Peter hammill over rar

Alice Letting Go. This Side of the Looking Glass. Lost and Found. Styles Art Rock. Recording Date June 27, - April 21, Imagination Late Night. Crying Wolf Peter Hammill. Spotify Amazon. Autumn Peter Hammill. Totally out of the traditional repertoire.

But so amazing Another huge track is the closing Two Or Three Spectres. Maybe the most VDGG oriented one and therefore my fave. One can appreciate the great and inspired sax play this man is really great. All in all, this is a good album. Surprising during several tracks, it gets back to the roots during some other ones. Three stars. Naturally, the playing from Banton, Evans and Jaxon is fantastic, and Hammill's vocals are simply incredible.

The lyrics are, of course, thoughtful and well-written even when the general effort appears to be to put out a simple album. Every song is memorable, moving at times, and some are extremely effective. Perhaps the best chunk of the album is the balladic material in the middle Been Alone So Long, Shingle Song and Airport , though Open Your Eyes and the title track are equally impressive in their own way. All in all, not a must for any progressive music fan, but a solid addition for anyone who loves Hammill's voice and lyrics or is secretly quite fond of progressive pop.

Sure, it's not a breakthrough or forty minutes of near-perfection, like a couple of Hammill's albums, but certainly not a bad way to spend however much a CD costs in your part of the world. Nadir's Big Chance is a rather bizarre break with anything Van Der Graaf Generatory, bursting through with an insistent rhythm, somewhat aggressive and growling vocals from Hammill, complementing the general guitar-playing, chair-smashing lyrical feel.

Evans provides a good beat, Jaxon scrails away in a whirl of soloistic flair that initially had me uncertain of whether it was a guitar or not hey, I'm still not entirely certain at times. The bass is a constant rhythmic pull, and adds a couple of extremely neat higher-level flourishes. An acoustic sort of tags along with the vocals, initially, while Hammill's vanishing-into-mid-air electric tones trade ideas with Jaxon's stonking sax. A complex piece, with a lot of cool melodies crammed in as well as unusual melodic effects, but also quite catchy in its own way 'Can't call the fire brigade, none of them have been paid'.

This track is the essential one for the serious Van Der Graaf Generator fan, being a bit more in their vein than the other stuff on here. Open Your Eyes is another punkier number, with some general banter opening it together with a couple of fairly basic layers of organ from Hugh Banton. The lyrics fit well, though song's whimsical nature sort of necessitates them not dominating the song too much. Banton's stabbing organ throughout the piece is a force of considerable rock, as is the electric shunted in under a splintering Jaxon take and an array of percussive sounds.

Potent, great fun. Nobody's Business continues the general loudness of the album, with a dense bass-led rhythm providing a background for the distorted range of vocals, some general sax patterns and an occasional percussion flourish.

The lyrics are good, the general rhythm hits, but the real standout feature is Hammill's voice of general force and fun. Been Alone So Long is a truly amazing love song, with sorrowful, sustained acoustics, touching sax and a vocal which is truly amazing for how unassertive and uncertain it sounds.

The Chris Judge-Smith lyrics are essentially perfect. I really do have nothing to say about this, other than that it is probably my favourite 'ballad' ever. I don't understand why, yet, but it is. A segue takes us onto Pompeii, another of the album's 'quirky' pieces, with an odd percussion rhythm underneath the whole piece, and a couple of saxophone and guitar melodies providing flavour. Every now and then, a bass note does something mildly significant.

The almost-grandiose vocals, though excellent, are again only slightly reminiscent of Hammill, and the restrictions of the rhyme scheme do come across a bit more than I'd perhaps like; the lyrics are also good, though not as memorable as many of Hammill's more personal choice.

Still a good piece, overall. Shingle Song is the second 'ballad' of the album, with a movingly honest vocal and a surprisingly sharp acoustic taking the lead. The effective Evans-Banton rhythm section continues to contribute very strongly even in a very soft song, which is, in my view, the real mark of a versatile rhythm section.

The piano is extremely moving and pretty. Subtle and. A lamenting Jaxon solo takes the limelight, flowing right into the soul-tearing vocal 'Look at the sky, but it's empty now Look at the sea, it holds nothing but despair I raise my eyes, but my head stays bowed Look to my side, but you're not there' An incredibly moving and touching song. Not to be missed. Airport is probably the most unusual of the album's love songs, complete with unpredictably-located harmonies, little melodic catches from the guitar and sax, as well as a fast-paced, hard-guitar-and-stabby-sax jabs at one point.

It's sort of a shame that, as Hammill notes, the very blunt tape-runs-out ending doesn't pay off at all. The lyrics are, again, very moving. Highly commendable overall, even if that ending is the album's most obvious weakness. People You Were Going To and Birthday Special are, in my opinion, the two weakest songs on the album, and the combination of the two brings it down a bit for me. Nonetheless, the hammering piano and the classy Hammill vocals on People is a pretty killer combination, and with the organ and solid percussion additions as well, it's musically quite strong.

The only problem is that the lyrics are a touch weaker than I'm used to from Hammill, and so, like White Hammer, it gets a bit more flak from me than it musically deserves. Birthday Special is another song which is musically great fun, but slightly weaker on the lyrics. The guitar, bass and drums all hammer home their point in an insistent way.

He continues to tour throughout Europe and many other countries world-wide, both under his own name and latterly with the reunited and stripped-down VdGG trio. VdGG, too, continue to release records with some regularity. Further fuzz guitar clashes slice outside the rhythm underscored by the massive fuzz bass line that swamps the soundscape with a lumbering gait. And on and on it goes With cathedral-sized reverb, this song is so powerful that when the initial piano joined by underpinning organ of amassed, angry cloudbanks suddenly halts, its echo holds in suspended decay long enough for the dust caught in its light to settle into darkness.

Hammill, now joined by longtime cohorts Hugh Banton, Guy Evans and David Jackson, proceed into a full scale ebb-and-flow of Van der Graaf-ian proportions.