Xurtio

Album Title: X
Artist: Spock's Beard
Nationality: U.S.
Year: 2010
Subgenre: Grunge-Prog
Player(s): Nick D'Virgilio (Drums & Lead Vocals), Alan Morse (Guitars, Backing Vocals), Ryo Okumoto (Keyboards), Dave Meros (Bass, Additional Backing Instrumentation)
Familiarity: Never heard before, but have heard of. Guess I never got past the novelty band name to give them a listen
Favourite track(s): “Their Name Escapes Me (nameless)”
Why? Groovy intro, vocals are more tolerable here than most other tracks (but also kind of remind me of Tenacious D's Jack Black), nice mellow break with an intense sax outro. I also liked Kamikaze a lot, probably due to the lack of vocals.
Least favourite track(s): "Emperorer's New Clothes"
Why? It was really a toss up between several track's where the vocals sound like a grunge rocker like Eddie Vedder singing over prop musicians... basically ruining my enjoyment of the groove.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad?
Not really, other then the name being novel.
Factoids you'd like to share? Don't know any factoids... I guess I read that the vocalist was the drummer, and I had to know because the vocals sucked so often.
End impression: Well, I'm glad I was introduced to this band, I thoroughly enjoy their progressions and their transitions and their melodic rifts. They can tell a story really well with their instruments. But I'm completely turned off by most of the vocals, because they rip me out the prog immersion that the instrumental introductions submerge me in.
Rating: 3 Great musicians, but bad vocals over good music is one of my pet peeves. It's not that the vocals are particularly bad, musically, but the grungy vocal styles conflict with the progressive themes.

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H̓̇̅̉yͤ͏mͬ͂ͧn͑̽̽̌ͪ̑͐͟o̴͊̈́͑̇m͛͌̓ͦ̑aͫ̽ͤ̇n̅̎͐̒ͫ͐c̆ͯͫ̋ ̔̃́eͯ͒rͬͬ̄҉

Trollheart

Album Title: X
Artist: Spock's Beard
Nationality: American
Year: 2010
Subgenre: Neo-Prog
Player(s): Nick D'Virgilio (Drums & Lead Vocals), Alan Morse (Guitars, Backing Vocals), Ryo Okumoto (Keyboards), Dave Meros (Bass, Additional Backing Instrumentation)
Familiarity: Have heard some of their material but find it hard to make it through a full album. Slowly getting there.
Favourite track(s): “The edge of the in-between”
Why? I like the idea of a really good opener, and though this is something of an epic it really keeps my interest from beginning to end. I like the digs at reality shows (“See the girls line at the gate, they're gathering for a chance in the big machine”) and the instrumentation is flawless.
Least favourite track(s): "Emperor's New Clothes"
Why? It's just stupid and Nick trying to sing like a 70s rocker is a bit silly. Mind you, it was a choice between this and “Their names escape me”, which is equally annoying.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad?
I kind of hoped this would be the album to finally decide me on SB but so far I'm still kind of on the fence with them.
Factoids you'd like to share? Um, their name is based on the Star Trek episode “Mirror mirror”, in which Spock, well, had a beard! Oh, and it's their tenth album, as if you couldn't guess...
End impression: A decent album that has almost a 50/50 between great and poor tracks, but has not yet managed to convince me these guys are worth listening to for any great length of time.
Comments: Nobody doing comments any more guys? This is actually our second outing with Spock's Beard in this club, our previous being in the former incarnation when we looked at “The Light”. I wasn't terribly impressed with it then, and I can't say I'm overly so here either, though I did enjoy the album. As I said above I've been finding it hard to get into Spock's Beard. The first albums I heard from them were on a playlist rotation with other tracks and I used to skip them, almost going as far as to delete their material off my player, but then I heard “Flow” and I liked it. Since then I've given them a chance but I find their music, for me, is quite hit and miss, and it's the same here. Some great tracks, some really bad ones. I've also somehow always thought of them as an English band, dunno why: they just don't sound American to me.

As usual there are the epics but surprisingly they're what save this album for me. Opener “Edge of the in-between” is excellent and the closer “Jaws of Heaven” almost tied for best track with that. The ones that annoy me are detailed above and it's just that they're too whimsical. Come on guys: this is not 1973! You can't get away with that sort of thing these days. Musicianship has never been in doubt but some of the subject matter for the songs is downright awful, as touched on by Anteater already. I would have preferred to have seen a ballad on this album though, as they do those quite well.
Rating: I'll give it a 4.0 on the basis of the epics as I think it probably deserves it, though I may be being a little generous here.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Unknown Soldier

Album Title: X
Artist: Spock's Beard
Nationality: American
Year: 2010
Subgenre: Neo-Prog
Player(s): Nick D'Virgilio (Drums & Lead Vocals), Alan Morse (Guitars, Backing Vocals), Ryo Okumoto (Keyboards), Dave Meros (Bass, Additional Backing Instrumentation)
Familiarity: Pretty familiar with the Neal Morse era.
Favourite track(s): “The Edge of the In-Between”
Why? A strong 10 minute opener, which I thought was going to set the tone for the rest of the album, sadly it didn't.
Least favourite track(s): Nothing was really bad enough to single out here, it just all happened to be mediocre instead of bad.
Why? The problem is that a large number of the tracks were very average.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? Well I always enjoyed the Neal Morse era, so I was expecting at least something to that quality.
Factoids you'd like to share? I guess they're Star Trek fans and there was a real concern that the band would be leaderless after the departure of Neal Morse. General consensus is that they weren't but I think they were.
End impression: Decent playing and good musically but I was too uninterested to pick up on any individual musician here, but anyway does being good musically really make a good album these days? Well not really imo.
Comments: I really struggle with this kind of modern day prog that incorporates too much in the way of pop sensibilities and this is one such album. It's glossy and really lacks substance underneath the gloss and the band are really riding the production train here. Tracks like "Kamikaze" come across as a homage to classic era Yes, but do they really need to do this considering that the rest of the album is aimed at being a viable commercial release? Overall the album comes across as prog by numbers and I suggest that if anybody wants to hear what this band is capable of, then they're best off checking their early output and starting with albums like The Light.

Rating: 3.0 quite simply means average, decent and nothing special and that is exactly what this album is.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Trollheart

Okay, fellow progheads! It's Sunday and time for a new spin, so off we go.
Round and round and round she goes, and where she stops.... well, at
17
actually!

Which gives us


Pawn hearts --- Van der Graaf Generator

Interesting. I have this one, and know it reasonably well. There are some epic tracks on it. In fact, they're all epics: there are no short tracks.

Reviews in by next Sunday please!

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Trollheart

Album Title: Pawn hearts
Artist: Van der Graaf Generator
Nationality: British
Year: 1971
Subgenre: Classic Prog?
Player(s): Peter Hammill (Guitars, Pianos and Vocals), Hugh Banton (Keyboards, Bass), Guy Evans (Drums), David Jackson (Sax and flute) --- with guest appearance from Robert Fripp on guitar
Familiarity: I bought all of VdGG's albums in a spree after hearing one of their collections. I've yet to hear them all but I know this album very well. One of the real old classic prog bands who kind of started it all. Originals, in every sense of the word.
Favourite track(s): "A plague of lighthouse keepers"
Why? It's hard to choose when you have only three tracks, but for such a long piece this never bored me and I think it's constructed incredibly well. Plus it really showcases Hammill's amazing vocal range, and wouyld be the template for many an epic, from “Supper's ready” to “Cygnus x-1” in the future.
Least favourite track(s): None really but I'll choose “Lemmings (Including, it goes without saying, “Cog”!)"
Why?Merely because the second two tracks are totally amazing and though I do like this I don't love it as much as the other two. As an opener it's just a little weak I feel, but I still like it.
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? No. I know this album very well indeed and was looking forward to revisiting it again.
Factoids you'd like to share? The album title was a slip of the tongue resulting in an inadvertent Spoonerism, when “horn parts” got turned around to “porn hearts” and thence to Pawn Hearts. I did not know that. Thanks Wiki. Also, this album reached number 1 in Italia, probably Van der Graaf's biggest ever success anywhere.
End impression: An album that never really dates, and stands as a real classic within, and template for, the burgeoning progressive rock scene, and which influenced countless artistes down the years.
Comments: How do you market an album with only three tracks? Well, back in 1971 you had a lot of prog rock bands coming through with big epics --- Caravan, Yes, Pink Floyd --- so it wasn't as unusual as it would be today. That said, even “Meddle” had more than three tracks so this could be seen as something of a gamble, but than, Van der Graaf were never a band concerned with singles, chart success or indeed any success. And they weren't that successful. But they left behind a blueprint that has been followed, in one way or the other, by almost every prog band that has come after them, and others in different genres too.

I can't say for certain, but I believe Peter Hammill may have been the first singer to exhibit such a range of different styles, so many what I would call separate musical identities. One moment he can be singing softly at piano, the next he's raving like a loon, then he's snarling in anger and then quiet and soft again. You can clearly see where both Gabriel and Fish gained their inspiration, and the man was and is a total vocal powerhouse. VdGG would not have been the same without him.

The juxtapositioning of the soft piano melody and almost lullaby vocal on “Man-erg” (no, I don't know what it means, unless it's a corruption of “manage”?) with the subject matter --- “A killer lives inside of me...” is just amazing and takes my breath away every time. And “A plague of lighthouse keepers” is one of the most ambitious compositions I have ever heard in my life, mixing elements of rock, classical, jazz, funk even into an overarching story which appears to be about a man facing the last nights of his life (?) --- I can see now where Sean Filkins got his inspiration for “Epitaph for a mariner” --- which after all the changes, bumps and humps, screams and cries at the firmament for justice and explanation, ends in a slow, gentle acceptance and a quiet drifting off to the afterlife. Unless I got that totally wrong. But that's what it says to me and the lyric seems to back it up somewhat.

Either way, you have to look on this album as almost a progenitor of so many other classic prog albums since, and Van der Graaf as the weatherbeaten and experienced grandfathers of so much that we enjoy today in progressive rock. A superb album: may be their best, I don't know. As I said I have only heard a few, but without doubt their most successful and influential, and without it we might not have classics like “Close to the edge”, “Foxtrot” or even “Script for a jester's tear.”

Rating: Even with “Lemmings (including “Cog”)” being just that little weaker than the rest of the album I still have no hesitation in awarding this the rank of a masterpiece, which it is. So my rating for this album is 5.0

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Unknown Soldier

Album Title: Pawn hearts
Artist: Van der Graaf Generator
Nationality: British
Year: 1971
Subgenre: Classic Prog
Player(s): Peter Hammill (Guitars, Pianos and Vocals), Hugh Banton (Keyboards, Bass), Guy Evans (Drums), David Jackson (Sax and flute) --- with guest appearance from Robert Fripp on guitar
Familiarity: Surprisingly the album I knew least from their early work.
Favourite track(s): "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"
Why? Well it's such a epic and it wouldn't be possible to not like this and still like the rest of the album. The song is truly innovative and its strength lies in each member doing their own musical virtuosos without actually getting too carried away with it like ELP would and these disciplined restraints are a key factor for the song.
Least favourite track(s): None
Why? N/A
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? The album I least know of the band's early work, so was kind of looking forward to listening to it again to see if it's as great as the reviews were saying.
Factoids you'd like to share? I once remember reading that this album was originally meant to be a double.
End impression: A prime example of classic era prog really and the sax of David Jackson is pretty amazing as is the drumming of Guy Evans, but then again so are the rest of the band. Like most of VDGG's work the album has stood the test of time and still sounds very fresh. VDGG I find are a band that should be listened to sparingly anyway.
Comments: I always slightly preferred the previous two albums over this The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other and H to He, Who Am The Only One, but on listening to this today it's much better than I remembered and reading various reviews on how highly this album is rated, I can certainly see the brilliance of the album. But at the end of the day with VDGG it's really like apples and oranges as most of their albums are pretty great and solid, something that not every prog band can always muster.

As already mentioned Peter Hammill was the vital ingredient of this band and had a pretty remarkable vocal range along (even if he sounds girly at times)with the band's instantly recognizable sound and soundwise they kind of sat somewhere between King Crimson and Genesis and were as equally as good as those two. But whereas I can easily be in the mood to listen to Gabriel era Genesis and virtually anything by Crimson, I really have to be in the mood for VDGG, but maybe that's just down to how intense they are.

Rating: 4.5

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Anteater

Album Title: Pawn Hearts
Artist: Van Der Graaf Generator
Nationality: British
Year: 1971
Subgenre: None.
Player(s): Peter Hammill (Guitars, Pianos and Vocals), Hugh Banton (Keyboards, Bass), Guy Evans (Drums), David Jackson (Sax and flute) --- with guest appearance from Robert Fripp on guitar
Familiarity: I've had this album a lonnnnng time.
Favourite track(s): "A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers"
Why? Hammill is at his absolute best here: some people believe this to be the best "epic" prog song pre-Close To The Edge, and I suppose there's something to that. Jackson's sax work in particular is an absolute stand out.
Least favourite track(s): None
Why? N/A
Any preconceptions prior to listening, whether good or bad? Considering how much I like VDGG, I guess its hard to have preconceptions when you're already aware at how good the music is.
Factoids you'd like to share? Nothing that comes to mind.
End impression: A great listen as always, and distinctive even within their own catalog of output. It's not too long and not too short.
Comments: Probably the most underrated classic progressive rock album of the first half of the decade besides Gentle Giant's Acquiring The Taste, and like that record, there's a sense of vitality to the music that still resounds even decades later. I don't use the word "striking" very often, but that's what Hammill and co. were when they got in the zone, and in the zone they were all throughout Pawn Hearts. Their ace in the hole was definitely David Jackson though: did anybody outside of the fusion circuit even try to bring in sax to a pure prog rock context back then besides these guys? Nope, and that tells you a lot right there.

Rating: 5. It's not even my favorite record by VDGG, but its fantastic music when your in the right mood and its progressiveness is undeniable.

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Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

Trollheart

Thanks guys: you two are really starting to fit in here! Sorry Moss, I know you're being changed into a proghead (correct term yes) sort of against your will, but I hope it's turning out to be a pleasant and unexpected experience.



I'm sort of surprised by Xurtio's dislike of Hammill's voice, considering it was the template for both Gabriel and Fish, but there you go.

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Unknown Soldier

That's really the crux of the matter for most people when it comes to VDGG, they either dig Hammill's voice or not and that usually affects their opinion of the band overall.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History