I know what I like: Trollheart's History of Progressive Rock and Progressive Metal

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 02:32 PM

Album title: St. Radigunds
Artist: Spirogyra
Nationality: English
Label: B&C Records
Chronology: Debut
Grade: C
The Trollheart Factor: 0
Factsheet: Another band from the Canterbury scene, it appears these guys, unlike many of their contemporaries, actually came from that area. This album received some critical praise on its release but as an “underground” thing. They released two more before breaking up in 1974, leaving singer Barbara Gaskin to have a major hit with Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart in “It’s My Party” (God how I hated that fucking song!) and a reformation of the band around 2005, but with the death of its founder in 2018 that was it for Spirogyra.
Tracklisting: The Future Won’t Be Long/ Island/ Magical Mary/ Captain’s Log/ At Home in the World/ Cogwheels Crutches and Cyanide/ Time Will Tell/ We Were a Happy Crew/ Love is a Funny Thing/ The Duke of Beaufoot

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 02:33 PM

Album title: 200 Motels
Artist: Frank Zappa
Nationality: American
Label: Bizarre/Reprise
Chronology: Thirteenth
Grade: C
Factsheet: Soundtrack to a movie of the same name, this is more illustration of why I don’t have time for, like or understand Zappa. The emphasis on smutty comedy and wordplay may very well be leavened by great music, but though I’ve enjoyed the odd album, what I’ve heard of Zappa up to now has mostly been of a similarity to Beefheart, and too weird for my tastes. There’s no way I would suffer through a double album like this, and therefore I’m not going to. Hell, even writing out the track listing has exhausted me by itself!
Tracklisting: Semi-fraudulent Direct-from-Hollywood Overture/ Mystery Roach/ Dance of the Rock and Roll Interviewers/ This Town is a Sealed Tuna Sandwich (Prologue)/ Tuna Fish Promenade/ Dance of the Just Plain Folks/ This Town is a Sealed Tuna Sandwich (Reprise)/ The Sealed Tuna Bolero/ Lonesome Cowboy Burt/ Touring Can Make You Crazy/ Would You Like a Snack?/ Redneck Eats/ Centerville/ She Painted Up Her Face/ Janet’s Big Dance Number/ Half a Dozen Provocative Squats/ Mysterioso/ Shove it Right In/ Lucy’s Seduction of a Bored Violinist and Postlude/ I’m Stealing the Towels/ Dental Hygiene Dilemma/ Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting to You?/ Daddy, Daddy, Daddy/ Penis Dimension/ What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning/ A Nun Suit Painted On Some Old Boxes/ Magic Fingers/ Motorhead’s Midnight Ranch/ Dew on the Newts We Got/ The Lad Searches the Night for His Newts/ The Girl Wants to Fix Him Some Broth/ The Girl’s Dream/ Little Green Scratchy Sweaters and Corduroy Ponce/ Strictly Genteel (The Finale).

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 02:41 PM

Album title: 1001 Centigrades
Artist: Magma
Nationality: French
Label: Philips
Chronology: Second
Grade: B
Factsheet: Oh yeah right, the French guys who made up their own alien language. Zeuhl, right? Not going through that again!
Tracklisting: Rïah Sahïltaahk/ "Iss" Lanseï Doïa"/Ki Ïahl Ö Lïahk

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 02:44 PM

This, however, is one I can dedicate some time to.

Album title: In Search of Space/ X In Search of Space
Artist: Hawkwind
Nationality: English
Label: United Artists
Chronology: Second
Grade: A
Factsheet: One of the grand old men of prog and space rock, Hawkwind’s second album saw some changes to their lineup, with a bad LSD trip causing bassist Huw Lloyd-Langton to leave the band. The album begins Hawkwind’s creation of their own legend in a sort of ongoing science fiction story involving the “Spaceship Hawkwind”, and established Hawkwind as one of the best acts to “trip out” to. This is a label they continued to have throughout their exceptionally long career, and still do.
Tracklisting: You Shouldn’t Do That/ You Know You’re Only Dreaming/ Master of the Universe/ We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago/ Adjust Me/ Children of the Sun
Comments: It’s never been that easy to review a Hawkwind album. What can you say? It’s more a shared experience that you really have to hear and undergo than anything you can write about. Feedback, special effects, weird chants, experimental sounds, taped recordings, they’re all there and indeed the album opens with one of these, meant perhaps to represent the take off of an alien ship into space. Whistling synths, whining guitar, screeching sax and something that sounds like a sitar but almost certainly is not takes us through a fifteen-minute odyssey into sound, or what Arnold Rimmer once called “a voyage to Trip-Out City.” Indeed. Some vague vocals but nothing you could pin down.

“You Know You’re Only Dreaming” on the other hand has a droning and somewhat slurred vocal driving it, and sounds a little on the reggae side to me, though it soon develops into another spacey jam, nowhere near as long as the opener of course. The only song I know on this - one of the few Hawkwind songs I do know - is “Master of the Universe”, which again features a strong, clear vocal with a rising synth line and a very distinctive guitar and bass line that for me all but typifies the Hawkwind sound (of what I’ve heard). You won’t be at all surprised to hear that it turns into another extended jam. Sounds like there’s some harmonica in there too. By contrast, completely, is “We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago”, an acoustic number with some synth backing.

After that brief interlude it’s back to the spacey synthy stuff for “Adjust me”, a darker, deeper vocal which intones the lyric rather than sings, and then goes up the scale from normal to superfast as the feedback continues. “Children of the Sun” closes the album and is, surprisingly, another acoustic piece

Favourite track(s): Master of the Universe/ we Took the Wrong Step years Ago
Least favourite track(s):
Personal Rating: 3.50
Legacy Rating: 4.5
Final Rating: 4.0

rostasi · 03-05-2022, 03:25 PM

Well, actually Barbara Gaskin did a whole lot more than Spirogyra and It’s My Party.
She was part of Hatfield and the North, Egg, and National Health.

Queen Boo · 03-05-2022, 04:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

Re Gentle Giant: If you look back I did a whole feature on them during the 1970 segment and came to the conclusion that they were very good, but just not good enough to command my attention. The fact that they only became retrospectively famous, as it were, kind of backs that up. I think they tried to be too much, all things to all men sort of thing. I just couldn't see the attraction at all. Kind of like a lot of early Yes or ELP maybe. Just one of those bands.

As for Can, well, you know me and Krautrock/experimental stuff, is all I'll say. I really struggled with that one though.

Thanks for reading, both of you!

Gentle Giant are an important band for me because they were one of the first bands I got really into when I delved deeper into the genre.

The thing about them is that their music is very condensed, unlike most prog bands their songs are relatively short, In a Glass House is their longest track and it's only 8 and a half minutes, which for a prog band is hardly epic length.

Yet their songs have just as much going on as any 20 minute Yes epic, but Yes will let a piece of music breath and different parts build up to each other, Gentle Giant on the other hand don't like to dwell on anything too long, they compress all of their ideas into these little mini-epics which now that I think about it is something Cardiacs also did a lot, they probably had more in common with GG than any other prog band. Their music is very erratic and that's also big part of their appeal at least for me.

I think they are long overdue for some kind of rediscovery, whether it be because of reissues or the YouTube algorithm or being referenced in some popular piece of media or Pitchfork or some other music site revaluating their work. They have already had that happen to them a little bit because of their songs being sampled by popular hip hop acts like Madlib, A Tribe Called Quest and Run the Jewels but I don't think it will end there.

Much of the modern indie scene right now is art pop, progressive pop, anything that's "quirky" and Gentle Giant fit that mold better than any of their peers. I think it's only a matter of time before some popular indie act cites them as an influence.

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 08:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rostasi

Well, actually Barbara Gaskin did a whole lot more than Spirogyra and It’s My Party.
She was part of Hatfield and the North, Egg, and National Health.

Thanks for that. I'll have to read further on her. Funny she didn't come up in my article on Egg. Egg-stremely odd. Sorry, sorry.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Queen Boo

Gentle Giant are an important band for me because they were one of the first bands I got really into when I delved deeper into the genre.

The thing about them is that their music is very condensed, unlike most prog bands their songs are relatively short, In a Glass House is their longest track and it's only 8 and a half minutes, which for a prog band is hardly epic length.

Yet their songs have just as much going on as any 20 minute Yes epic, but Yes will let a piece of music breath and different parts build up to each other, Gentle Giant on the other hand don't like to dwell on anything too long, they compress all of their ideas into these little mini-epics which now that I think about it is something Cardiacs also did a lot, they probably had more in common with GG than any other prog band. Their music is very erratic and that's also big part of their appeal at least for me.

I think they are long overdue for some kind of rediscovery, whether it be because of reissues or the YouTube algorithm or being referenced in some popular piece of media or Pitchfork or some other music site revaluating their work. They have already had that happen to them a little bit because of their songs being sampled by popular hip hop acts like Madlib, A Tribe Called Quest and Run the Jewels but I don't think it will end there.

Much of the modern indie scene right now is art pop, progressive pop, anything that's "quirky" and Gentle Giant fit that mold better than any of their peers. I think it's only a matter of time before some popular indie act cites them as an influence.

I understand they are now considered very big, it's just back then it seems they kind of sunk without a trace, and as you say, it's only fairly recently that people seem to be rediscovering them and perhaps appreciating them as they should be. I've no issue with that. They're just not for me. I've sampled a few albums and they just don't click with me.

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 08:35 PM

Album title: Fearless
Artist: Family
Nationality: English
Label: Reprise/United Artists
Chronology: Fifth
Grade: C (if that)
Factsheet: Meh, after suffering through Music From a Doll’s House last year I don’t think there’s likely to be anything of interest here other than the performance of John Wetton, having left Mogul Thrash. When all Wiki can talk about is the “innovative layered-page album headshots of the band's members melding into a single blur” I think we’re done here.
Tracklisting: Between Blue and Me/ Sat’d’y Barfly/ Larf and Sing/ Spanish Tide/ Save Some for Thee/ Take Your Partners/ Children/ Crinkly Grin/ Blind/ Burning Bridges

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 08:41 PM

Album title: Meddle
Artist: Pink Floyd
Nationality: English
Label: Harvest
Chronology: Sixth
Grade: A
Factsheet: What self-respecting proghead does not know this album? The perhaps last gasps of the Barrett era on most of side one with the new direction Floyd were to pursue typified by the side-long final track, this album is generally regarded in the light of that last track, the twenty-three-and-a-half-minute “Echoes”, though there are some good tracks besides this. Basically though it must be said it’s a bit of a mess, with country, forties music and the emerging prog that Floyd would perfect on the next few albums. It’s also remembered for its enigmatic cover, which many of us (myself included) believed to be more erotic than is the truth, the picture being, according to the graphic designer Storm Thorgeson, an ear underwater. Boo. The album already shows a shift away from the “everyone write a song” idea behind previous efforts such as Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, with Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour writing the lion’s share of the music, a situation that would continue throughout Floyd’s career, up to, of course, the departure of Waters, whereupon Gilmour would pretty much take over the compositional duties for the band.
Tracklisting: One of These Days/ A Pillow of Winds/ Fearless/ San Tropez/ Seamus/ Echoes
Comments: Already Floyd are bucking the trend with an instrumental opening the album which turns out to have some sparse vocal content, basically a spoken threat voiced by Nick Mason (one of his only vocal contributions, perhaps his only one) which changes the whole nature of the piece and makes it much darker and scary. The tune rides mostly on a bouncy bass line with hits from Richard Wright’s Hammond organ hopping through it then guitar snarling in from Gilmour. The piece then becomes staggered with effects making it sound like the music is stuttering, then Mason’s heavily-phased vocal before the tune takes off again on guitar and organ with the bass maintaining the rhythm it began. Note that some of Gilmour’s riffs here would surface later in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Part 1” on Wish You Were Here.

After this powerful introduction things tail right back for an acoustic ballad, as “A Pillow of Winds” (which begins with the ultimate cliche, the sound of wind) makes me feel that the guys from The Alan Parsons Project must have been listening to this album. No, he wasn’t the engineer here, before you ask. Lovely laid back gentle little song, featuring of course some beautiful acoustic guitar from Gilmour. “Fearless” uses the crowd chant at Liverpool Football Club’s Anfield singing the club theme “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and is another soft acoustic style song with a very gentle crooned vocal from Gilmour and acoustic guitar played by Roger Waters. As a matter of fact, from a very powerful, energetic start the album has really fallen into quite a laconic, relaxed groove.

This more or less relaxed, breezy direction continues on “St. Tropez”, with a lounge, easy-listening style faintly reminiscent of the forties or something we might later hear from the likes of The Divine Comedy. Nice slide guitar in it, but can’t say too much more about it other than that. Not one of my favourites, though it’s well above “Seamus”, the “joke track”, set to a country/blues slow rhythm with Gilmour affecting a country redneck drawl. I suppose it’s not without its charm but as Gilmour himself later admitted "I guess it wasn't really as funny to everyone else [as] it was to us". No, Dave, it wasn’t.

That of course leads us to the standout on the album, an entire side dedicated to one track, the phenomenal “Echoes”, which nods back to improvisational experimentation such as “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”. Opening with echoey beeps made by a grand piano apparently. It’s all very technical and if you’re so inclined and wish to you can read all about the compositional technique here. After the mostly guitar and organ intro the vocal comes in, and again keeping with the tone of most of the album it’s laid back and gentle, though the song will not remain that way. Running for twenty-three minutes it goes through some major changes, including a lot of experiments in sonic and recording techniques. No doubt “Echoes” influenced many later experimental pieces such as Vangelis’s “Beauborg” and ELO’s “Fire on High”

Favourite track(s): One of These Days/ A Pillow of Winds/ Fearless/ Echoes
Least favourite track(s): Fucking Seamus!
Personal Rating: 4.0
Legacy Rating: 5.0
Final Rating: 4.5
Musings: I always wondered, and now I know. Andrew Lloyd-Webber stole the main riff from “Echoes” for his “Phantom of the Opera”! I knew it sounded the same. Roger Waters thinks so too, but recognised the futility and expense of suing the rich bastard. “Yeah, the beginning of that bloody Phantom song is from Echoes. *DAAAA-da-da-da-da-da*. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. It's the same time signature—it's 12/8—and it's the same structure and it's the same notes and it's the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is! But I think that life's too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber.”
I wonder if he meant “life’s too short”? He probably meant life's too short.

Trollheart · 03-05-2022, 08:43 PM

Album title: Focus II/ Moving Waves
Artist: Focus
Nationality: Dutch
Label: Imperial
Chronology: Second
Grade: A
Factsheet: Not a whole lot to say really. I quite liked Focus's self-titled debut, but I had to make choices and this one did not make the cut. Sorry to any Focus fans. Maybe another year.
Tracklisting: Hocus Pocus/ Le Clochard (Bread)/ Janis/ Moving Waves/ Focus II/ Eruption (i) Orfeus (ii) Answer (iii) Orfeus (iv) Answer (v) Pupilla (vi) Tommy (vii) Pupilla (viii) Answer (ix) The Bridge (x) Euridice (xi) Dayglow (xii) Endless Road (xiii) Answer (xiv) Orfeus (xv) Euridice

03-05-2022, 02:32 PM	#251 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: St. Radigunds Artist: Spirogyra Nationality: English Label: B&C Records Chronology: Debut Grade: C The Trollheart Factor: 0 Factsheet: Another band from the Canterbury scene, it appears these guys, unlike many of their contemporaries, actually came from that area. This album received some critical praise on its release but as an “underground” thing. They released two more before breaking up in 1974, leaving singer Barbara Gaskin to have a major hit with Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart in “It’s My Party” (God how I hated that fucking song!) and a reformation of the band around 2005, but with the death of its founder in 2018 that was it for Spirogyra. Tracklisting: The Future Won’t Be Long/ Island/ Magical Mary/ Captain’s Log/ At Home in the World/ Cogwheels Crutches and Cyanide/ Time Will Tell/ We Were a Happy Crew/ Love is a Funny Thing/ The Duke of Beaufoot __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 02:33 PM	#252 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: 200 Motels Artist: Frank Zappa Nationality: American Label: Bizarre/Reprise Chronology: Thirteenth Grade: C Factsheet: Soundtrack to a movie of the same name, this is more illustration of why I don’t have time for, like or understand Zappa. The emphasis on smutty comedy and wordplay may very well be leavened by great music, but though I’ve enjoyed the odd album, what I’ve heard of Zappa up to now has mostly been of a similarity to Beefheart, and too weird for my tastes. There’s no way I would suffer through a double album like this, and therefore I’m not going to. Hell, even writing out the track listing has exhausted me by itself! Tracklisting: Semi-fraudulent Direct-from-Hollywood Overture/ Mystery Roach/ Dance of the Rock and Roll Interviewers/ This Town is a Sealed Tuna Sandwich (Prologue)/ Tuna Fish Promenade/ Dance of the Just Plain Folks/ This Town is a Sealed Tuna Sandwich (Reprise)/ The Sealed Tuna Bolero/ Lonesome Cowboy Burt/ Touring Can Make You Crazy/ Would You Like a Snack?/ Redneck Eats/ Centerville/ She Painted Up Her Face/ Janet’s Big Dance Number/ Half a Dozen Provocative Squats/ Mysterioso/ Shove it Right In/ Lucy’s Seduction of a Bored Violinist and Postlude/ I’m Stealing the Towels/ Dental Hygiene Dilemma/ Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting to You?/ Daddy, Daddy, Daddy/ Penis Dimension/ What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning/ A Nun Suit Painted On Some Old Boxes/ Magic Fingers/ Motorhead’s Midnight Ranch/ Dew on the Newts We Got/ The Lad Searches the Night for His Newts/ The Girl Wants to Fix Him Some Broth/ The Girl’s Dream/ Little Green Scratchy Sweaters and Corduroy Ponce/ Strictly Genteel (The Finale). __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 02:41 PM	#253 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: 1001 Centigrades Artist: Magma Nationality: French Label: Philips Chronology: Second Grade: B Factsheet: Oh yeah right, the French guys who made up their own alien language. Zeuhl, right? Not going through that again! Tracklisting: Rïah Sahïltaahk/ "Iss" Lanseï Doïa"/Ki Ïahl Ö Lïahk __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 02:44 PM	#254 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	This, however, is one I can dedicate some time to. Album title: In Search of Space/ X In Search of Space Artist: Hawkwind Nationality: English Label: United Artists Chronology: Second Grade: A Factsheet: One of the grand old men of prog and space rock, Hawkwind’s second album saw some changes to their lineup, with a bad LSD trip causing bassist Huw Lloyd-Langton to leave the band. The album begins Hawkwind’s creation of their own legend in a sort of ongoing science fiction story involving the “Spaceship Hawkwind”, and established Hawkwind as one of the best acts to “trip out” to. This is a label they continued to have throughout their exceptionally long career, and still do. Tracklisting: You Shouldn’t Do That/ You Know You’re Only Dreaming/ Master of the Universe/ We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago/ Adjust Me/ Children of the Sun Comments: It’s never been that easy to review a Hawkwind album. What can you say? It’s more a shared experience that you really have to hear and undergo than anything you can write about. Feedback, special effects, weird chants, experimental sounds, taped recordings, they’re all there and indeed the album opens with one of these, meant perhaps to represent the take off of an alien ship into space. Whistling synths, whining guitar, screeching sax and something that sounds like a sitar but almost certainly is not takes us through a fifteen-minute odyssey into sound, or what Arnold Rimmer once called “a voyage to Trip-Out City.” Indeed. Some vague vocals but nothing you could pin down. “You Know You’re Only Dreaming” on the other hand has a droning and somewhat slurred vocal driving it, and sounds a little on the reggae side to me, though it soon develops into another spacey jam, nowhere near as long as the opener of course. The only song I know on this - one of the few Hawkwind songs I do know - is “Master of the Universe”, which again features a strong, clear vocal with a rising synth line and a very distinctive guitar and bass line that for me all but typifies the Hawkwind sound (of what I’ve heard). You won’t be at all surprised to hear that it turns into another extended jam. Sounds like there’s some harmonica in there too. By contrast, completely, is “We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago”, an acoustic number with some synth backing. After that brief interlude it’s back to the spacey synthy stuff for “Adjust me”, a darker, deeper vocal which intones the lyric rather than sings, and then goes up the scale from normal to superfast as the feedback continues. “Children of the Sun” closes the album and is, surprisingly, another acoustic piece Favourite track(s): Master of the Universe/ we Took the Wrong Step years Ago Least favourite track(s): Personal Rating: 3.50 Legacy Rating: 4.5 Final Rating: 4.0 __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 08:35 PM	#258 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: Fearless Artist: Family Nationality: English Label: Reprise/United Artists Chronology: Fifth Grade: C (if that) Factsheet: Meh, after suffering through Music From a Doll’s House last year I don’t think there’s likely to be anything of interest here other than the performance of John Wetton, having left Mogul Thrash. When all Wiki can talk about is the “innovative layered-page album headshots of the band's members melding into a single blur” I think we’re done here. Tracklisting: Between Blue and Me/ Sat’d’y Barfly/ Larf and Sing/ Spanish Tide/ Save Some for Thee/ Take Your Partners/ Children/ Crinkly Grin/ Blind/ Burning Bridges __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 03:25 PM	#255 (permalink)
rostasi . Join Date: Aug 2012 Posts: 4,007	Well, actually Barbara Gaskin did a whole lot more than Spirogyra and It’s My Party. She was part of Hatfield and the North, Egg, and National Health.

03-05-2022, 08:41 PM	#259 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: Meddle Artist: Pink Floyd Nationality: English Label: Harvest Chronology: Sixth Grade: A Factsheet: What self-respecting proghead does not know this album? The perhaps last gasps of the Barrett era on most of side one with the new direction Floyd were to pursue typified by the side-long final track, this album is generally regarded in the light of that last track, the twenty-three-and-a-half-minute “Echoes”, though there are some good tracks besides this. Basically though it must be said it’s a bit of a mess, with country, forties music and the emerging prog that Floyd would perfect on the next few albums. It’s also remembered for its enigmatic cover, which many of us (myself included) believed to be more erotic than is the truth, the picture being, according to the graphic designer Storm Thorgeson, an ear underwater. Boo. The album already shows a shift away from the “everyone write a song” idea behind previous efforts such as Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, with Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour writing the lion’s share of the music, a situation that would continue throughout Floyd’s career, up to, of course, the departure of Waters, whereupon Gilmour would pretty much take over the compositional duties for the band. Tracklisting: One of These Days/ A Pillow of Winds/ Fearless/ San Tropez/ Seamus/ Echoes Comments: Already Floyd are bucking the trend with an instrumental opening the album which turns out to have some sparse vocal content, basically a spoken threat voiced by Nick Mason (one of his only vocal contributions, perhaps his only one) which changes the whole nature of the piece and makes it much darker and scary. The tune rides mostly on a bouncy bass line with hits from Richard Wright’s Hammond organ hopping through it then guitar snarling in from Gilmour. The piece then becomes staggered with effects making it sound like the music is stuttering, then Mason’s heavily-phased vocal before the tune takes off again on guitar and organ with the bass maintaining the rhythm it began. Note that some of Gilmour’s riffs here would surface later in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Part 1” on Wish You Were Here. After this powerful introduction things tail right back for an acoustic ballad, as “A Pillow of Winds” (which begins with the ultimate cliche, the sound of wind) makes me feel that the guys from The Alan Parsons Project must have been listening to this album. No, he wasn’t the engineer here, before you ask. Lovely laid back gentle little song, featuring of course some beautiful acoustic guitar from Gilmour. “Fearless” uses the crowd chant at Liverpool Football Club’s Anfield singing the club theme “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and is another soft acoustic style song with a very gentle crooned vocal from Gilmour and acoustic guitar played by Roger Waters. As a matter of fact, from a very powerful, energetic start the album has really fallen into quite a laconic, relaxed groove. This more or less relaxed, breezy direction continues on “St. Tropez”, with a lounge, easy-listening style faintly reminiscent of the forties or something we might later hear from the likes of The Divine Comedy. Nice slide guitar in it, but can’t say too much more about it other than that. Not one of my favourites, though it’s well above “Seamus”, the “joke track”, set to a country/blues slow rhythm with Gilmour affecting a country redneck drawl. I suppose it’s not without its charm but as Gilmour himself later admitted "I guess it wasn't really as funny to everyone else [as] it was to us". No, Dave, it wasn’t. That of course leads us to the standout on the album, an entire side dedicated to one track, the phenomenal “Echoes”, which nods back to improvisational experimentation such as “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”. Opening with echoey beeps made by a grand piano apparently. It’s all very technical and if you’re so inclined and wish to you can read all about the compositional technique here. After the mostly guitar and organ intro the vocal comes in, and again keeping with the tone of most of the album it’s laid back and gentle, though the song will not remain that way. Running for twenty-three minutes it goes through some major changes, including a lot of experiments in sonic and recording techniques. No doubt “Echoes” influenced many later experimental pieces such as Vangelis’s “Beauborg” and ELO’s “Fire on High” Favourite track(s): One of These Days/ A Pillow of Winds/ Fearless/ Echoes Least favourite track(s): Fucking Seamus! Personal Rating: 4.0 Legacy Rating: 5.0 Final Rating: 4.5 Musings: I always wondered, and now I know. Andrew Lloyd-Webber stole the main riff from “Echoes” for his “Phantom of the Opera”! I knew it sounded the same. Roger Waters thinks so too, but recognised the futility and expense of suing the rich bastard. “Yeah, the beginning of that bloody Phantom song is from Echoes. DAAAA-da-da-da-da-da. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. It's the same time signature—it's 12/8—and it's the same structure and it's the same notes and it's the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is! But I think that life's too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber.” I wonder if he meant “life’s too short”? He probably meant life's too short. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

03-05-2022, 08:43 PM	#260 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Album title: Focus II/ Moving Waves Artist: Focus Nationality: Dutch Label: Imperial Chronology: Second Grade: A Factsheet: Not a whole lot to say really. I quite liked Focus's self-titled debut, but I had to make choices and this one did not make the cut. Sorry to any Focus fans. Maybe another year. Tracklisting: Hocus Pocus/ Le Clochard (Bread)/ Janis/ Moving Waves/ Focus II/ Eruption (i) Orfeus (ii) Answer (iii) Orfeus (iv) Answer (v) Pupilla (vi) Tommy (vii) Pupilla (viii) Answer (ix) The Bridge (x) Euridice (xi) Dayglow (xii) Endless Road (xiii) Answer (xiv) Orfeus (xv) Euridice __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018