skills are often beyond reproach, their melody-writing skills, to me, are not a strong point at all. If this seems like a contradiction to you, I consider something like “Knots” an absolute paragon of songwriting, because so few people could have ever taken all the dissonant parts involved in that thing and mashed them together into something listenable, let alone as outstanding as “Knots” is. As a source for a traditionally catchy melody, though, let’s just say it’s lacking. Second, the almost obsessive-compulsive drive the band seemed to have to stick as many complex, differing sections with as many time signatures as possible into a 4-5 minute song means that those looking for emotional catharsis in their music are better off listening to just about any other band in the history of mankind. If these guys touch anyone’s heart, then that person is an almost unfathomably large dork.
Unlike most progressive rock bands, Gentle Giant has had relatively few lineup changes. They started out as a six-piece with Derek Shulman (fun if slightly generic (though better than Geddy Lee!) rock-star vocals, saxophone, ten other things), Ray Shulman (bass, violin, ten other things), Phil Shulman (any instrument you blow wind through, also lead vocals), Gary Green (guitar, ten other things), Kerry Minnear (keyboards, ten other things, also lead vocals), and Martin Smith (drums, and that’s it…what a PUSSY, huh?). After dropping one shitty over-busy, powerless prog drummer (Smith) for another (Malcolm Mortimore), they finally picked up one with some balls before recording Octopus (John Weathers). Phil Shulman left after Octopus, leaving the band as a five-piece for the remainder of their time on this earth, including their hilarious pop sellout period, during which they sold roughly five records a month. I mention all these lineup changes in the reviews, too, so I don’t even know why I bothered to do it here, but whatever. In the picture above, from left to right, you’ll find Derek, Ray, Gary, John Weathers, and Kerry. None of them will be showing up on the cover of GQ anytime soon.
Final Gentle Giant fun fact: Derek Shulman went on to become a record company executive and was, at different points in time, responsible for signing both Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Slipknot! Yee-hah!
And, onto the reviews!
Gentle Giant (1970)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “
A number of web reviewers (well…two) have remarked that this album’s main drawback (in terms of sales) was that it sounded a little too much like King Crimson’s genre-defining megasplurge (plus the ten minutes of disturbingly awful dental surgery known as “Moonchild”) In the Court of the Crimson King. I, however, feel I must offer some dissent. To my ears this album sounds about as much like In the Court of the Crimson King as its weaker, energy-less imitation follow-up album In the Wake of Poseidon. That is to say, in its shameless attempts to sound exactly like the most historically important album prog-rock ever released despite the fact that neither Ian McDonald nor Greg Lake were around to write all the songs on it thus making its eventual failure to kick much ass or have much atmosphere at all unsurprising, it sounds a fuckload like In the Wake of Poseidon itself, and NOT In the Court. In the Court’s four tracks that aren’t one of the ten worst songs ever written have a majestic, breathtaking power that few albums can ever hope to attain. In the Wake had a bunch of synths, guitars, and saxes tooting real loud and sounding sorta kinda OK. So does Gentle Giant.
OK, so it’s not exactly like In the Wake. It doesn’t have anything resembling the bad-ass little weirdo-pop number “Cat Food” that totally saves that album for me, for one thing, hence the rating lower than the imitation album it doesn’t attempt to be modeled after but ends up being modeled after by accident. Also, despite the off-the-wall goofiness of “Cat Food,” King Crimson had and still have the sense of humor of Robert Fripp, which means they have the sense of humor of an immobile, homogeneous pile of dog vomit that’s also a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. And although this right-wing puke heap probably likes to laugh more than Dick Cheney (and certainly doesn’t remain alive by feasting on the blood of the living), it’s probably not very funny. Not so Gentle Giant, whose obvious sense of humor is both a blessing and a curse for this album. On the one hand, a bunch of tracks that attempt to replicate the power and majesty of In the Court of the Crimson King but fail miserably because they’re just not that good certainly cannot be helped by the fact that the band are weird goofs. On the other hand, if “Giant” didn’t have that absurd (and mildly disturbing) “See the GIANT! Feel the GIANT! Touch the GIANT! Hear the GIANT!” line in there, what else would make that song interesting? It’s just another one of those proto-prog “rockers” heavy on the abrasive horns playing busily yet uneventfully and trying desperately to be “21st Century Schizoid Man” despite the fact that no song of that genre will ever be nearly as good as “21st Century Schizoid Man.” The spacey middle may be tasty, but aren’t there like five other sections on this album that sound just like it? And I’m not buying the massive chorus overdub sections at the end either. They’re trying to be powerful, but they just can’t do it. They have the chops, you see, but not the balls.
About half the album in sounds like “Giant” in one way or another. “Alucard” is basically the same song, at least in terms of riff structure, but the ear-splitting moog synth thing is a nice touch, actually, and the echoed choral vocals are at least interesting, if not very listenable. Still, at least this song tries to do something different, even if that “something” is a Rick Wakeman-synth on steroids and some atonal, echoey vocals. Bonus points for song title goofiness, too (it’s just “Dracula” spelled backwards! Fripperlips would never sink to such parlor tricks). The sections of “Nothing at All” after the spacey intro (which sounds exactly like the spacey middle part of “Giant,” which sounds exactly like the spacey part of “Alucard,” which…oh, never mind, it has a flute and wind noises! So it’s fine) improve nothing on this mediocre template, either. You can see what the band’s trying to do here, and they obviously have some very nice instrumental ability and tasty vocal stylings (provided mostly by Derek and his ever-present Simon Dupree and the Big Sound rock star yell on the “rock” songs I’ve discussed), but it’s clear that this King Crimson imitation tomfoolery is not where it’s at.
Fortunately,
the band lightens up on several occasional and provides the listener with
several examples of nascent, yet evident, songwriting talent. The charming “
This is also an album that contains a complete waste-of-time psychedelic drum solo dropped inappropriately into the middle of “Nothing at All” and an out-of-place rock re-working of “God Save the Queen” as album closer (Hey, Queen ripped off Gentle Giant! I’ll let it slide because their album-closing interpretation actually works in the album’s context, and because they, like everyone else on this planet with a life, have not heard of Gentle Giant), not to mention one of the weirdest album covers I’ve ever seen (although that was quickly outdone by the comically filthy cover of Acquiring the Taste). Gentle Giant are a weird band, and although that weirdness is eventually quite worthwhile, this half-assed pseudo-Fripp tossed-together imitation is certainly not one of their better moments. It’s relatively…normal, actually. See, the Giant is at their best, to me, when they’re just fucking with my head. Not that this album isn’t dissonant enough to hurt the eardrums of your average TRL moron teenybopper, but, dammit, I want ridiculousness from Gentle Giant, not weak, boring knockoffs of early-period King Crimson! Oh well. It’s alright, I guess, and thank god for the soft tracks.
Acquiring The Taste (1971)
Rating: 8
Best Song:
“Pantagruel’s Nativity”
"Acquiring the taste is the second phase of sensory pleasure. If you've gorged yourself on our first album, then relish the finer flavours (we hope) of this, our second offering.
“It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with the one thought - that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating. It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this.
“From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts on blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling. All you need to do is sit back, and acquire the taste."
I still can’t figure out if the above quotation, taken from the liner notes to this, Gentle Giant’s second record album, is meant to be taken seriously or just as a goof, especially considering that the opening track is about a grotesque giant from a Rabelais novel and the album cover depicts an enormous tongue drooling onto a pair of asscheeks. Either way, it’s just about accurate, because this album is weird. I’d hazard to say that, outside of the purposely over-dissonant mess that is Interview, this is the most “out-there” album in Gentle Giant’s discography. The atonal echoey vocals in “Alucard” are in like half the songs here, the song structures are about as traditional as the Xtreme Analingus the album cover is referring to, and the whole thing is just fucked-up to high heaven. As I said in the intro, Gentle Giant in general is not for the faint of heart, and I’d guess this album would either confuse, anger, or bore to death most people that come in contact with it, which probably explains why it didn’t sell worth shit. But most people are morons, and I like really fucked-up nontraditional craziness as long as it displays creativity and purpose and maintains a minimum level of listenability, all of which this album does.
Anyhoo, you can tell you’re in for a strange journey right from the opening notes of “Pantagruel’s Nativity,” some sort of rhythmless moog synth line that may or may not follow any kind of traditional scale. Thankfully, it vanishes quickly in time for the cool soft, echoey part with blasting trumpets and trilling flutes before that morphs into the slow and actually heavy metal guitar riffing section underlying some sort of Gregorian chant. And there’s like a multiple xylophone solo that leads into a metal god guitar solo for no reason. And that’s what, half the song? It’s bizarre. The song moves so slowly and sluggishly (in tempo, that is; the ideas come fast and furious) that despite the multiple excellent Gary Green moments it rocks not a whit, making up for this with a dark, utterly captivating atmosphere and the fact that there is absolutely no reason all of these parts should fit together in the same song without totally sucking ass. It’s not like any single riff is that fantastic or any melody line is that strong, but unlike, for instance, “Nothing at All” from the last album, where the different parts really seemed tossed together randomly, the odd combination of all these seemingly disparate parts really works for some reason. Why? I don’t know. But it’s sure as shit something not too many bands could pull off.
Those of you looking for a return to the relative normalcy of tracks like “Giant” and “Why Not?” from the last album (although looking to Gentle Giant for normalcy is like looking to Antonin Scalia for hippie free love…and if you read the lines notes and are looking for normalcy, you’re just a moron) after the oddness of “Pantagruel’s Nativity,” moreover, are out of luck. “Edge of Twilight” is essentially the world’s first purposely dissonant drum solo, lasting four minutes and briefly containing actual “music” in the form of more atonal choral chants and softly played clarinet lines, while the title track is a ninety-second excuse for Kerry Minnear to play five different Moog synth lines that don’t make sense on top of each other. These, along with the sections in “The House, the Street, the Room” where a bunch of scratchy percussion instruments and glockenspiels and whatnot play completely random notes in no particular order, are the kinds of things that really should fail. In the hands of just about anyone relatively sane, they probably would. But Gentle Giant, as I have said, are weird, so tossing a tape of Derek Shulman drunkenly slapping at wood blocks and mallet instruments in the middle of a song whose other dominant themes are a spooky groove rocker and a moody pseudo-medieval acoustic guitar/piano line doesn’t create an awful listening experience at all. On the contrary, “The House, the Street, the Room” is actually one of my favorite tracks here! Somehow.
I had been planning on talking about how side 2 was actually a lot more normal and similar to the debut and therefore a disappointment from the head-spinning ridiculosity of side 1, but then I listened to this album again and realized that “The Moon is Down” and “Black Cat” may be the two oddest songs on the entire record. “Wreck” and “Plain Truth” are relative throwbacks to the sound of Gentle Giant, yes, with the former reminding me favorably of the acceptable “Why Not?” and the latter, not withstanding the truly bad-ass intro and multiple overdubbed trill guitar solos that totally rule, for the most part reminding me unfavorably of the “rockers” I didn’t like at all on the last record (though thankfully leaving out the Moogs and saxes in lieu of what I think is some sort of loudly-mixed violin back there behind the riffage). “The Moon is Down” is yet another song I will struggle to explain correctly. It starts out with more dissonant chorus chanting over what sounds like a medieval harpsichord (oh, that’s after the forty seconds of melodyless saxophone blathering, thanks) before making a relatively upbeat turn halfway through to something that could be described as a “jig,” but isn’t at all because Gentle Giant felt like being really dark and shit when they were recording this thing. Plus, the saxophone solo, plucking guitar break, and wonderful Moog solo (Kerry gets so many cool sounds out of those things on this album, it’s a wonder Keith EMERSON has managed to suck the amount of ass he’s sucked in his career with similar trappings) are all winners (and all short; there are a lot of solos on this album, but they’re all like ten seconds long and obviously pre-planned to develop and add to the compositions as a whole). “Black Cat,” then, is a playful little number, or at least playful as you’re gonna get from this record, at least until the brief string quartet interlude followed by yet another section of random percussion instruments playing random crap for no reason that somehow still sounds cool because the strings are still doing interesting things in the background before the main melody line come back in at the end without your even noticing. That takes talent, my friends, and although these guys may be hopelessly white, unhip dorks with as much ability to “rock,” “kick ass,” or “move me emotionally at all” as a sponge, they are talented, and they are interesting. And they are weird.
If it seems like I’m praising this album a little too much for the 8 I’ve slapped up there as the rating, remember that Gentle Giant as a band have inescapable flaws that preclude them from rising above a certain level of quality, and their chronic lack of traditional hook-writing, epic feel, or emotional resonance means that they need to be really, really clever to get super-high ratings. This is definitely one of their best, though. Odd and dissonant to the extreme, yet endlessly interesting and even fun in places. The amount of screwball ideas they’re able to toss in without ruining the overall structure of their compositions is quite admirable, and there’s really no weak track here (except maybe the ninety-second Moog solo, which probably doesn’t need to exist). Plus, who doesn’t love graphic depictions of analingus?
Three Friends (1972)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Peel The
Paint”
Probably the least pretentious and most nondescript of all pre-“pop” Gentle Giant records doubles as the band’s only full-scale concept album, yet another conundrum in the enigma wrapped in a riddle that is Gentle Giant. And those of you turning your nose at the thought of concept albums from seventies prog-rockers due to visions of obscure Eastern religious texts and armadillo tanks dancing in your head, simmah down now, because here’s the concept: three friends grow up together, go to school, obtain three very different jobs in their adulthood (a road digger, an artist, and a white-collar business type), and…that’s it. That’s the concept. Not exactly Ian Anderson, I know.
Musically, I have very little to say about this album. It’s certainly a step down from Acquiring the Taste (of Anus). The tracks are longer (only six, one of which is like two minutes long, over thirty-five minutes of second-rate seventies prog-rock), so there are fewer ideas stretched out over longer periods of time, leading to periods of a phenomenon called “jamming” listeners of prog-rock might be familiar with, but which has not cropped up too often on Gentle Giant records to this point. Bar possibly the ham-fisted rocker “Working all Day” (Goddammit, why doesn’t this band realize they can’t rock?), which sounds EXACTLY like the mediocre hard stuff on Gentle Giant, I can’t find anything to really dislike here. Lots of pretty organs and subtle quiet sections and massed choral vocals (which are actually on-key and quite pretty, an anomaly in the Gentle Giant catalog). The album sounds more like the work of seasoned, professional musicians than the sometimes-gooftastic first two records, which I guess is a sound of “maturity,” but makes me miss the grand ol’ fucked-up-ness of Acquiring the Taste (of Salad). Gentle Giant are so overtly strange and unique that it’s tough to call anything a “generic Gentle Giant album,” but if you had to pin one down as such, this’d might be the one.
Oh, hell,
it’s still OK. I rated it higher than
the debut, didn’t I? Maybe there’s
nothing as enjoyable as “
OK, moving on, I’ve already
mentioned I don’t like “Working all Day,” and now I’ve mentioned it again, so
it’s time to discuss side 2. “Peel the
Paint” is probably one of the weakest “best song” nominees you’ll see on this
page, but I do admire it as a rocker with guitars-a-blasting, horns-a-tooting,
and Derek-a-yelling that actually gets my gander up a tad. Plus, there’s this classical string part the
first two minutes to lull you in before Derek totally starts yelling “Nothing’s
been learned, no NOTHING AT ALL!!!” that’s pretty cool, although the mp3 I have
of that section is so quiet I have to turn it up and thus summarily have my eardrums
blasted away by the rest of the track (there’s often one little aspect of this
band’s albums’ production that bothers me; on this one, it’s the volume, which
fluctuates wildly and randomly. Watch
out for the album with horribly mixed vocals and the one with backwards satanic
messages that made me kill three of my students, which is the real reason I
haven’t updated in over a month. I’m in
a jail cell right now awaiting lethal injection, but the Oyster Bay Cove prison
has ethernet access on death row, so it’s OK).
There’s another jammy section at the end, too. All the semi-soft jammy sections of this band
sound remarkably similar, especially on their early albums when their drummers
were all super-fast jazz-based prog doofuses who couldn’t play straight if
their life depended on it (possibly a contributing factor to the generally low
quality of their early rockers).
Continuing our journey through this remarkable conceptual masterpiece, “Mister Class and Quality” traces the life of the white-collar douchebag with another unconvincing horn ‘n’ guitar rocker that thankfully turns into a nicely tasty keyboard jam about halfway through (although the repetitive “give and take the orders!” melody line remains slightly annoying) and continues with said tastiness until suddenly morphing into what sounds like a church hymn, with spacey church organs and ethereal chorus vocals, i.e. the closing title track, which I actually almost nominated for best track here. It’s really good! The organs sound ace, for instance. Great sound, and one of the band’s handful of moments that at least reside within the ballpark of “epic.”
Anyway, pretty good album here, but definitely no more, and really one of Gentle Giant’s most forgettable and least interesting outings (remembering that something can be “interesting” for bad reasons as well as good). It’s a worthwhile piece of work, but unless you’re a Gentle Giant completist (if in fact you’ve actually heard of Gentle Giant), feel free to skip it. Though one of the band’s most accessible and listenable moments, it’s more of a respite between Acquiring the Taste (of Eating Out Someone Else’s Ass With Your Massive, Drooling Tongue) and Octopus than anything else.
Octopus (1972)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Knots”
There’s really no such thing as the “consensus best Gentle Giant album,” if only because most hardcore Gentle Giant fans are too busy debating serious questions like “Kirk vs. Picard” to bother with such trivial nonsense, but this one (along with In a Glass House, Free Hand, and actually just about anything pre-The Missing Piece) might come the closest, and to me there’s really no contest. If you want only one Gentle Giant album, this collection of eight deliciously twisted, head-spinningly complex, and surprisingly melodic (in their own sort of way…) compositions has got to be the one. And I for one am gonna give a good bit of credit to new drummer and inconceivably dorky-looking man John Weathers. The band always had the chops and (usually) the compositional skill, but their all-too-frequent attempts at “rocking out” always ended up somewhere between “passably decent” and “laughably pathetic,” due in large part to the over-tricky jazzy wussiness of early drummers Martin Smith and Malcolm Mortimore. And while John Weathers may look like the treasurer of the International Dungeons and Dragons fan club (and may well be, for all I know) and is able to play as tricky as you like when necessary, his addition gives Gentle Giant, for the first time, the capability to rock. Now, ofcourse, I’m not saying that the band has turned into The Who here. What I am saying is that the songs and sections of songs in the past that required a rock-solid, groovin’ backbeat finally have that backbeat, so the dissonant piano bashing of “The Advent Panurge,” the hyperactive noise-rock of “A Cry for Everyone,” and the sections of “River” where John does these totally bitching multi-drum fills are fat and sturdy and meaty, unlike the wuss-fests that we’ve seen until this point. Quoth Derek Shulman about the new skin-basher, “we were realizing we could rock as well as do nice tinkly things.” Acquiring the Taste was a real good album, sure, but the best moments were the most self-consciously screwy, and the straightahead rocking sections only presented mild improvements on similar material from the debut. But now they’ve got nerdboy, so it’s OK.
It’s not like you can add a good, steady drummer to “Nothing at All” or “Working all Day” and turn them into dominant songs, though, so the addition of Mr. Weathers, as well as (unfortunately) the final appearance of Phil Shulman, also gives us easily the best bunch of Gentle Giant compositions you’ll ever be able find in one spot. The semi-rambling (but still pleasant) “jamming” sections of Three Friends are completely gone (were they rushed when they made that album? Because it’s just not like these guys to jam semi-aimlessly), leaving us with Gentle Giant’s most ridiculously complicated album to date, with eight songs clocking in at a tidy 34 minutes, meaning that these often inconceivably complex songs are over done with in an average time of just over four minutes. Long-winded these things are not. Weird, though, they are, but somehow the band is able to compress all these often-quite-dissonant ideas into four-minute running times and have the whole thing both make sense and sound quite good, which is no mean feat, really.
The first side is where most of the best material is gonna be found. For the second time in four albums, the band begins a record with an excerpt from a nonexistent rock-opera based on the works of Rabelais, this time “The Advent of Panurge,” in which “the fabulous Rabelaisian giant, Pantagruel (last seen in “Pantagruel’s Nativity” from Acquiring the Taste), discovers a lifelong friend and companion, Panurge.” I for one have never read any Rabelais, nor have I been able to learn much about Rabelais outside of Gentle Giant’s random references (principally due to lack of both effort and giving a shit), but that doesn’t hurt my thorough enjoyment of both of this band’s Rabelaisian compositions. A bit of lovely a cappella harmonizing (a new and extremely welcome ingredient to the Gentle Giant stew, as well as one that would provide us with the most interesting song in the band’s catalog a few tracks hence) greets us at first before, undercut by a fabulously groovy backbeat courtesy of Mr. Weathers, Kerry proceeds to hit a bunch of organ and piano chords that belong together only if one enjoys sounds that don’t belong together. Dig the middle section of indecipherable spacey vocals drifting in and out over the kick-ass drum ‘n’ bass groove and occasional avant-garde piano tinklings! The song then works up a sweat again towards the end before the final “Myyyyyyyyy name is Panurge and I have COOOOOOOOOME from HELL!” line that just kicks my ass everywhere, the momentum from which is only lost briefly in the next few tracks (the somewhat ugly sounding hard rock guitar chord intro to “A Cry For Everyone”). I for one think the medieval troubadour theme song “Raconteur Troubadour” might actually be the second-best tune here, for instance (trailing my totally irrational and idiotic choice for the best). The way the truly medieval-sounding vocal melody and piano trills give way to the string quartet waltz section and randomly dissonant trumpet-blasting part is really fantastic. Hell, once the ugliness of the guitar intro goes way, “A Cry For Everyone” turns into this bad-ass hyper-tricky synth/guitar hibbity-jibbity before some John Weathers percussion overdubs provide the first truly KICK-ASS moment in the entire Gentle Giant catalog. Excellent stuff. These songs are busy, but never so much so that it seems like the band is deliberately fucking with you.
Well, except once, and that exception, the ridiculous “Knots,” happens to be my favorite track on the album and probably my favorite Gentle Giant track, period. The interlocking dissonant a cappella vocal parts at the beginning (the band’s attempt at a so-called “musical jigsaw”…think of “round” singing like you did in grade school, only written by an overcaffeinated astrophysicist manchild with far too much time on his hands) are utterly insane, especially when one considers that the band were able to reproduce them exactly when they played the song live, but when the melody line (no kidding) consisting of two saxophone notes and two or three unidentifiable percussion implements being hit at seemingly random times (and taken each on their own, they are; they’re off the beat completely, but put together they somehow work) comes in, you just have to tip your hat to these guys. Why anyone would want to write such an amazingly complex track with this amount of preciseness in planning and execution that something like 5% of the world’s population could actually find enjoyment in (it’s possibly the most dissonant pre-Interview track in the band’s entire catalog) is beyond me, but they did, and god bless ‘em. The song does turn into a relatively pretty piano jam with layered on-key vocals on top during its second half, so it’s not all ridiculous all the time, but it’s close.
The 2nd half is a bit of a slip from the 1st, but it’s not a horrible drop. “The Boys in the Band” is an instrumental, and a damn good one, but doesn’t really do anything I haven’t seen before on this album or earlier in the band’s career. “Dog’s Life,” the band’s sarcastic tribute to their roadies (oh, such nice guys they were…), gets by with strings and a medieval reed organ (say the liner notes) and no percussion, but it’s a real nice, pretty, relaxed time. “Think of Me with Kindness” is the one song that doesn’t really fit on the album at all, a soaring piano ballad that’s easily their best of the genre since “Funny Ways,” and probably better (by the way, what does it tell about the relative quality of Gentle Giant and Octopus that by far the best song on the first is slightly inferior to something tucked away harmlessly on side 2 of the second?). “River” closes the album a high note, with the rhythm section (dig the multiple drum bashes at the end!), Gary Green (the guitar solos near the end are ace) and studio effects guys (dig the random whooshing sounds underneath Kerry’s delicate keyboard work) giving especially good performances, but, like most of side 2, I’ve never had much to say about it. Side 2 of this album is certainly of high quality, and it’s definitely less difficult on the ear than most of side 1, but “The Advent of Panurge,” “Raconteur Troubadour,” and “Knots” are such fantastic pieces of work that that they can’t help but overshadow the rest of the album.
So, anyway, improved, more focused songwriting + new, far superior drummer = the best Gentle Giant album yet, as well as by far the best Gentle Giant ever got. This band is certainly not for everyone (for instance, my roommate once listened to half of “The Advent of Panurge” and told me to turn it off after two minutes because it was too dissonant…and his two favorite albums of the seventies are Red and Marquee Moon, so it’s not like he hates “weird” music), but if they are for you, this is the place to start. Lack of emotional impact and top-shelf vocal melodies aside, the sheer amount of musical ability it took to write this album is astounding.
In A Glass House (1973)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “The
Runaway”
Two facts about this album
illustrate Gentle Giant’s enormous lack of commercial cache, even when compared
to their progressive rock brethren like Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, and
Horseface McGee,
Thing is, this album is good! It’s my second-favorite Gentle Giant release, actually, and musically it’s not really that much of a step down from its superior predecessor. My main musical issue with the album is that, after doing quite nicely at the whole “stuff a whole bunch of randomly dissonant crap into a four-minute song and hope to hell it works” thing on Octopus, the band apparently remembered “hey, we’re a prog-rock band! Aren’t we supposed to have long songs?” So while there are no Yes or Jethro Tull-length extendo-tracks to be found here, instead of thirty-four minutes containing eight tracks, this album presents thirty-eight minutes containing six, two of which (“An Inmate’s Lullaby” and “A Reunion”) combine for something like seven. Thus we are left with four bad boys clocking it at somewhere between seven and eight minutes each, and while this is not necessarily a problem per se, it is slightly annoying after the screwy genius of Octopus.
Mostly due to the track length factor, which leads the band to frequently sound less like Gentle Giant and more like either an especially energetic Genesis or a really fucking bored Yes, this is probably the most stereotypical “progressive rock” of Gentle Giant’s albums. Like, if you ask someone to tell you what “prog-rock” sounds like, with herky-jerky yet pleasant-sounding (the dissonance factor is again, like the difference between Acquiring the Taste and Three Friends, greatly reduced) guitar/keyboard patterns, meaningless lyrics you can toss away at a moment’s notice, certain sections that sound almost symphonic, and no humor at all, this comes the closest to that generic definition. Fortunately, it frequently operates very well within this set of boundaries, specifically the tight ‘n’ tasty seven-minute opener “The Runaway,” where the time signatures are always a little off, the riffs are always a little skewed, and the solos (including, but not limited to, keyboard and xylophone!) are lengthy and show-offy but always melodic and grounded. I suppose maybe this is something new for the band, making a top-notch song that sounds more like Genesis than themselves. Either way, good times indeed.
The proto-disco-rock (no kidding) of “Way of Life” is a winner, too, but mostly due to the parts after the hi-hat spinning funkaaaaay guitar pattern of the first few minutes goes away, leaving us with some lovely medieval Gentle Giant sounds, namely soft flutes and such leading us into a quite bombastic (especially for these guys) keyboard blast section (though I could do without the two minutes of aimless harpsichord twiddling at the end). Hell, I even like the silly “GO!” disco-rock sections, too. The only real problem I have with these tracks (and this is by far the record’s biggest flaw as a whole as well) is the absolutely atrocious vocals. Musically, it feels like the band put nearly as much care and effort into this one as they did into Octopus, but the vocals are barely audible! Perhaps Derek is nervous at being THE FRONTMAN now that Phil and his vocals on a good third of the tracks are gone, but there’s still no reason for the band to spend months on these detailed musical backgrounds only to half-assedly slap on some vocal parts two weeks before the release date. And I’m not even kidding, because that’s what the vocals sound like. Technically fine, but uninspired and mixed extremely low, like a goddamn afterthought. The main exception is the altogether odd atmospheric ditty “An Inmate’s Lullaby,” in which the musical backing (consisting nearly entirely of copious mallet percussion instruments, including xylophones, glockenspiels, and timpani) is occasionally so slight you figure the vocals (which seem to be put through some sort of effects box to boot) have to sound relatively forceful. The tune’s a real winner, though, and very original. If a lot of bands (albeit on an exceptionally good day) could have made “The Runaway,” only Gentle Giant could have made “An Inmate’s Lullaby” (compare it to “Knots” in that way; I’m quite sure no one else could have written that one).
Despite the criticism I’ve leveled against parts of this album so far, the fact remains that side 1 of this theoretically conceptual piece (about, um, living in a glass house…) is actually very strong, probably better than side 2 of Octopus even. Just as with its predecessor, however, side 2 is where we see a slight, though noticeable, dip in quality. “Experience” dials the medieval influences up to higher than they’ve ever been, from the bouncy court jester acoustic opening part to the church harpsichord chords in the song’s middle. After this part, though Mr. John Weathers busts in with his butt-shaking groovathon of a drum pattern and Gary Green starts tearing a hole in the motherfucker (OK, no, not really, but this is Gentle Giant, so we’ve gotta take what we can get). Either way, enjoyable times are had by all during the middle sections of “Experience” where the thing rocks out a bit. After the pretty, two-minute string afterthought “Reunion,” then, the relatively unmemorable title track, surely the least exciting tune on either of these last two Gentle Giant albums, takes us home in a slightly disappointing way. Don’t get me wrong, the song is a generally agreeable time, with guitars and keyboards a-playing inoffensive and mildly melodic chatter in the background before the band makes one last stab at hard-drivin’ groove rock! YEAH!!! It’s OK, I guess. I suppose it’s unfortunate that, bar the second half of “Experience,” it seems this band was only able to harness the ROCK for one album. I never go to them for that, anyway. It’s just a fringe benefit.
Why I decided to review Gentle
Giant I don’t know, but this one here is definitely one of their best offerings
and a real darn good record album indeed.
Not as exciting or interesting as Octopus,
but just as professional and well-written.
Unfortunately, thus ends the little
The Power And The Glory (1974)
Rating: 7
Best Song:
“Proclamation”
Yup, it’s another Gentle Giant album, that’s for certain. A fairly interesting concept, too, about the corruption of power, the tenuous relationship of a ruler with his subjects, etc. (in theory that’s what it is, at least; I can never understand enough of Derek Shulman’s vocals on any album to make out what a given song is talking about). And it’s not bad, either! Not great, and definitely a drop from the aforementioned mini-peak of the last two records, but I certainly dig into this one more than both the debut and Three Friends (which is a pretty weak 7, to be honest; that Mortimore guy blows).
There’s a little bit of a change in sound here, too, though not for the better, as the band, for the first time in earnest, really tries to bring the funky hard rock, the most immediate side-effect of which is that Kerry’s vast array of keyboards has been reduced, mostly, to a loud church organ and that “funky” keyboard thing that sounds sort of like a Hammond organ but isn’t (anyone know what that is? Because I’m bejiggered!). Our favorite dorky bald guitarist, Gary Green, gets in on the act as well, letting loose some fat, rocking guitar lines in songs like “Valedictory” (the opening of this tune might as well be by Grand Funk Railroad…by the way, how’s about some love for two Grand Funk Railroad references on a Gentle Giant page, huh?), at least before getting repeatedly swallowed up by the busy keyboard twiddlings that, despite the renewed interest in writing funky rock music, are still all over the place because this is Gentle Fucking Giant and a Gentle Fucking Giant album without ultra-busy keyboard twiddlings is no Gentle Giant album at all, sir. Also, Derek and his charismatic rock star voice sing on pretty much everything, leaving Kerry and his pretty mellowness to add beauty to the ballad “Aspirations” and make the ultra-complex confuse-a-thon “So Sincere” more tolerable, so that’s another thing that shows the band is attempting to rock more. Plus John Weathers is the most badass motherfucker on the planet, forcing all other players and pimps to get out of the way of him, his bitches, his unwashed Oakland A’s jersey, his bald head, and his six-inch pothole glasses. You don’t fuck with that guy when he’s laying it down.
But I digress. I often see this record characterized as the most dissonant and unwelcoming Gentle Giant album outside of the frequently reviled Interview (and by “often,” I mean “on George’s and John McFerrin’s pages”), but I must wholeheartedly disagree. That’s not to say the album is “accessible” in any way, and it’s definitely more “difficult” than, for instance, the debut, as well as probably Three Friends and In a Glass House. So, yeah, it’s “difficult.” But what Gentle Giant album isn’t? That’s the whole point of this damn band! Expecting a Gentle Giant album released before The Missing Piece or even Giant For a Day! to be “accessible” is like expecting Ashlee Simpson to have talent. So just get past the fact that “So Sincere” is damn-near unlistenably complicated the first time you hear it (and you know what? I don’t hate it! Sure, it’s annoying and the dissonance isn’t as well put-together as that of “Knots,” but why single out this song for ridicule when you’ve got like 20 other Gentle Giant songs you could make fun of? The thing is actually in 4/4 time if you get past the millions of other little parts jerking in and out at random times). And it’s followed up by the lovely keyboard ballad “Aspirations,” which is about as “dissonant” as the Beatles and one of the best songs on the album. Saying this album is more “difficult” than everything previous to it is just asinine. So Kerry’s keyboard’s don’t sound as pretty in the Yes/Genesis way and he’s using more funky seventies tones. Whoop-de-damn-do.
The opener here, “Proclamation,” kicks ass by the way. That’s a totally danceable (you think I’m kidding? Ha!) keyboard rhythm Kerry’s breaking out in the beginning, and the balance of the solid rhythm section, screwy yet still danceable keyboards, and “Knots”-esque (but not nearly as ridiculous) round vocals in the main part are just spiffy. The middle sections with the keyboard jam and the dissonant organ bashing part (because every Gentle Giant song over six minutes, by law, has to have a dissonant organ bashing part) aren’t so hot, but they’re not so annoying they make you turn off the song, and I do love the main melody. The biggest winner left to me is the unfortunately under-discussed “No God’s a Man,” which proves to me that I just dig it way too much when Derek sings four different vocal melodies and layers them over each other (since that’s the same trick he used in “Proclamation”). Instead of admiring the whole piece of work and its subtle buildup (not that there isn’t or anything; I’m just admiring something else), I dig mostly into the vocal sections here, with their lovely melodies as well as the aforementioned overlapping vocals (listen to what sound like reindeer bells in one of them! Sweet!). But then again I’m an idiot so maybe you shouldn’t listen to me.
Everything else is fine, but nothing
else is particularly outstanding. It’s
Gentle Giant, you know? It’s cool and
interesting but not especially gripping.
The lengthy “Playing the Game” seems to get inordinate amounts of
fellatio, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard most of the parts in this song before,
plus the vocal melody sounds like a refugee from In a Glass House, where the vocals had as much passion behind them
as George W. Bush has IQ points. “Cogs
in Cogs” is the other song that seems to get shat on because it’s too dissonant
and complicated, but where I could see the argument for “So Sincere,” despite
not really agreeing with it, I see so little to separate “Cogs and Cogs” from
tens of other perfectly acceptable over-busy Gentle Giant keyboard songs that I
actually find it somewhat forgettable, not
dissonant crap. Maybe it’s just me,
though. Maybe I’d rather listen to
really talented but dorky guys and their hyper-complicated songs with notes
that probably shouldn’t go together than some over-produced nu-metal garbage or
computer-heavy teen pop manure. Does
that make me a bad person?
Filling out the album, “The
Face” books along at a pretty nice pace, but since it’s dominant musical motif
is a proggy-sounding fiddle riff, it’s not the most face-melting experience
I’ve ever had. I do enjoy the rock
beginning of “Valedictory,” with its great drum figure and almost-metal riff,
but the echoed dissonance of Derek’s vocals wouldn’t have been my first pick
for what to layer over it. Great guitar
work from
Free Hand (1975)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “On
Reflection”
Gentle Giant’s best-charting
album in the
I’ve seen this record called Gentle Giant’s “avant-garde pop album,” but I’m not sure how much I buy that. Until the last three, where the band just starts blatantly selling out, there’s so little to distinguish one Gentle Giant album from another that to call one their “pop” album and another their “dissonant” album is retarded. I find this record to be just like any other Gentle Giant album released to this point, only with less general heaviness, intentional dissonance, and guitar presence, and a general increase in “bounciness.” While this certainly makes the album the most “ear-friendly” of the band’s “prog” material, that’s still a loooooong way from being “pop.” Take the aforementioned “On Reflection,” for instance. As I said before, the only thing separating this tune from the wildly ridiculous “Knots” is the use of, you know, actual chords. And while I’m not saying “actual chords” aren’t a big deal, it’s not like extremely complex five-part medieval harmonies are gonna get played on Top 40 radio any time soon. The opener “Just the Same” is the same way. I can see how someone used to “Cogs in Cogs” and “An Inmate’s Lullaby” might call this “pop music,” but look at it in the grand scheme of things. While snapping fingers, bouncy piano, and a jaunty rhythm section may be poppish in theory, they’re not so much if they’re in 13/7 time or whatever this thing’s in, and the vast array of Kerry’s keyboard’s on display here just screams “PROG” at me. The part like three and a half minutes in where Kerry’s soloing on like four Moogs at the same time sounds a lot like a slightly neutered WakemanYes. The song’s real strong, though, definitely the best after the masterful vocal showcase of “On Reflection.” So thus far the new “why don’t we not try to fuck with people’s ears too much” thing seems to be working.
This kind
of powerless, bouncy, medieval synth-prog isn’t gonna stay at that level for
thirty-five minutes, however, and anyone who expects this is severely
deluded. This is actually the first
Gentle Giant album since the debut where there’s like a full half of it I can’t
differentiate from itself, just because the tone (jaunty, bouncy) and
instrumentation (Kerry, Kerry, and more Kerry, with
I like this album. I really do. But it’s more of an objective respect for the compositional acumen and tasteful medieval arrangements involved than any kind of personal attachment to the music. I find it odd that the first Gentle Giant album without any intentional “fuck with the listener” moments is the one, out of all of them so far, I feel the most ambivalent and unattached to, but whatever. This is a very well put-together album by seasoned professionals who have found a signature sound they’re comfortable in, but nothing really pushes the envelope here, and the overall effect is a bit underwhelming. But it’s not gonna fuck with your head, and the band’s talent is still fully evident, so it’s probably one of the better introductions to the band out there. It should also be noted that it’s probably the most-represented record on the fantastic live album you’ll be reading about two reviews hence, with the entire first side given a feature role. It’s just, you know, kinda boring.
Interview (1976)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “I Lost My
Head”
While it’s certainly not boring, and it’s surely one of Gentle Giant’s most purposely “wrong”-sounding albums, the dissonance and complexity of this one are not as bad as George Starostin would have you believe. He is right about one thing, though: this is the first time that Gentle Giant’s screwy ways get a bit away from them. Many of these songs can be traced back to earlier Gentle Giant compositions, but just a little bit more fucked-over than their models. This is a problem. Songs like “The Advent of Panurge,” “Knots,” and 2/3 of the songs ever produced by this ridiculous band teeter oh-so-precariously on that edge of acceptability without falling off the proverbial cliff, and that little bit of extra dissonance causes several sections of this record to be damn near unlistenable. Interesting, yes, and not at all boring, but when I can’t listen to a piano or organ riff without getting a headache, you know someone has gone a little overboard.
Oh, this is also a concept album, taking the structure of a fictional “interview” with the band, and many of the songs deal with the trappings, usually negative, of rockstardom, as evidenced by a handful of song titles (“Interview,” “Another Show,” “Empty City,” etc.). For those of you snickering at the idea of Gentle Giant lamenting how crappy rockstardom is, I hear you loud and clear, but it is true that Free Hand was the band’s most successful album and eventually the basis for by far their most successful tour, so the guys went into the studio (which they did extremely late and with little time to record, by the way, due to the success of said tour) at essentially their peak of commercial viability. It’s not like the apex of Gentle Giant’s commercial cache is anywhere near where U2’s been for about twenty years or the Rolling Stones have been for over forty, but by 1976 they were certainly a well-established, viable commercial entity, at least relatively.
Anyway, back to the music. The only song I actively hate here is the ultimately useless and faceless “Timing,” about which I can remember nothing except that I usually think it sucks ass while it’s playing (and I know I’ve left out some of the usual offenders by saying this, but remember I have a high tolerance for ear pain and “Knots” is my favorite Gentle Giant song of all time), but very little of this material avoids at least slightly pissing me off for its entire duration. The opening title track probably should be one of the best tunes here in its rocking, danceable, avant-garde piano-bashing goodness (think “The Advent of Panurge,” but more, uh, squeaky), but the first example of that aforementioned “falling off the cliff” phenomenon occurs here, specifically when Kerry goes off on one of his patented modern classical random-keyboard-hitting tangents underneath a suitably funky drum pattern (John partially got his mojo back from Free Hand for this one, and it’s kind of a shame the rest of the band neglected to play real notes half the time). What the hell rhythm is that? What the hell scale is that? Are you kidding me? Sometimes I actually think it’s catchy, but more often than not it’s just jarring. Not cool. The other Octopus-track imitation that manages to go a bit too far is the universally loathed “Design,” which sounds exactly like “Knots,” but somehow more ridiculous, and also lacking the pretty piano parts at the end, instead replacing them with drum bashing and still more dissonant overlapping vocals. While “Knots” rested just within the realm of acceptability for me, and thus its impressive complexity completely won me over, “Design” rests just on the other side of the fence. It’s basically the same bag of tricks, only worse. Again, the insane precision and talent required to try a piece like this, as well as the sheer balls it takes to do so, impress me to no end, but this time it’s a little too much for my enjoyment. I’d still rather listen to “Design” on an endless loop than two minutes of, say, Ja Rule, though. Does that make me a dork?
Moving on, “Give it Back” is reggae played by Gentle Giant on the most intentionally dissonant album of their career. And no, I’m not kidding. Shockingly, it’s not awful, but to say it’s good would be incorrect as well. Let’s just say “weird, silly, strange, and ultimately unenjoyable,” shall we? Fine. “Another Show” actually sounds a tad like some of the rockers on The Missing Piece, only fucked with a lot, because every song on this album is fucked with a lot, and “Empty City,” for the most part, is actually a quite pleasant listen, if not really great. The quiet, medieval beginning breaks no new ground for the band whatsoever, but it’s very nice, and I don’t even mind when it gets all hard-rockin’ ear-splittin’ during the “SOOOO long!” parts. Whatever wind instrument that is back there sounds alright indeed. Finally, the closing “I Lost My Head,” while really just a decent Gentle Giant rocker in the grand scheme of things, closes things out with the most enjoyable track you’ll find here. John does an OK job of laying it down, Gary Green finally gets to play real loud for the first time since The Power and the Glory, and Derek’s vocals are actually some of the most impassioned yells you’ll hear from him in the Gentle Giant catalog. It comes directly after “Timing,” by the way. I still don’t remember a thing about “Timing.”
Though I stand by my statement in the previous review that such statements concerning Gentle Giant records are ludicrous, if you feel obligated to call one “the dissonant one,” this is it. The fact that it came between the band’s first album that didn’t have any intentional dissonance and their super-happy-fun-pop-sellout period is odd, but so is the fact that their fifth album still hasn’t been released in the U.S. and the fact that the cover of their second album features a picture of analingus. A lot of things about this band are odd. Out of two records, why does the “accessible” one have Thing on the cover and the “difficult” one have a pretty, pretty rainbow? And why is John Weathers so cool? I guess some things we’ll never know.
The Official Live: Playing The Fool (1977)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “
Hey! Guess what?
Gentle Giant kicked scrotum live.
Lots of it. To the point where I
might even like this record more than Octopus,
and I most definitely recommend it as
the best starting point for this goofy band you can get. It’s real hard to fault either the setlist or
the playing here, though I suppose we could have done without “So Sincere”
(though it’s stretched out to ten minutes by an absolutely bad-ass full-band
drum bash which rules). It’s also interesting to look at the track
listing, consider it was taken from the Interview
tour, and notice that the only song actually from Interview on here is “I Lost My Head,” which is tacked onto the end
of “Peel the Paint” in a two-song medley afterthought. Guess they didn’t like that Interview album so much, did they?
This review will be
short. I promise, especially considering
the absurd length of some of my reviews of earlier Gentle Giant records (The Power and the Glory needs a multi-page
thesis as much as Paris Hilton needs another venereal disease). The songs on this bad boy are taken from all
over the place and constitute almost a live “greatest hits” (if Gentle Giant
ever had hits, that is) package, with
the only album completely unrepresented being (unfortunately) Acquiring the Taste. “Funny Ways” is taken from Gentle Giant, “Peel the Paint” from Three Friends, “The Runaway” and
“Experience” from In a Glass House,
“Proclamation” and “So Sincere” from The
Power and the Glory, the entire first side (“Just the Same,” “On
Reflection,” “Free Hand”) from Free Hand,
and, as previously mentioned, only “I Lost My Head” from Interview. The
representation of Octopus is a
different matter entirely, as little pieces of the majority of its tunes are
spliced up and reassembled in often drastically rearranged versions (like
acoustic guitar instrumental takes on one or two of them, for instance) for a
fifteen-minute splurge of a medley called, appropriately, “Excerpts from
Octopus.” The only tunes I can pick out
are “The Boys in the Band” (whose intro we get at the start), “Knots” (parts of
the vocal harmonies as well as cool piano jam parts) and “The Advent of
Panurge” (the whole damn song! Yeehah!),
but sources inform me a number of others are dropped in there somewhere, so
I’ll just trust them. That’s what
sources are for, you know.
Musically,
as I said, this thing is top-notch. John
Weathers’ ability to rock ferociously
is on full display throughout, and Gary Green and Kerry Minnear give us a good
number of guitar/keyboard solo duels that never fail to put a hop in my wop
roommate. Songs are either reproduced
flawlessly or jiggled around flawlessly (for instance, “Funny Ways” is now five
minutes longer than “The Runaway,” and “On Reflection” now begins with a
three-minute medieval recorder/violin part).
The ridiculous interlocking vocals in “On Reflection” and “Knots” are
spot-on, and the seeming ease with which they’re done is astonishing. “
Great live album here, yessir. Great singing, great playing, great song selection. Everything good about Gentle Giant is contained here, including their goofiness (witness the fun, unnecessary linking thing “Sweet Georgia Brown (Breakdown in Brussels).” And now that they’ve again shown us what a great band they can be, you know what time it is? That’s right! Time to sell out! Whee!
The Missing Piece (1977)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “As Old As
You’re Young”
A completely ridiculous album that finds Gentle Giant building on the success of Free Hand and their last two excellent tours by attempting to “mainstream” their sound, adopting such touches as really obvious ballads that smack you over the head with their generic sooooaaaaaaring melodies, phat disco bass lines, and bad-ass funky boogie woogie rock. From the men that brought you “Design” a year ago. Right. You can probably guess how this album turns out, and you shouldn’t be surprised at the fact that their traditional fan base turned up their nose at this and everything the band subsequently released while those “new” fans the guys were no doubt hoping for never came, because the first single (“I’m Turning Around”) is an embarrassingly generic ballad that’s one unnecessarily reverbed snare tone away from being the next Corey Hart smash hit (does this mean the band was ahead of their time?), and because it’s GENTLE GODDAMN GIANT. You can’t get those ultra-screwy vibes out of your system instantaneously, you know? So the pop songs have these occasional “prog” touches that, since it’s not cute, unthreatening prog like what Yes or Genesis may have been producing at the time, turn off the moron pop listener. Plus, it’s not like hardcore Gentle Giant fans are listening to this band for their innate sense of pop melody. If there was any band that had absolutely no business going “pop” whatsoever, it was these guys.
Shockingly, though, the album doesn’t turn out that badly. I say they had no business going pop because of the nature of their fan base and their commercial viability, not necessarily because of their talent. That’s not to say this album is good or anything, but it’s certainly okay, and a handful of tracks are actually pretty damn entertaining. First, though, the bad. I’ve already mentioned “I’m Turning Around,” but let me expound for a second on its badness. Production-wise, it’s not actually horrendous. There’s a real organ and guitar and everything in there, and its general sound is relatively attractive. It’s just one of those ballads with the generic BIG, SWOOPING HOOK that is so obvious and so predictable that it makes anyone who has actually listened to more than ten or fifteen songs in their life angry. At least it should. The funk-rock experiments here are also crap, not that this should surprise you (since Gentle Giant was the funkiest band ever back in the day, eh?). “Who Do You Think You Are?” and “Mountain Time” are just ass-poor, for instance, though the latter is worse (where did those female backup singers come from? Are you serious?), making the former at least tolerable. Why is Gentle Giant playing funk-rock? It’s ridiculous! And “Betcha Thought We Couldn’t Do it” is almost punk! Shall I call it punk boogie? I shall! It’s silly, very silly, and it’s over in, what, two minutes? Even though I actually like this one for some reason, these songs are all too damn busy as well, like Kerry, lamenting that the band has decided to go this boogie pop route, inserts as many keyboards as he can into every song. I guess you could call this Gentle Giant’s answer to Yes’ Tormato in that respect, plus they’re both very silly. But Tormato gets a higher rating because Yes are a better band and Tormato is the silliest album I’ve heard in my life and sucks so hard it’s good. Perhaps if The Missing Piece sucked harder, I could give it a higher rating.
Oh, but there are some good songs here! Honest-to-goodness solidly done tunes, not like the best songs on Tormato (which were so over-the-top ridiculous I liked them because they made me pee myself). I suppose “Two Weeks In Spain” is this band’s idea of what power-pop sounds like, which just goes to show you how fucked-up this band was. It’s as herky-jerky as nearly anything you’ll find on any Gentle Giant album, only it has a recognizable BIG HOOK, the instrumental interplay is sensible, it’s in 4/4 time and never strays from it, and there’s enough repetition that the aforementioned BIG HOOK will stick in your head. I find the song entertaining, though I’m not sure if that’s my appreciation for well-done pop songs or my soft spot for this band at their screwiest. Either way, it was a single and no one liked it, so poop on people.
Side 2 is where the band decided to make their final, half-hearted stand as a prog-rock band, sliding in a batch of more traditional Gentle Giant material and actually coming up with two real good ones. “As Old As You’re Young” is totally Kerry’s showcase and the last example of his obsession with traveling back in time to become a medieval flute minstrel of some kind. It’s very bouncy, fun, and lighthearted, and the keyboard interplay is often quite impressive. Definitely my favorite tune here, though the one most often cited as the best is the following seven-minute “Memories of Old Days,” which is the only song here without any pop leanings at all (which, therefore, makes it an easy pick for best song on this whore sellout piece of trash by elitist fans of this silly band). I certainly admire the song a great deal, with its lovely acoustics and haunting atmosphere, but I’d probably find more personal enjoyment out of it were John Weathers not absent for its entire duration. I like his drumming! The song, without any sort of rhythmic basis, ends up a bit meandering for me, though objectively it is lovely. Finally, except for the super percussion intro part to “Winning” (and its recurrence in a breakdown later on) that sounds like the opening to In a Glass House or something, nothing about this tune or the closer “For Nobody” will excite you, though I suppose all they are is “boring” and not “offensive” (like “I’m Turning Around” or “Mountain Time”…ofcourse, I suppose this also means they’re not “funny,” but whatever). The bass line in “Winning” is totally disco, by the way, and the band tries to work up a sweat on the busy-prog intro to “For Nobody,” but neither of these touches is very exciting and neither really sounds like Gentle Giant. Yee-hah.
This isn’t a bad album or anything, but it’s completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of all things Gentle Giant (unless the idea of these guys playing boogie woogie funk rock is too hilarious for you to pass up), which I guess is why their career went completely in the tank after it got released. Gentle Giant is so not at home in these styles it’s hilarious, but they’re talented enough to make most of it tolerable and large chunks of it actually enjoyable. Plus, it’s silly! Like this band. They’re silly.
Giant For A Day! (1978)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Words
From The Wise”
More silly pop ridiculousness from everyone’s favorite AM radio whores Gentle Giant. This one differs from The Missing Piece (i.e. a Goddamn Radio Hit) in that, while that one still had maybe a few toes on one foot firmly planted in prog-rockville, from the tasty old-school sounds of “As Old As You’re Young” and “Memories of Old Days” to the fact that “Winning” and “For Nobody” bore the living crap out of me, this one harbors no such ambitions to combine pop and prog into some sort of holy beast of musical domination. Nope, this is silly, simple, poppy AM pop/rock poppyness from beginning to end, roughly as difficult as simple addition compared to the complex linear algebra of Octopus. Can someone say “sell-out?” And while I hate using the “s” word, to abandon such a unique and esoteric classic style for this kind of trite silliness is one of the most blatant examples of the “selling out” phenomenon I’ve seen. Look at the cover, for christ sake. If you cut around the outline of the giant face, affix elastic, and wear said mask around your head, YOU TOO can be Giant For A Day!!!! Hee!
The fact that the band sold out this hard in this short a time (though can you blame them? Once new wave and punk hit seventies prog-rock had about as much cache as fascism, and it’s not like the guys had been commercial megastars in the first place) makes the adequacy of this album even more shocking than that of The Missing Piece. Hell, the opening “Words From the Wise” is excellent, easily the best pop song the band ever wrote. It’s like the great lost Yes song (from after they sold out, too)! Listen to those harmonies and tell me that doesn’t sound like Jon Anderson and Co. It’s a perfect late seventies AM radio single, and the fact the band was able to come up with it after making no attempts whatsoever to write traditional pop hooks their entire career until one year ago shows this band’s talent almost as much as all that crap they were able to pull off on Octopus. It’s goofy, yeah, and that bouncy bass line reminds me vaguely of some kind of bastardized white man’s disco claptrap, but how can anyone dislike this song? Fantastic stuff.
Needless to say, they were only able to pull off this miracle once, because outside of that minor masterpiece we have before us the weakest Gentle Giant record not called Interview. “Thank You” is a pleasant acoustic ballad with pretty melodies that will offend no one, but I’ve never found much bite to it. “Spooky Boogie” is just absurd, a faux-frightening instrumental that’s easily the funniest thing this band ever did. There are fake horror screams and “BOOO!!!” dissonant clashing parts and everything (nice to see the band was able to work in their trademark dissonance somehow), all on top of a remarkably sterile boogie rock background. To give you an idea of what genre it belongs to, the NFL has actually used it (in 1993) as the soundtrack for its blooper reels. And no, I’m not kidding. Try setting Garo Yepremian’s attempted “pass” to “Knots.” Doesn’t work so well.
Moving on, the rest of the good material consists mostly of hard-rockin’ down home boogie-woogie! Yee-hah! “Little Brown Bag” is actually the best the band ever did in the genre, from a seriously rocking opening riff to great guitar/boogie piano interplay in the body to John Weathers laying that shit DOOOWWWWWWWN! I personally never thought a classically trained snob such as Kerry would lower himself to the Jerry Lee Lewis boogie bashing he does in the background here, but it’s hilarious, fun, rocking, and catchy (though notice the new-wave Devo nerd keyboard sound buried underneath; couldn’t Gentle Giant be unabashedly cool for one minute? Is that too much to ask? Must they always be giant dorks?). “Rock Climber” does the same genre in much less exciting but ultimately passable style, and the pretty-yet-forgettable (less than two minutes!) acoustic nothing track “Friends” is semi-notable in that it was written by…John Weathers! Yes! My man! I glasses sono molto sexiosi! Aiiiieeeeeee!
The rest of
this album sucks a blooch. The title
track is a horrible thumping disco-rock embarrassment, the ballad “Take Me” and
whatever genre “No Stranger” are supposed to be are as eventful as competitive
lint-picking, and “It’s Only Goodbye” takes the atrocious over-obvious ballad style of “I’m Turning Around,” makes
the melody even more retarded, and replaces the admittedly cool instrumentation
of its predecessor with horribly generic piano chords (this might be Kerry’s
lowest moment in the band) and a guitar solo that sounds like hair-metal a
decade before it existed (it might be Gary’s lowest moment as well). And that’s the record! Another thirty-five minute slab of vinyl from
This bad boy was the final nail in the coffin of Gentle Giant as a commercial entity as well, being the first record of theirs to not chart at all since back in the early days. Even The Missing Piece, still riding the last fumes of the band’s Free Hand mini-peak, managed to chart a little bit in the lower reaches of whatever Billboard Hot 6,000 measuring stick is being used as the barometer in this discussion for whether something “charted.” It’s not like they ever had a chance at this pop success thing anyway, though. Have you seen what they look like?
Civilian (1980)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Inside
Out”
How did this band never produce
a horribly bad album? How? And the quality of this one is the most
surprising of all. These guys were absolutely,
100% done as a commercial entity,
their grand pop sellout scheme having failed miserably. They were huffing and puffing along, limping
slowly to an end that seemed more inevitable every day. In an effort to “Americanize” more (since
they always enjoyed more success in the
So ofcourse it makes perfect sense that this is their best work since Free Hand. After two wildly inconsistent (yet consistently HILARIOUS!) records of pop “experimentation,” it seems like the guys finally figured how to write pleasant, catchy, non-offensive pop/rock music, plus the generic new-wave guitar and keyboard tones (which actually sound fine together; George is totally right about their somehow finding the right “balance” between the two) usually sound a lot better than the sometimes nonexistent backing tracks of Giant For a Day! or the messy ones on The Missing Piece. If you’re not gonna be down with clean, new-wave pop/rock singles with vaguely metal guitar tones, though, this album isn’t for you, as (outside of the quite effective mood piece “Shadows on the Street”) it’s easily the least stylistically diverse of Gentle Giant’s albums. Hell, before they sold out, most Gentle Giant songs contained more musical genres than this entire record, and although that’s certainly an objective knock on it, I find it nice that the band decided to stick to a pop/rock style they found they were actually good at (meaning that no, there are no bluntly obvious horrendo-ballads like “It’s Only Goodbye” here, thank god).
Some tunes are faster, some are slower, some are more aggressive, some are moodier, and some are, I suppose, none of these things, but the songwriting on display here is perhaps the most consistently engaging since The Power and the Glory (and yeah, I deliberately skipped Free Hand there). The easy standout here is the majestic “Inside Out,” whose vaguely echoed vocals on the “Do I need lifting?” provide the only evidence whatsoever that Gentle Giant could have written this album (but even they have that “swooshing” effect like on Bonzo’s drum fills from “Kashmir,” only with eighties-for-brains), but if you like that minor classic (Derek’s vocals throughout are perhaps the best he’s ever done) you can’t go wrong with any of these other agreeably decent new-wave rock songs. “All Through the Night” is the one with the guitar riff that totally sounds like eighties hair-metal (but good, unlike the atrocious solo in “It’s Only Goodbye,” which has to be the worst song Gentle Giant ever recorded), which I suppose is unique, but the only way to tell “Convenience (Clean and Easy)” from “I Am a Camera” (How’s about the Yes/Buggles parallel there, huh? This thing even came out the same year as Drama!) from “Number One” from whatever else might be on this thing are vaguely dissimilar keyboard parts, differing tempos, and the fact that the title of each track is sung in the chorus like 600 times. “Underground” is the one where John hits the hi-hat double-time to make the song seem faster than it is, “It’s Not Imagination” is the shitty one, and “Heroes No More” is the one that’s a bonus track. Shadooby.
I still have no idea why this album is any good at all. Shit, I like it better than the concurrent release by Yes! And while that little nugget of information may have to do with the presence of a certain pair of new-wave keyboard goofs in lieu of, say, Jon Anderson in Yes at the time, it’s still pretty surprising. But there’s no special reason for this album’s quality at all: it’s just good, solid, “workmanlike” pop/rock songwriting. Bar possibly “Inside Out” (which really is great), nothing here will bowl you over, but the consistent decency, acceptability, and catchiness never wane. It’s generic as hell, and not a single instrumentalist in the band seems like they’re breaking a sweat playing this stuff (plus there are no instruments here at all besides guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums, which is downright odd coming from such an accomplished band of multi-instrumentalists), but fuck me if it’s not pretty solid stuff. Weird.
Oh, and they broke up like right after it came out. I should probably mention that.