The sound is becoming tighter with this album – less prog, more new wave, as was not uncommon at the time – look at the direction Peter Gabriel took the same year. A change in sound is due in part, it seems, to the departures of organist Hugh Banton and saxophonist/flautist David Jackson, the return of bassist Nic Potter and the addition of violinist Graham Smith. A violin riff from Smith opens Lizard Play, the album’s first track. It’s a signal of new things, to be sure. Lizard Play is also notable for some nicely mixed harmonies.
Running times are shorter, arrangements are less improvisational, but the vocals are still speaking/howling combinations we’ve come to know and love. Replacing horns with a violin produces a slightly more listener-friendly sound, which works well with the shorter songs.
I especially like the double-tracked violin in the second half of Cat’s Eye/Yellow Fever (Running). That’s a mouthful of a title – I think we’ve got the same glut of ideas that populate earlier VDGG work, but condensed somewhat. There’s a fine lip-sync video of this track (alas the sound is not cleaned up) that shows there was also a cellist in this lineup. You can hear the cello on the album, but the player isn’t credited on Wikipedia. The notes for the video name him as Chas Dickie.
The Sphinx In The Face (one of two songs on which Jackson plays) opens with a Dirty Water-style bassline which is kind of tasty. Stylistically it might have done well if pushed as a new wave track, but lyrically it relies heavily on the repetition of a refrain that Hammill usually avoids. (And I’m not sure if You’re so young, you’re so old / You’re so queer, you’re so strong / Such a drag to be told / You’re so here, you’re so gone ranks with his best writing. A 90-second reprise after Chemical World seems a little superfluous.)
Chemical World is sort of Suede meets Fairport Convention via Hamilton Beach.
It’s kind of an odd album to go out on. They toured it and released a live album (Vital, coming up next), and then went on hiatus for 28 years.
Opening track When She Comes closes with an interesting Spanish castanet thing, but it’s a proper rocker. For the most part. The second verse almost had me feeling I’d tripped into a Leonard Cohen song: ‘And you think she’s really with you, / and you think that she’ll always stay, / always ready to forgive you, / always ready to grant you her mercy / but in her own way,’ but Hammill twists in his own vision of things, namechecking ‘The Belle Dame [is] without mercy’ from Arthurian mythology.
That said, but this album has a much greater pop sensibility than its predecessors. It helps that two of the five songs clock in at less than 8 minutes and two more at less than ten. Yes, I’m stretching the definition of ‘pop’, I know.
On first listen, the four tracks that make up Godbluff are a bit less varied than those on Pawn Hearts (not hard, given the multiple sources of side two and the extensive recording process). It seemed to be all hard all the time, sort of like ConstruKction of Light/Power To Believe-era Crimson. The dynamics are mostly set to full on. This might have to do with it being the first VDGG album without an outside producer.
And then there’s side 2. A ten-part medley that on a certain level brings Genesis’ Supper’s Ready to mind, but possibly a little more scattershot. The lyrics still speak to the human position in the face of the disasters of modernity:I can see the lemmings coming, but I know I’m just a man / Do I join or do I founder? Which can is the best I may?
Joe Jots 