A couple of the tracks, in fact, are among my favorites that Peter and the band would ever put out. Running Back is related to a "normal" song subject, a man's feelings towards a woman, but it's done in a dark, stately manner unlike most any other 'love' song I've ever heard. From the somber bass and acoustic lines the piece is built around, to the moody vocal melody (and incredibly well-formed lyrics for a love song), to the dark shadow of Peter's singing, to the alternately happy and melancholy flute lines in the mid-song instrumental passage, this piece is a virtually ideal snapshot of everything I like about the band, with basically none of the bad. Similarly, Aguarian showcases Peter's singing and melody-writing abilities extremely well, even as Peter moves into bizarre whacky land with his lyrical imagery. Come on, is there any chance of getting that "Now we look to the sun in every direction" chorus out of your head after hearing it? The rest of the band does fine too, though - the thumping bass sound is killer, and the minimalistic piano lines are perfectly placed.

There's other good stuff to be found as well, most notably from the opening Afterwards, which shows that the band could have been perfectly successful working in the "conventional" formulas they would avoid in the rest of their history. The vocal melody is memorable and non-trivial (ie my definition of "catchy"), Peter gives a warm vocal performance (while singing a somewhat chilly vocal melody), the low-key wah-wah's give a strangely uplifting feel in the midst of the moodiness of the rest, and the electric piano solo in the middle is very pretty and moody. What else could be wanted? Oh yeah, lyrics like "the pedals that were blooming are just paper in your hands."

The album also has three other short tracks, which is definitely something not to be found on later VDGG albums. Necromancer is a fine energetic piece, with "spacey" keyboard and guitar parts helping out a bunch of energetic vocal lines about, well, being a Necromancer (not to mention that funny part where Peter wails up and down on the word "blaaaaaaaaaaack"). The other two short tracks are insubstantial, but cute nonetheless - the title track is a goofy fake jingle, and Black Smoke Yen is a minute-and-a-half of bass, drum and piano jamming that works more as an introduction to Aguarian than anything else.

The remaining three tracks are more or less ok, but unfortunately not particularly interesting in the context of the album. The two parts of Orthenthian St. are each fairly pretty as background noise, but aside from the great sound of Peter's voice, and maybe one or two memorable lyrics, I'll be damned if, even after a ton of listens, I can describe much about it. Into a Game is a bit more aggressive, but except for parts of the chorus, " " Finally, fans might like Octopus, since it comes closest to the classic VDGG style than anything else here, but except for the downward organ swirls, I'm not too impressed with Peter's hysterical ramblings or with the instrumental parts or whatever (though the moody organ chords in the middle do kinda rule in their own way). It's pretty danged far from the worst thing VDGG has ever done, though, and I do like the feeling of desperation in the last couple of minutes, so it's not an album killer.

In short, this album shows a band with quite a bit of talent but that occasionally has trouble getting that talent put on record. In other words, a quintessential VDGG album. Quite good, though.

Take something like the opening Darkness, for instance, a track that I would very much like to like but just can't because it won't let me. Ok, we've got wind, we've got a slow moody bassline, some slow organ noodling in the background, so far so good. We've got Peter quietly singing some well-done grandiose lyrics ... wait, there's problem number one. Peter's voice, the band's greatest attribute, doesn't do anything interesting! He just goes about quietly singing something he may as well be mumbling, and then when he starts singing "normally," his voice is just pasted against the back without standing out; similarly, when he starts singing an "intense" part, he's just holding extended rising notes, without the dark angel-of-death sound he'd successfully pull off a million other times. Meanwhile, the organ and sax interplay is so drastically minimalistic and unexciting that I just can't get into the atmosphere it's creating - if you want to provoke, you have to evoke, and for everything that could theoretically succeed here, very little does.

White Hammer, unfortunately, is even worse (to my ears). I have nothing against Peter singing about the historical event on which these lyrics are based, but the song sounds far too much as if the band thought that singing about such a deep, obscure historical topic, backing it with their standard (piss-poorly-produced) atmospheric instrumentation playing whatever short note sequences struck their fancy, was enough. Perhaps for you that is enough - for me it's not. Sure, there's also an "angry" coda, and it's nice to listen to, but overall I feel so malnourished at the end of the track that I can't take it. Hey, you wanna know what I consider to be a great song that has a lot of the VDGG melancholy, gloomy atmosphere, as well as a rousing, "evil" coda, but also has tons of interesting riffs and melody twists? Genesis' Twilight Alehouse, that's what, which my brain has always considered a properly done version of this track, even if lyrically the two have nothing in common.

Lessee, on side two we have Whatever Would Have Robert Said?, a piece dedicated to, you guessed it, Robert Van deGraaf. These lyrics are great! I just wish the "verse" parts didn't just feel like beat poetry over the standard VDGG instrumentation lazily providing texture. There's a nice bassline in the slow parts, and the fast part that Peter and Co. break into from time to time is amusing, but overall the music in the main parts sounds dreadfully cut-and-paste to my ears. And hey, the mid-song "jam" has some good parts, like the aggressive angry wah-wah guitars near the end - I just wish the slow, mechanical noodling at the beginning entered fast noodling sooner, and that the fast noodling had more damned energy to it. Man, if this is how Tales From Topographic Oceans sounds to other people, I guess that explains why so many people hate it so much (of course, my feelings towards Tales haters are about the same as lovers of this album are probably towards me, but let's not go there).

Ah, and then there's the closing After the Flood. There's definitely positives; a nice acoustic intro (and occasional reprise), a GREAT apocalyptic "chorus" melody, some nice instrumental textures to simulate the melting of ice as precursor to flooding, whatever. On the other hand, the mid-song jam sounds like a cross between subpar Jethro Tull and subpar King Crimson, the attempt of Peter to add drama by encoding his "ANNHILATION" scream is incredibly stupid and cheezy (screw subjectivity, I'm claiming this as objective fact), and the track just feels so stretched out that I'm begging for the end when it finally comes (even though the end is an extended version of the part I like so much, heh). You may think that something like Yours is no Disgrace or And You and I is overlong, bloated prog - well, for me, this is overlong, bloated prog. I mean, it's not offensive, but so much of it is just there for me ...

Fortunately, while what I've written so far is the description of a 5(8) (or worse) album, the other two tracks are enough to make me knock the rating up. Refugees is possibly the most beautiful song to come out of the VDGG catalogue, as Peter uses his lyrical talent to eloquently express a very down-to-earth emotion, a longing for a time and place where old friends could be found ("West is Mike and Suzy, West is where I love"), combining it with an absolutely gorgeous vocal melody and a pretty flute background. Even the other instruments have their moments - the major key (a contrast to most of the rest, to be sure) organ part around 3:30 to 3:45 has to be one of the most brilliantly cathartic moments in all of the VDGG catalogue, and everybody else does their part well (damn I love those flutes). A lesser track is Out of my Book, which is lovely nonetheless - what can I say, I'm a sucker for good singing and a catchy vocal melody and lovely flutes.

Overall, though ... ehgn. I can see the talent even in the tracks I don't much like, but as you can guess, I won't be pulling this out again any time soon. Let's just say that I'm incredibly glad the band was able to put out albums that I like way more than this.

PS: The remastered version sounds MUCH better than the original CD release I had, and is one of the most effective cases of putting lipstick on a pig I've ever come across. Nothing can save White Hammer, of course, but Darkness is improved so much that I find it mind-boggling. Raise the rating a point for that particular version.

It also helps that the band kicks the album off with possibly its greatest track ever (always a great way to be introduced to a band). Killer is absolutely outstanding, a brilliant display of all of the band's strengths and, dare I say it, NONE of the weaknesses. The lyrics are among Hammill's best (albeit in his typical goofy way), a treatise on loneliness presented in the form of a fish that is compelled to kill anything that comes near it. Yet it is the music itself that makes this track THE alltime VDGG classic - the main grumbly sax-organ riff is absolutely outstanding, as is the main vocal melody, and that's not even including the terrific melody during the "death in the sea" part in the middle. Furthermore, there's a relatively simple (but absolutely perfect for the context) six-note motif that pops up repeatedly in the lengthy instrumental passage, providing a frame for some of the best VDGG playing you'll ever hear. Discord abounds, sure, but it's fast, unsettling discord, and just as it seems the band is running out of steam, Dave Jackson starts playing an absolutely wild saxaphone solo over the band's repeated hammering on the "death in the sea" melody. Now THAT'S what I want out of VDGG. Of course, performance-wise, Hammill comes through splendidly as well - his intentional over-dramatization of the lyrics he sings is perfect, not to mention the way he lets his voice freak out at the end of each line in the main verse melody. An amazing bit of prog, this is.

The next track finds VDGG doing a "simple" piano-based ballad, but that's definitely not an insult. House with no Door shows amply that restraint and the band's style are not inherently contradictory, as Peter's magnificent singing (of more magnificent lyrics in another magnificent vocal melody) is framed by some extremely pleasant piano lines and a bunch of nice flute and saxaphone parts. Kinda like the Moody Blues, but with a distinct VDGG flavor, thanks to Peter's ability to gradually build the level of pleading and desperation in his voice over time, capped off with his burst into a lovely falsetto during the last run of the chorus.

Unfortunately, the album hits a little bit of a standstill with the next track, entitled The Emperor in His War-Room. Strangely enough, it's Peter that bothers me the most on this track - the lyrics cross the thin line into banality that Peter often would walk (usually coming out on top), and Peter's usual overdone delivery hurts rather than helps this time. "As your heart is kissed by the lips of death" is a typically dippy line, and the echo effect he puts on his voice when he sings "..the GARBAGE IN YOUR MOUTH" approaches the depths of "ANNHILATION" from the last album. On the other hand, though, the music itself more or less rules; the slow parts may be a bit overlong, but the way the beautiful lovely flute parts alternate with the "majestic" parts is quite fascinating, and the faster part, featuring some Fripp meanderings over a solid bassline, is extremely enjoyable. Heck, even Peter's singing works better in the fast part, so whatever. Point is, the track has some flaws that just come with the fact that we're talking about Van Der Graaf Generator, but the good parts are very good, so no, I don't dislike this track. Heck, I'll even admit that, if English isn't your first language (which in turn means that the lyrics probably won't be as immediately bothersome to you as they are to me), it would be very easy for you to consider this the best track on the album.

And then we have Lost. Frankly, I feel that the instrumental parts of this track let it and the album down quite a bit. Except for a couple of bits, like the moody sax playing before the "I wore my feelings..." part, or the "rhythmic countdown" somewhere near the end, too much of the playing seems to me like the band went with whatever discordant themes (or variations on the vocal melodies) first popped into its collective head, without worrying whether or not they fit moodwise with the rest of the track (frankly, I don't think they do at all). But while the playing may fail a bit, this is more than made up for by Peter. On ALL COUNTS. The vocal melodies are great, giving Peter a chance to engage in lots of entertaining vocal gymnastics. The lyrics? "If I could just frame the words that would make your fire burn, all this water that's now around me could be the love that should surround me." Enough said. Above all, though, is the delivery. The range of emotions and singing approaches that Peter absolutely nails, from the relative playfulness of the beginning to the sheer majesty of the "I know we'll (I'll) never dance..." lines to the INCREDIBLE operatic majesty that he pulls off in so many other places (holy cow, how anybody in this world could pull off the "...but I'm dead inside as I stand aloooooooooooone (aloooooooooooooooooooooooooone)" part the way he does absolutely boggles my mind) completely confirm for me that Peter was one of the greatest singers ever to have the fortune to be recorded. One of the most crushing love songs I've ever come across, to be sure, and all because of Peter.

Finally, there's Pioneers over c, where Peter and Co. go into the subject of space travel. The lyrics are good ("Doomed to wander in a living death, living antimatter-antibreath"), but as if to make up for the awkward breaks of the last track, the actual music is what steals the show. Several themes dominate the piece, one a slowly rising repeated nine-note bassline (with good textural counterpoint from time to time), another a cool bass/sax riff that pops up in the best places, another a brief atmospheric part with Peter singing such cool lines as, "The universe is on fire, exploding without flame," another a cool organ-driven theme ... man, there's so many cool things that happen in this track. My favorite moment, surprisingly enough, is relatively near the end, where Dave plays a quiet, totally dissonant sax solo (literally solo, the band stops) that works for me because the solo reminds me so much of the last moments of a flickering candle, before it disappears and the Hammond organ leads a brief, interesting and SOOOO ATMOSPHERIC theme. Holy cow, this is the same band that did White Hammer???!!!

And there's your album. Several people I know hate this, but I cannot empathize with this at all. Let it be known that that is an EXTREMELY high 12 - on days when the flaws of Emperor and Lost don't bother me as much as they usually do, my brain enjoys this as much as any 13 (and sometimes beyond) album, and I really see no good reason to not feel the same way.

That said, I do not want to give the impression that the album is worthless, because that's simply not what I think. You see, each of these three tracks has something I like a lot, and to be perfectly honest I like this album slightly more than I do Least. It's just that built around these ideas is a whole ton of material that simply irritates the hell out of me. Repeated listens have brought the positive features clearly to the forefront of my mind, and I've always liked a few parts of the suite that makes up side two, but certain parts have only gotten worse and worse for me as the number of listens I've given this has gone up.

At first, track number one, entitled Lemmings, actually gets the album off to a fairly promising start. The "soft" vocal melody that Peter sings is quite cute, and I particularly enjoy it because the little spike up in the middle of each repetition easily brings to mind the image of little lemmings jumping up off a cliff and then tumbling to their dooms. The harder riff, with a vocal melody sung in unison, is also intriguing - I'm bugged by the echo on Peter's voice, but the riff is very interesting, and Peter really sounds majestic as he sings lines like "We have looked upon the high kings." Of course, every time he breaks the vocal melody from mirroring the riff, he starts to fall back into declamation instead of a singing mode, but still, it's tolerable. Unfortunately, while the track works until about 3:20, the remaining eight minutes of the piece make it very difficult for me to stay focused, and don't forget, I can keep my mind laser focused while listening to Yes' The Remembering. The noodling just keeps going and going, Peter occasionally reprises the beginning vocal melodies but mostly just mirrors the jamming, and basically the sound loses all of its apocalyptic tension by making itself so freakin' low key and boring (well, except for a fairly brief passage where the band goes into an extremely angry-sounding bit). I mean, I really don't see how I can keep myself from falling asleep during the last minute of quiet sax/keyboard noodling.

Up next is Man-Erg, which starts out as a piano-ballad in the vein of House with No Door, but while the atmosphere is quite nice, Peter has trouble here matching the majestic approach of his singing with an equally resonant and memorable vocal melody, and that hurts quite a bit. The sound is nice, but it's getting mushy again, which I'd hoped they fixed once and for all with H to He. Anyway, the song also features a fairly cool mid-section with some fierce sax/organ jamming, along with some solid Fripp guitar lines. Peter's singing sounds especially dumb during this part, but while the instrumental parts kinda veer towards the pointlessness that bugged me so on Least, they're also very fast in parts, so whatever. Of course, Peter comes back and starts singing another soft part, this time using cliches like "acolytes of doom," and it doesn't do much to raise my opinion of the track too much. Concluding with the initial melody, along with the mid-section popping up amidst it from time to time, does give the track a nice epic sweep, but when the individual parts don't impress me that much, it shouldn't be difficult to guess that I'm not totally thrilled.

And then there's A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, which those who hate the band often use as Exhibit 1 of why they hate it so. Strangely enough, though, I've actually come to enjoy several parts of it, though I doubt I'll ever go sufficiently loony to consider it the peak of VDGG, like many fans do. The general gist of the piece, best as I can tell, is that it's about a lighthouse keeper going nuts from a combination of loneliness and all of the ghosts, real and imagined, that are are inherent to the mythology of sea travel. He goes batty, jumps into the sea to kill himself and escape the madness, and muses over various philosophical things. Fine, decent concept, whatever. What does matter to me, though, is that there a few parts that I enjoy a great deal, even though I consider the suite as a whole to be a moderate failure. I actually think the opening Eyewitness section is incredible, combining decent lyrics with an eerie vocal melody and a gloomy atmosphere that sets the lighthouse backdrop well. Furthermore, the lyrics also do a fine job of establishing the gradual paranoia of the protagonist - I particularly like the line, "When you see the skeletons of sailing-ship spars sinking low You'll begin to wonder if the points of all the ancient myths are solemnly directed straight at you..." I don't even mind the occasional dissonant backing harmonies as Peter sings the melody - they do a good job of depicting the various ghosts fluttering around.

So that's part one. Alas, the next couple of minutes, entitled Pictures/Lighthouse, are devoted to a bunch of "atmospheric" blaring sax noises over blaring keyboard noises, followed by some atmospheric organ chords. Enough said. Part three is a reprise of part one melodywise (and thus is also called Eyewitness), and depicts the protagonist reaching the very edge of his sanity. Just as it seems things are starting to get obnoxiously repetitive, we enter section four, S.H.M., where images of sea spectres start assailing the protagonist's mind. I actually find the lyrics here quite image-laden, despite the nonsense that appears at first glance when one glosses over a line like, "'Unreal, unreal!' ghost helmsmen scream and fall in through the sky, not breaking through my seagull shrieks ... no breaks until I die: the spectres scratch on window-slits - hollowed faces, mindless grins only intent on destroying what they've lost." Call me nuts, but it's not difficult at all for me to imagine a nightmare to go with this passage; a bunch of translucent ghosts whirling all around me, screaming seeming nonsense, set upon my destruction solely because they themselves have been destroyed. So anyway, as the lyrics go on, the protagonist is leaning on the wall to support his wilting self, looking out upon the sea and seeing ghosts of ships long gone, crashed upon the rocks. Not bad so far.

Unfortunately, in part five, divided into The Presence of the Night and Kosmos Tours, the suite starts to come unraveled. The first part works nicely, a quiet reprise of the S.H.M melody with appropriately epilogue-ish lyrics, and the later sorta-jazzy melody that comes up after some noodling is amusing (though the hooks aren't very sharp), but then the rest of the part goes into a bit of self-parody. Hammill's screams go with a melody that really strikes me as jerky discord for its own sake, a bit of a vocal freakout for no good reason other than having a bit of a vocal freakout. It ends with the hero jumping out of the lighthouse, presumably into the sea, but while I might have cared for his fate before, the detachment presented immediately before this managed to preemptively undo any resonance I might have had from this. And what's with that random dissonant keyboard-layers part that pops up after that cold melody has finished? This sucks, Beavis.

The next section, Custard's Last Stand, tries to be one of the band's cathartic anthemic ballads, but the melody is so flaccid that it doesn't warm or inspire me at all. Just Pete's voice with lots of echo and not approaching the grandeur of House with no Door. Then we have The Clot Thickens, where everything just goes nuts - it's actually fairly amusing, since it's insane and twisted and weird beyond recall, but given that it uses an "ANNHILATION"-like trick when Peter sings "..one more haggard DROWNED MAN," it's not about to get a total free pass from me. Whatever.

At least the piece ends on a nice note. Land's End and We Go Now actually base their majesty around a lovely piano chord sequence instead of seemingly random organ splurts, and despite the amount of crud I've just waded through to get here, I actually feel a twinge of catharsis listening to this. Plus, let's be fair, the majestic guitar parts coming through the layered vocal and keyboard harmonies (as well as all the sputtering radio static, which works well as a symbol of the protagonist slowly slipping out of his life conciousness), had they come with a better overall piece, would be recognized as near the same level (though in a different way, since this is Robert Fripp and not Steve Hackett) of the brilliant instrumental passages at the tail-end of Genesis' Supper's Ready. Go Robert!

So there you go - a loooooooong review given that this is only gets a 6 out of 10 from me. It's just as I said in the band's introduction - even the songs that are dreadfully flawed overall still have chunks of solid quality, and it takes a lot of effort and explanation to separate those chunks from the overall chaff. In any case, Hammill apparently decided he couldn't do anything else with the band at that time, so they broke up for a few years. It's just as well - I shudder to imagine how a 1972 followup would sound.

Related to this, the band has gone back to the coffee-shop sound of H to He (as opposed to the icky, pseudo-universalist sound of the albums surrounding it), yet even more stripped down - the overall sound is very low-key and meditative, yet there are some parts that manage to rock harder than anything in the band's catalogue to that point. As strange as it seems, this is the kind of album that makes me understand why Johnny Rotten liked this band - the band really "comes back to earth" with this album, much as punk rock brought "normal" rock music back to earth for so many people. The band's style is the same, yes, but the senseless "atmospheric" noodling is (mostly) gone, and the result is that the same combination of players that often seemed so befuddling before (largely because there were too many layers of each player - not that I have anything against overdubs in general) manages to kick a good amount of ass in more than a few spots on the album. Whodathunkit?

So anyway, the album is four tracks, all of them good. The Undercover Man surprised me quite a bit the first time I heard it, if only because I couldn't totally believe that VDGG could exercise such a drastic amount of restraint over an extended period of time as shown here. For almost twenty seconds, it's just a VERY quiet repeated flute note flipping from channel to channel, with a quiet repetition of a cymbal tap and a keyboard note after a bit - no "atmospheric" wind noises like on Darkness, just a musical whisper. And then Peter starts singing, almost in a whisper himself, with no special effects whatsoever (THANK. YOU.). It all slowly gets louder (with the band basically holding the same minimalistic groove) over time, with an ever-growing obviousness as one listens that Peter's singing lyrics that are actually worth listening to (I think the point of them is that we each have a hidden side that we hide only because of our own stubborness and fear, and that if we're not careful, that hidden side will someday need to reach out to somebody, but nobody will be there - I think, though I could be way off), yet never abandons pleasantness for abrasion. And so it goes, with Peter using the power of his voice as only he can, while the band supports him but never overshadows him. Of course, one can point out one little nitpick (from a "regular" music standpoint) for the track - on a formal level, the vocal melody is really just one giant verse sung twice, a kind of massive musical run-on sentence. Frankly, though, I don't care here - in terms of entrancing somebody, putting somebody under a spell, however you want to phrase it, I've heard very few who can match Peter's ability in this department (the one person I would put ahead is another Peter, he of Gabriel fame), and his skills are on full display here.

Scorched Earth slightly recalls the bad sides of the first incarnation of VDGG, if only because Peter comes a little close to his bag-of-banal-tricks a couple of times in his delivery ("It's far too late to turn, unless it's too stone" bugs me a bit, as does "He's walking right into a *traptraptraptrap...*"), but I don't really mind, as the primary riffs of the song tend to knock me into next week. I get somewhat tired of the track around the five minute mark (which is a problem given that it's 9:48), as it goes into a bit too much of VDGG-noodle mode in parts and drives the great riffs a bit too much into the ground in others, but that just means I don't adore the track, not that I at all hate it (which I do not). This is not a crime, so don't flame me like it is one.

Flipping over to side two, we come to Arrow, which starts with a minute-and-a-half of what sounds to my plebian ears like free jazz, before a phased guitar line quietly comes in and the other instruments slowly build up around it in a gloriously anthemic fashion. Finally, about 3:10 into the track, we get Peter growling out some solid apocalyptic lyrics to what turns out to be an extremely catchy vocal melody, full of impressive buildups and climaxes that each end with him bellowing the word "ARRROOOOOOW." The most delightful surprise comes about 5:25 in, where the band manages to seriously and legitimately rock for the first time in as long as I can remember - it's mostly a stately, simple saxaphone phrase played repeatedly in different ways, with a solid rhythmic foundation, but holy cow it rocks like mad, before Peter comes back to do his thing some more. And oh how he does his thing some more - the tension and fear, crossed with the maddening sense of inevitability leading to the end, capped off with "How strange my body FEEELS IMPAAAAAAAAALED UPON THE ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOW" is probably the single greatest vocal passage on an album full of great vocal passages.

After the band gradually brings Arrow to a close after Peter's shining moment, we come to the best of the four, The Sleepwalkers. The lyrics are some of Peter's best, yet as tends to happen in my favorite VDGG tracks, it's the music that mostly steals the show. The main organ-sax riff is instantly recognizable as prog-rock because of how involved and untrivial it is, yet it's almost, I dunno, goofy, if goofy can be used for a song as gloomy as most of this is. I say most because the song also features one of the most gloriously macabre sections I've heard in prog rock, a slight Vaudeville pastiche (built around Peter's vocal melody for the rest of the track) that, for whatever reason, strikes me as the perfect smart-alleck soundtrack to watching a bunch of sleepwalkers (or undead zombies, for that matter - hey, the only difference between the two is that one is technically alive). But other than that, it's all sorts of doom and gloom in the music, all to great effect. The quiet keyboard flourish when Peter sings, "but soon the dream is ended," which also pops up at the very end, combined with the terrific hard-rock groove the band goes into at the five-minute mark (a mode in which the rest of the piece stays, including after Peter comes back in with the vocals) is enough to make me easily put this in my top 5 VDGG tracks. Honestly, the album is worth buying for this track alone.

To wrap it up: yes, the album is a tough nut to crack, and yes, I can see where many people would not want to expend the energy to try and crack it beyond a couple of listens. Yes, there are some parts that remind me why it is I only gave VDGG **. But dang it, this album has grown mercilessly on me over the months and years, and while I don't think it will grow much further, I nevertheless happily recommend it to all music fans the world over. Heck, even somebody who thinks they hate VDGG could enjoy this.

The end result is that, while all of the tracks on Godbluff entered my good graces, only the first two tracks here particularly make me want to hear them again when the album is done. Not because they're particularly enlightening from a standard music sense, but because Peter's performances on each are at an exceptionally high level. Pilgrims does the run-on sentence thing again, just like Undercover Man on the last album, yet may be even better than the Godbluff opener, as Peter runs the gauntlet of emotions in his lyrics and delivery in possibly his best anthemic display yet (a standard which gets higher and higher with each passing album). Still Life, on the other hand, is nothing but depression, an amazingly gloomy take on the emptiness of life and existence, ending with you entering the state of death along with your wife. Man, I may not buy into this kind of emptiness philosophy, but there's something to be said about a song that can have as brilliant a stanza as: "What chance now of holding fast the line, defying death and time - Everything we had is gone? Everything we laboured for and favoured more than earthly things reveals the hollow ring of false hope and of false deliverance." $%&*%&$()#*$!& excuse me while I go shoot myself. A brilliant low-key delivery, too.

But the next three tracks just don't measure up for me. It's not just that I can't remember heads or tails for them - I can't really do that with most of mark-2 VDGG anyway, and I still like this incarnation of the band. It's that none of Hammill's performances resonate enough with me to cause me to have a lingering emotional memory after they're over. That doesn't mean they're totally unentertaining when on - Hammill's too clever to allow that. But aside from vaguely remembering that La Rossa features Peter kinda pissed, My Room (Waiting for Wonderland) kinda emotional, and Childlike Faith in Childhood's End kinda bombastic (not in a bad way, more of in a Pioneers Over c way), I can't remember much of what was triggered at all. And sheesh, at no time does the band enter into a hard rock groove like on the second half of Godbluff - there's one that kinda comes close in the last track (popping up twice, first in the "As anti-matter sucks and pulses ..." part), but even that seems like a pale imitation of the similar groove of Sleepwalkers.

Still, in the end, I don't want to give this album anything less than a 7(10). After all, the last three tracks, as much as I can't recall much about them, don't offend me in any particular way, and the first two tracks are danged great. But regardless, get Godbluff first, and then proceed here with caution.

UPDATE: (7/15/06) I have upgraded the album's rating a smidge due to the fact that, after many, many listens, I finally gained a real appreciation for Childlike Faith in Childhood's End. And to think all I had to do was sit down and watch 2001: A Space Odyssey again and actually figure out what the heck was going on. Yes, the song is pompous in some ways that make me a little uncomfortable (and man, there's just something a little too dorky about a song that contains the lyric, "Let us make computations of the stars," even if it fits in perfectly), but it has true epic power going on, and it's become a song I genuinely enjoy listening to. So that's worth an upgrade to a high 7, as opposed to a low 7.

The album gets off to a slightly deceptive start with When She Comes, as the first half minute or so is dominated by seemingly random overdubs of various Jackson woodwinds, but a nice groove slowly fades in and takes precedence over the dissonance, and soon the introduction is nothing but a memory. Peter's vocal tone is a bit odd (which I guess could throw some fans), but that's about the only complaint I could lodge, as Peter's singing is well-supported by some great guitar and sax texture in parts, and a FABULOUS organ line in others. Even the mid-song instrumental break works - some moody, pleasant (not discordant for its own sake) sax soloing, some slightly dated synth sounds (not horrible, though), some jamming around the "main" themes, and none of it sounding essentially pointless to my ears. I might shorten the song by a couple of minutes, but other than that, I can hardly think of anything about which it would be worthwhile to complain.

A Place to Survive is probably even better, though, if only because it manages to stay in a fabulous groove for more or less the entirety of its ten minutes. It sounds a little Steely Danish, but while some may consider that a fatal flaw (like the commentator mentioned in the first paragraph), I would say that if it took a Steely Dan influence to make this combination of the usual VDGG elements so irresistable for so long, then so much the better. The quiet yet powerful intensity of this track is truly a wonder to behold, especially in the parts where Peter blares out his lines in such an "ugly" yet fascinating way (I LOVE the way he sings "place to surVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE"), with the band sorta using those parts as a launchpad for their intensity afterwards. Of course, ending the track with such a blatant nod to the end of King Crimson's Schizoid Man is a bit of a cheat, but that's hardly worth worrying about.

The other three tracks don't measure up to the first two (surprise), but they're at least more impressive to my ears than the last three tracks of Still Life, so that's at least something. Masks, the side-one closer, has an extremely pleasant, melancholy opening, but the music basically consists of repeating the opening several times while Peter sings his usual high quality lyrics with an average quality performance (except, of course, for the "m m m masochistic m m m mumble of his act") part. In other words, ok, but not really an essential part of my musical diet. The album closer, Wondering, tries to be a massive bombastic anthem, and despite the (as before) slightly irritating synth noises, it almost succeeds with me. At least, it works fairly well as a potential career closer (which I wish it would have been), in my humble opinion.

Sandwiched between these two tracks is a track whose very existence and character seemingly makes it an inevitable source of debate amongst VDGG listeners. Meurglys III (The Songwriter's Guild) is a 20+ minute behemoth that (on the plus side), unlike A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, doesn't require a copy of The Bible Code at hand to be deciphered, but (on the minus side) is based around a small number of themes that are noodled into the ground. I like it, though. The lyrics are freakin' GREAT, a brilliant treatise on self-isolation (come to think of it, most Hammill songs are about that in some way or another) that starts with "These days I mainly just talk to plants and dogs - all human contact seems painfuly, risky odd. So I stay acting god in my own universe ..." and only builds from there. And the music, well, the themes are nice, even if they are repeated seemingly ad nauseum. The sound never gets mushy, there's a lot of guitar (I love how it plays along with the saxes in the part after Peter sings "There's nothing else but my guitar ... I suppose he'll have to do"), and it even turns into a reggae jam in the last third! That this reggae part stays almost exactly the same for seven minutes is a bit irritating, but that hardly makes it unlistenable.

In short, this may be slightly uneven (WHAT ELSE IS NEW), but the high points are very high, and I'd gladly recommend the album to anybody not afraid to have to exert a little effort when listening to music. Unfortunately, this would turn out to be the last VDGG album - Hugh Banton took off (maybe he was mad that Peter asked his keyboard parts to make sense, who knows), and the band came to an end. It did, however, reform for one more album, albeit with a different name and slightly different approach.

I don't even know where to begin in trying to describe these tracks. Lizard Play seems ok, given that I get a slight twinge when I hear Peter sing, "...in the land where the lizards plaaaaay," so that's something. The Siren Song has a very pleasant atmosphere, even if there's nothing remotely memorable (lyrically or musically) aside from parts of the main piano melody. Lessee .... oh yeah, it's neat how The Sphinx in the Face ends with the chorus harmonies singing a capella, and how The Sphinx Returns (which follows Chemical World) starts off with those same a capella harmonies before going back to the "regular" version of the chorus. Oooh, and I like that moody violin and bass introduction to Last Frame, yup.

But the rest? Sheesh. I mean, this isn't the worst listening experience in the world, and there's a few reasonably intriguing parts here and there, but I couldn't figure out what to say besides this for all the tea in China. It should be noted, though, that fans seem to like this quite a bit, so if you're a budding VDGG hardcore fan, it may be worth your while to seek it out. As is, though, I'm perfectly content with the good tracks the Generator conjured up - this will probably never grace my stereo again.

Amazingly enough, though, it's actually really decent. Instrumentally, the band sounds like it's lost nothing at all (though the band had never relied on amazing technical skills to make its best music in the first place, so I guess it's not surprising), and Hammill is in fine form given his age. The band's central shtick is, of course, basically the same as it's ever been; Hammill rambles on and over-emotes (not meant in a bad way) with his "intellectual" lyrics while the band stomps and clomps behind him in a sorta structured manner. One thing that's slightly different than usual is that there's a lot of guitar here, more than on any VDGG album except for World Record. The track where guitar makes its most notable appearance is in the "short" Abandon Ship!, which gives Hammill a chance to ramble about getting old and losing your mental grip. It's also a key ingredient in the texture of the following In Babelsburg, which has a rather perverse intensity as Peter bellows what I guess are decent lyrics about post WWII Berlin. The delivery is actually kinda muffled in that one, truth be told, and I'm not crazy about the song, but I like it.

The opening Every Bloody Emperor is the album's major highlight, of course. It's particularly timely for 2005, of course, when slowly but surely the free nations of the world morph into empires by stripping away one freedom at a time. It also helps that it has Hammill's best and clearest vocal delivery of the album, with a rather enjoyable, if slightly rambling, melody (kinda like Pilgrims) that has only grown on me over time. And let us not forget the absolutely lovely flute work that Jackson graces this track, bringing great beauty before he eventually switches back to his saxes. I could take or leave some of the random bits of discord in the second half of the song, but I guess they're nice to have in the sense that they provide an extra reminder that, "Holy cow, this is a new Van Der Graaf Generator album in 2005!"

Unfortunately, the other three tracks on disc one (more on disc two later) don't quite make it for me. Boleas Panic is the band's first instrumental since (I think, unless I'm forgetting something) Black Smoke Yen on Aerosol Grey Machine, and while it's certainly no difficult burden on the ears, it's not something I'll want to come back to any time soon. The problem, as I hear it, is that Jackson is trying to cross his "regular" VDGG sax work (with the rest of the band following suit) with mellowness and "maturity," but in the end he kinda makes it just a slightly longer, slightly more discordant version of "smooth jazz." Maturity is all well and good, but when it gets applied in this manner, and for almost seven minutes to boot, it's not something I'm about to praise.

The closing On the Beach is also a little too close to adult contemporary for my comfort, and though it's obvious that they were shooting for some diversity with a track like this, this just largely proves my assertion that the band was/is largely incapable of branching out beyond its general niche. I mean, let's face it: can any good come out of a song that involves Peter Hammill calling out, "surf's up!" ? I think we all know the answer to that question.

The remaining track, Nutter Alert, rates a little higher in my eyes than those two others, but I still can't quite give it a thumbs up. Simply put, I just can't get past feeling bothered by the title and the way it's used during the song; I feel like Peter penned one of the verses, kinda stumbled at the end, and jotted down the first combination of words (about something vaguely relating to paranoia) that ended with an "-ert" sound that popped into his brain. I guess I just have to ask; what is the Nutter Alert? Is it a feeling? Is it a frightening object? What is it exactly? I dunno, I just keep getting more and more bothered by that each time I listen to the track, even if it's a fairly stupid gripe. This is actually quite a shame, since I rather like the central theme around which the track ends up being formed, and can enjoy the other instrumental passages as much as I do any other average Jackson-led passage.

So that's disc one. Disc two is a collection of instrumental improvisations by the band (as Banton wrote somewhere, listening to them is like being locked in a room with Van Der Graaf Generator), which is a concept that so frightened me that I waited a good week after first listening to disc one to start listening to any of disc two. I mean, if VDGG's written material was so discordant, what kind of monstrous noise would they come up with while making stuff up as they go along?? Well, it turns out that my line of thinking was incorrect, because I like this disc quite a bit. It's actually revelatory in terms of where the band came up with so many of their ideas, because an awful lot of this sounds just like the sort of thing that would go into the "written" sections of their songs (ie the improvised bits weren't cleaned up that much), only with more of the energy that naturally accompanies trying to play off others without a serious clue of what's going on. I have some I like more than others (Architectural Hair stood out to me in particular, though I don't remember why), and it'll be a long while before I feel the urge to listen to these tracks again, but they're certainly all decent, and that's a victory.

So that's the band's comeback. It's everything I could reasonably hope for from such a venture, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a serious fan of the group. If you live and die by the VDGG sound, this is nearly as essential as Still Life.

There's just one major problem. Hammill's vocals at this concert are absolutely, unremittingly bad. Yeah, I know that he had throat surgery a couple of years prior to this concert, and of course there was the natural passage of time, but even accounting for those factors, Hammill comes close to ruining what's otherwise a perfectly good performance. I can understand taking an aggressive approach to singing things like Darkness or the aggressive parts of Lemmings and Man-Erg, but yelling tunelessly during Refugees and Childlike Faith in Childhood's End (which is DESTROYED by Hammill) and pretty much every track on here is something else entirely. Lots of the time he doesn't even approximate singing, instead choosing to growl out his lines like a rabid dog. I mean, I knew from others' accounts that live VDGG performances were very noisy back in the day, but I still didn't expect that the singing here would pretty much ruin everything.

The end result is that, despite good performances otherwise, I don't really want to hear anything from this album again. The band is enthusiastic and happy to be together, and I'm sure this was a hoot to see in person, but it's torture. Recommended only for completists.

PS: I am rather amused by the way Peter directly shatters the illusion that song requests from the audience would even be considered, as he says early on that they'd already decided what they would play and would not deviate.