AVDGAD – 15 – Do Not Disturb

February 23, 2017 //

And last year’s fine effort brings the Van Der Graaf Generator saga to a close. Clocking in at just under an hour, Do Not Disturb is a curious effort. They three remaining members only worked together on the music for about two weeks (according to the wikibox), but it sounds much like another well-oiled VDG machine.

vdgg-dnd (Oh No I Must Have Said) Yes seems to be a response to the various failings of the electorate in the past year, though the recording was complete before, for example, the Brexit referendum…

But let’s not talk about the old days
except to say the consequences run,
to be plain, what’s over isn’t done
and you thought you were only having fun.

As always, most of the songs seem to contain epics within them, slow movements calmly orchestrated still go measure to measure with slamming drums, weirdly overlaid vocals, and histrionic keyboards, but if they didn’t, we’d question whether we were listening to the right band.

It’s definitely good stuff, but not the gut-grabbing musical assault that we were once used to.

I realised there’s another live recording: Live at Maida Vale, recorded at the BBC in 2010 and released in 2012. It’s not on the band’s Wikipedia discography, but it’s up on Spotify. I’ll probably give that a listen next week.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

AVDGAD – 14 – Merlin Atmos (2015)

February 20, 2017 //

You’ll note that I skipped one. 2012’s ALT was an interesting enough instrumental album, but nothing really to jump and shout about.

Merlin Atmos, recorded in 2013, is a live album featuring the trio line-up that had recorded ALT, A Grounding In Numbers, and Trisector. A such, it leans on these later albums, It opens with Hammill’s solo epic Flight from the 1980 release A Black Box. It’s a proper full-side piece in multiple parts in the vein (sort of) of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers (which takes up side 2 of Merlin Atmos‘ vinyl release).

There were two CD releases – a single and a double. The single includes the two epics and closes with a tight version of Hammill’s Gog, previously heard in a poor 1975 live recording as a bonus track on Still Life.

Disc one also features Lifetime and All That Before (Trisector) and Bunsho from A Grounding In Numbers.

It’s quite an interesting affair, a good balance of the old and the more recent trio work. It’s interesting that both this and Vital were recorded by lineups that weren’t the classic quartet. As such, David Jackson’s horns are especially missed on the older material. On the other hand, the recording is clean and the performances are as intense as one would expect.

The second disc (Bonus Atmos) features:

Interference Patterns, Over the Hill (Trisector)
Your Time Starts Now (A Grounding In Numbers)
Scorched Earth (Godbluff)
Meurglys III (World Record)
Man-Erg (Pawn Hearts)
Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End (Still Life)

They’ve been doing this work a long time and the renditions are generally tight. I think the solos, such as the keyboard adventure in the middle of Childlike Faith, seem a little tightly bound to the original versions. At two hours twenty, I don’t feel driven to compare the live tracks to their studio counterparts in the moment, but these versions are certainly satisfying. Hammill lets his vocals soar in a way he hasn’t on the recent studio recordings. I’d say it’s as good an introduction to their work as you’re likely to find.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

AVDGAD – 12 – A Grounding in Numbers (2011)

February 6, 2017 //

A stronger effort in many ways than Trisector, but more lyrical weakness. Lines like ‘Mathematics / Just so “wow” it brooks belief’ (from track 2, ‘Mathematics’) are more common than one would like to admit. On the other hand, there a lot of musically strong numbers – track 3, ‘Highly Strung’ is one of those – Hammill, Banton, and Evans seem to be finding their places as a trio in a way that wasn’t evident on Trisector (even though the three had been playing together for decades).

Opener, Your Time Starts Now, is almost theatrical with sweeping organ fills, and big concepts about how the addressee hasn’t been getting on with it, but now must.

vdgg-agin-cd It’s a poppier affair, at least in terms of song length. Five tracks clock in under three minutes; only four break five; and only one breaks six.

Snake Oil certainly speaks to the current dystopian zeitgeist, ‘Brainwashed and bound to believe in the orthodox text, slogans on t-shirts, / the punters can’t wait to be told
what to think of next’, from a slightly different angle to 2005’s Every Bloody Emperor.

Side note – I posted that song on FB last week and my mother shared it out. If even my mother (who loves Leonard Cohen, but otherwise listens to musical theatre, classical music, and a lot of NPR) would give Van Der Graaf a try, what would it take to get that song up on the charts?)

Smoke has a funky keyboard opening that slides in and out of something nearly disco (in a good way), but after slipping into something even weirder, they decided not to take it very far. Despite the line ‘You held your inattention’, two and half minutes is as far as they decided to take it before segueing into 5533, another song ostensibly about something mathematical (‘As the primacy of digits ticks the boxes / So the codes that they unlock begin to run’).

A Grounding In Numbers closes with All Over The Place, which might be as good a title for the album as the one they used. The longest track on the album, it leads with a nice harpsichord melody (that might be a counterpoint to the organ of Your Time Starts Now) but the whole song is still a little piecemeal, like they felt they had to do something proggy and multi-sectional.

Tags mathematics, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, Rock

AVDGAD – 11 – Trisector (2008)

February 1, 2017 //

Okay, this is a weird one. VDG’s first outing as a trio following another departure of David Jackson. It might reward further listening, but I’m not certain.

vdgg-trisector_eclipsed0308_ad The opener, Hurlyburly, is an instrumental which seems to declare in major chords where the band is going this time. One of the melodies echoes the rinky-dink of Freddie Cannon’s Palisades Park.

Interference Patterns is almost a parody of a VDG song – weird rhythms, off-the-wall subject matter, and a howling vocalist, all grinding to a halt for a solo in a different time signature. Lyrically, however, it’s a word salad lifted from a book of popular pseudophysics. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.

The Final Reel is a fairly straightforward song about an elderly couple choosing mutual suicide over slow decline and sounds much like a jazzy 70s rock ballad. It’s strange to hear a story from Hammill so devoid of nuance. This isn’t a bad thing, just strange.

Drop Dead is another song short on the poetry we’d come to expect. In a sense some men are always caught in adolescence / trying to crack the mystery girl cocoon.

Over The Hill is a proper VDG epic – 12 minutes 30 and more lyrics and tempos than usual, and like The Final Reel, seems to be about facing mortality (‘and there’s no time for hesitation as the stations of our lives are passing by’)

(We Are) Not Here, which closes Trisector, is another song about mortality, but one that sounds more like classic VDG – Hammill howling over insane keyboard and guitar noise about, well, things like ‘Light streaming through us blindly / we are not here for long’.

Musically, Trisector is good stuff, but it’s just not as interesting as their other work. I put it down with Godbluff.

Tags trisector, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, Rock

AVDGAD – 10 – Present (2005)

January 31, 2017 //

Indeed, what a difference 27 years makes. Another interesting album. Far more listenable than most of their efforts. This release was divided into two discs. The first consists of six finished tracks, one of which (Boleas Panic) is an instrumental. The second is made up of ten improvisations. This album has more of an overarching theme that has to do, I think, with bearing up or sinking under the burden of history.

One of the first things one notices about this album is David Jackson’s horns, missing (for the most part) from the last two 1970s releases. They’re really quite integral to the Van Der Graaf sound and it was odd on the previous release to have them replaced with strings.

The opening track, Every Bloody Emperor, is one of the only politically charged songs in the band’s catalogue. While it was bloody appropriate to 2005, the beginning of Bush II’s second term, it seems even more so now:

Truth’s been beaten to its knees; the lies embed ad infinitum
till their repetition becomes a dictum
we’re traitors to disbelieve.

Nutter Alert seems to be a flip side of MC 900 Ft. Jesus’ The Killer Inside Me, the narrator of which is an absolute nutter. (I have a feeling I’ve mentioned The Killer Inside Me with reference to an earlier song, but I’m not certain.) Nutter Alert has the narrator indicating that he’s stuck listening to someone who is no longer fully with the programme:

Oh, but here comes that special nonsense
all the words out in a spurt,
the unhinging of the trolley
as the mouth begins to blurt…

Abandon Ship! is lyrically a little weak, but I quite like the interplay of the horns and guitars.

In Babelsberg seems to describe a walk through late 20th century Berlin and compares it to, perhaps, a pre-reunification version of the same city.

The light is getting dimmer,
the walls of history close in.
In Babelsberg they’re hunting
for a different Stimmung (mood, according to google translate)
that predates the war.

The title of the disc 1’s closing track, On The Beach, would suggest Neville Chute’s novel of the same title, about life in a post-nuclear war Australia, but lyrically, not so much. ‘We could have thrown in our cards / when the going got hard / but evidently we went on interminably’ seems to indicate another of Hammill’s tales of love that’s gone awry in that human way.

The improvisations of disc 2 seem to be more focused than those that made up, for example, the various sections of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers. While the band members are striking out for the edges of what a song can hold, they manage to pull each piece back into a song.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Rock