I like the cover which merges an outerspace blue marble photo of the earth (centered on the middle east, oddly, not Europe or the US) with an LP. Musically, it’s a lot of the same kind of stuff we’re used to and then suddenly not. It’s a very different beast than Still Life, which was released only six months before.

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.

A Place To Survive also rocks out pretty mightily with Jackson’s horns positively screeching at times over Banton’s mellotron arpeggios. It closes with the the sound of the recording tape being pulled thin, garbled and distorted. Masks, which closes side 1 (just a note or two short of actually resolving musically), continues the musical intensity with another confused/complex Hammill character who confuses the face he shows the world with the face he shows himself. Or something. Lyrically, it reminded me a bit of MC 900 Ft Jesus’ The Killer Inside Me, though that might be a little twisted.

Side 2’s 21-minute epic, Meurglys III (The Songwriter’s Guild), has a long reggae section. The first 13 minutes are a normal proggy VDGG song with lyrics about not knowing the truth or thinking the truth is there but in the end it’s not. And then the bass takes over and there’s several minutes of that loping 70s reggae beat with some way-down-in-the-cutaway guitar work. It’s cool, but a little unexpected. (The 2015 live version on Merlin Atmos clocks in at 15:24 and keeps the reggae to a minimum.)

The initial release of the album closed with Wondering, which starts as a flute-based (or rather synth-flute-based) waltz and evolves into something musically anthemic, but lyrically ambivalent. In the first iteration of the last line, wondering if it’s all been true, the last word is spoken and intoned like a question. The line is repeated several times with the word true usually sunk below the instrumentation.

Really, I’m still trying to get my head around this one. On the one hand, four years makes a huge difference. On the other hand, there were four Peter Hammill albums in between Pawn Hearts and this one, all of which featured most if not all of the other members of VDGG.

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.

The Undercover Man opens quietly, but Hammill leans on the sing/scream dynamic he used to some effect in songs like Man-Erg. His falsetto is still in good form.

Scorched Earth is more full on and Arrow falls squarely into heavy metal territory. Yup, some serious heavy metal saxophone.

And then The Sleepwalkers, the album’s original closing track, has multiple sections including one with this weird fairground organ thingy going on. It’s the piece with the most interesting range of stuff going on. Give the subject matter, well…

The bonus tracks are live versions of Foresaken Garden and A Louse Is Not A Home from Hammill’s 1974 album The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage. The recording isn’t very good – a fair amount of feedback mars the listening experience.

Another member of Music Obscurica posted a bit about this, and was primarily glad because he could share this fine version of the magnum opus, A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers.

Pawn Hearts is a proper entry in the prog rock canon, with a track that takes up all of one side, (viz. Yes’ Relayer and Close To The Edge; Genesis’ Foxtrot – yeah, the 99-second Horizons doesn’t count).

With this album they venture into serious free jazz territory. Not that Jaxon’s saxophones weren’t already doing that work on the previous two albums. What VDGG do really well is to rope that improvisation into the service of Hammill’s intense lyrics.

Side 1 comprises two tracks, Lemmings and Man-Erg. While Hammill’s themes often include internal battles writ large, Lemmings takes on the state of humankind in the face of expanding war: Death offers no hope, we must grope for the unknown answer / Unite our blood, abate the flood, avert the disaster .

Man-Erg opens with contrasting verses that open ‘The killer lives inside of me’ and ‘Angels live inside me’ and he works from there with music of appropriate fierceness.

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?