Reviews
Artist: Van der Graaf Generator
Album: Trisector
Label: Virgin
Tracks: 9
Website:http://www.vandergraafgenerator.co.uk
Yahoo! A brand new Van der Graaf Generator album. It's like being a teenager again, but without the acne.
Must admit to have felt a trifle dubious about this one. Their previous album, "Present", never really grabbed me, despite being a double. This album is called "Trisector", as the band is now a trio, having lost David Jackson, their saxophonist. Without the sax, I was not expecting good things but I was very pleasantly surprised. Apart from one particular track, I adore this album.
For some odd reason, it is bookended by the sound of a piston. As the piston fades, it breaks into "The Hurlyburly", an instrumental. Uncharacteristically, for the band, this is a happy, upbeat tune. (Think "Theme One"). It opens with a guitar break reminiscent of Dire Straits, but then Hugh Banton's keyboard comes in, and the band sounds like the VdGG of old. Fantastic. In my opinion, this would make a really good opening track at a live concert. For their recent tour of the States (no, I wasn't there), this track didn't get an airing at all.
Not quite so keen on the second track, "Interference Patterns", which is a shame as the theme of the track is modern physics. It was tracks like "Pioneers Over c" and "Red Shift", that first attracted me to Peter Hammill and VdGG. Whilst other bands were playing soppy little love songs, they weren't afraid to extend their horizons to scientific themes. "Interference Patterns" though, seems to me to have too repetetive a riff.
"The Final Reel", though, is beautiful. Without doubt, this is the prettiest song that VdGG have yet produced. A very strange song though, about a couple in a televised dance concert, who, in fear of losing the contest, become suicide bombers!
This is followed by "Lifetime", another exquisitely beautiful song. This is a much more typical Van der Graaf song about thinking back on the halcyon days of youth, from the vantage point of a lifetime of experience. Sadly all too short: the song and the lifetime.
"Drop Dead" has to be my all time favorite Van der Graaf Generator track, and believe me, there are some very strong contenders on earlier albums. I could listen to this, over and over again, without ever getting bored. The only tragedy is, the song was written recently, rather than in the seventies. If this had been released as a single, back in the days of glam rock, maybe enhanced with a little saxophone, it would have rocketed the band to mega-stardom.
In my review of Peter Hammill's solo album "Thin Air", I mentioned that one of the common themes he explores in many of his songs was various states somewhere between the animate and the inanimate (footprints, reflections, photographs, etc). "Only In A Whisper" continues this exploration, with the avatar from a computer game. Again, another very pretty song.
His solo album "Thin Air" dealt with aging and his awareness of mortalility. "All That Before" considers a different aspect of aging: forgetfullness. Or did I say all that before?
Many of the earlier VdGG albums contained an epic, set piece. A single song, around twenty minutes in length (one side of a vinyl record). To many, a twenty minute song may seem boring or pretentious, but a longer song does allow time to take the listener on a journey. No such marathons are on "Trisector", but the closest they get is "Over The Hill", which comes in at just over twelve minutes. It is long enough to progress the listener through various emotions, and does have a couple of manic instrumental breaks of the sort loved by Van der Graaf fans, but which may put off the casual listener not used to experiencing such raw passion in their music. The tune during the verses is very infectious, and will play round inside your head for weeks after one hearing.
This segues directly into the last track, "(We Are) Not Here", which neatly links many of the earlier themes on the album. Growing old and realising that we're not here on earth for long. I think it also echoes the modern physics of track two with a superposition of quantuum states of simultaneously being there and not there, like Schrodinger's cat, another fine example of something neither fully animate or fully inanimate, like the avatar of track six.
Without doubt, the best Van der Graaf Generator album in many a decade.
Pete Bradley