Van Der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts

If King Crimson and Yes just so happened to have the worlds whitest baby, and that baby just so happened to have the worst idea of quality lyric writing imaginable, then it would resemble Van Der Graaf Generator. This is progressive rock’s designer baby. Dedicated Prog fans seem to like it well enough, because despite my harsh assessment, it also does all of the things prog does well.

The opening track, Lemmings (Including Cog) manages to balance both jazz-fusion flavoured sax playing and discordant 21st Century Classical influenced organ playing. At the same time in one section. The track has a very King Crimson sound, due to the presence of Robert Fripp playing guitar on the track. Based on not only the sound of it but the naming scheme as well, one could be forgiven for assuming it was a discarded demo for a King Crimson opener. You know, sort of like 21st Century Schizoid Man (Including Mirrors).

The original LP consists of three tracks, a relatively standard number for a Progressive Rock record of the early seventies (the average Pink Floyd record has about five, and you could make a case for Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans only having one track across two LP’s). The other two tracks follow the multi-part suite formula established initially established by side two of King Crimson’s Lizard and side one of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. Man-Erg is some sort of introspective piece about the nature of man as far as I can tell. A far more interesting piece is the sprawling A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers. The track has an experimental ambience which would have served Man-Erg well in places.

The only available CD edition of the album (to the best of my knowledge) was mastered in 2005 and honestly, doesn’t sound great. The first two tracks suffer clipped sounding drums and some odd phasey sounding vocals which could be potentially suggest the used of no-noise, it’s hard to tell. Apart from a couple of points, I certainly don’t think it was a creative decision from the band. By comparison, A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers sounds like it was mastered by someone else entirely.

There are a couple of nice surprises in the bonus tracks. Theme One is an instrumental piece which appeared on American releases of the album, and as a single in the UK. It’s good, but I can see why the band themselves decided to leave it off the UK record, it seriously breaks the pace (and pretentiousness, I guess) or the rest of the record. There is an alternate take to W, the b-side to Theme One, which probably should have been on the album in the first place. The experimental tracks Angle of Incidents and Diminutions should have been the basis for an album all by itself, the latter piece sounding almost like the missing track for the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack.

The actual instrumental content is pretty good when you focus on it. The main problem is the lyrics. We should all be pretty well used to bad lyrics; we’ve all heard enough of them. These lyrics still prove to be a huge distraction from the musical content, which is quite an achievement in itself. Being a prog fan may not be enough, you probably need to have more of an understanding of how music works than I do (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory... that should about do it) in order to become completely focussed on the music, and not the bad writing. Here’s a video. If you like the music, pick up King Crimson’s Red instead.

Lemmings (Including Cog): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CAubGFcAYM