I’m listening to Hand. Cannot. Erase. by Steven Wilson and it’s a remarkable experience.
My copy ofHand. Cannot. Erase. by Steven Wilson
It came out in 2015. Wikipedia tells me it’s his fourth solo album, since deactivating Porcupine Tree after the less-than-successful The Incident (an album I liked, though they’ve made better.)
This album is proggy af. Synths, time signature shenanigans, lots of notes, two 10+ minutes-long tracks… and yet it feels contemporary. If Classic Rock™ were still a thing as of 10 years ago, this album would definitely qualify. I hear the influences, and the originality. This is a Contender, an album that should be in the pantheon.
I’m listening now and it soothes me. The election THE GODDAMN ELECTION is 8 days away and I have little hope that things are going to be OK. There is a charismatic cult leader openly running for president, describing the fascist policies he intends to implement publicly, and the supposed “normie” (but also authoritarian and a genocide) alternative is barely hanging on to a lead in the current polling. The only person in the race whom I think might have a chance of setting this country on the right path has absolutely no chance of winning. It’s a scary time.
But this album is good, thoughtful, and human. The playing here reminds me that there is virtue in people, and that that virtue… great musicianship, great music production, a clear eye expressed in the lyrics of these songs, originality… can still happen.
I’ll talk about these in alpha order since I can’t think of a better rubric. These are the five things I brought with me for a trip east from Colorado with my brother. He brought a number of things too, my favorites from his stash were The Dambuilders’ Tough Guy Problem ep and Beach House 7. TGP is just about ideal 90s quirky hard indie rock, the Beach House is note-perfect shoegaze, with great songs and a beautiful droney sound. I’d stack their album up against Loveless anytime. btw, we had Loveless along, too.
It’s important to note that my brother’s truck has very loud road noise. Some music had more trouble cutting through that noise than other. “Road Noise Resistance” is another of the judging criteria I’m using to quantify my experience of these records on the trip.
Welcome, Michael!
Gentle Giant — Acquiring the Taste(1971) I brought this one along to either dispell or confirm that this might be my favorite Gentle Giant album. I certainly didn’t dispell that notion. eight tracks, less than forty minutes. We probably listened to it beginning to end maybe 10 times, maybe more, so that will give you some idea.
Favorite tracks were “The House, The Street, The Room,” “Wreck,” and “Plain Truth.” “Pantagruel’s Nativity” also merits a mention. Quite honestly, I like the whole album. The big stylistic difference I see between how they’re playing here as opposed to how they play on later albums is that they used a bit more legato phrasing on this earlier opus. Gary Green’s guitar work shines on “The House…” I love the sea shanty flavor of “Wreck,” and “Plain Truth” just rocks.
I’ve been trying to sit with Octopus (their 4th album) and the staccato element of their later style is taking a little bit of getting used to. I understand that they styled themselves a funk band, and I do like their mid-period sound a whole lot, but right now, Aquiring the Taske just feels more like a rock album, and “rock album” is the flavor that hit the spot on our trip! Strong contender for favorite disc of the trip, and DEFINITELY my favorite GG.
Estimated Number of Listens: 20 Road Noise Resistance: 9/10 Perfect Album Scale: 10/10 Overall Score: 10/10
King Crimson — Discipline (1981) This is the other strong contender for best CD of the trip. I love how every note on this album feels like it exists in a spacific aesthetic framework, and yet at the same time feels so free and spontaneous. Nice trick! Maybe the one makes the other possible?
Every song is great — it’s a perfect album. I absolutely include the two instrumentals at the end. “Sheltering Sky” is simple and primal yet hits you like a beautiful psychedelic painting. Bill Bruford is the star of the track! “Frame by Frame” has been an earworm for me for the last 43 years, and the recording we played again and again this past week justifies that level of imprint on my delicate tissues. There was a lot of singing along with various Adrian Belew vocal lines (And a couple of Tony Levin ones, too.)
ENL: 18 RNR: 9/10 PAS: 10/10 OS: 10/10
Yes – Relayer (1874) Back in the day, I thought this album was built around too much “try.” I sensed that they had been shocked by the reception of Tales From Topographic Oceans (I think Tales is genius, btw, possibly their best work, so of COURSE it wasn’t appreciated at the time…) After sitting with this album through 5+ listens, I would have to say that I do still hear some “try” but goddamn, this album a triumph.
Alan White is no Bill Bruford. He is not a “touch” drummer the way Bruford is… but he is pretty fricken good. He played on Revolver, he played on both Plastic Ono Bands, I rest my case.
The point being, that I think of Yes in the same breath in which I think of the Beatles, Zep, Bowie, and Chairs Missing-era Wire, in other words, at the tippy tippy top of its genre, and also rock and roll in general. They were not afraid of dischord, and their sixth album does not shy away. There are also some transcendently lyrical moments here. Alternating between beautiful and aggressive, this is one of absolute favorite albums by this band.
The road noise really bordered on making it hard to listen to an album.
ENL: 8 RNR: 7/10 PAS: 9.5/10 OS: 9/10
Pink Floyd — Soundtrack From the Film “More” (1969) I was using the cat brush on the Persian rug next to the kid’s bed we acquired from one of our previous “living situations” and listening to this, and I really came to feel like it’s one of my favorite of their albums. Early Floyd is the best Floyd by far, in my opinion.
My actual favorite Pink Floyd is Saucerful of Secrets. Soundtrack from More is the album they recorded next, and feels like an important, intersticial album for the band. It’s not my second favorite, that would be Obscured By Clouds.
I love early Pink Floyd, but have long harbored the sentiment that they were a remarkable band up through Dark Side of The Moon, and that everything that came after it was total shite, and the worst of the lot has to be The Wall (which everyone else seems to love for some not-understood reason) but which is the absolute nadir of the ouvre in my jaundiced eye.
Cinema was a part of their feel as a band, and I think some of their best music was informed by it.
ENL: 7 RNR: 3/10 PAS: 8/10 OS:8/10
Genesis — Selling England by the Pound(1973) This was probably the least listened-to of the 5, but we listened to it 3 times in a row while driving through Lincoln, Nebraska, and I love it. Kinda wish we’d listened to it more. I think the problem is the amount of road noise we were having. Oneof the considerations when picking a CD to pop in was that it had to stand up to the background noise. One of the ratings I’m giving each of these for the trip is about how well it battled the steady, dissonant drone of road noise in that truck. I’m giving this one a 4 out of 10 for that. The sound of the truck blended too oddly with Tony Banks’s playing.
I love every track on this album. I think Genesis has 3 perfect albums, and this is one of them, absolutely.
Can anybody ‘splain to my why I LOVE Peter Gabriel’s voice in every context I’ve ever heard it in, and why Phil Collins’s singing is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me?
ENL: 4 RNR: 4/10 PAS: 10/10 OS: 7/10
I think, in the final analysis, what needs to be said is that I love all 5 of these albums. The order of preference in this blog post relates directly to how much enjoyment I got out of each one in the particular context of that trip from Pueblo, Colorado to Gill, Massachusetts. Each album was a color on our journey cross-country. I loved them all, and wish we’d listened to them each 100 times more.
As noted in my previous post, these days when I go to record stores, I’m combing the racks for prog cds. This is often frustrating, as most of the music I’m interested in is a bit too esoteric for the typical used record store buyer to take a chance on, or there were few enough of a particular album pressed that they just don’t show up much.
Therefore, I bought my copy of Yes’s Magnification online, which is fine, as I think it unlikely that I would find a used copy.
Writing about music is challenging for me, as there are only so many hours in the day for music in my life, maybe only one or possibly two hours in a typical weekday. I have minor audio processing issues, so it’s hard for me to sort out two different audio sources at the same time, especially when it comes to music. It never fades into the background for me, which makes it difficult to focus on anything else, especially if the music has a lot of movement, or strong emotions, or lyrics that need to be focused on. If I’m listening to music, I can’t also be writing. I have to pick one or the other. It’s just the way my quirky brain works.
As a result, I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge your average music writer is expected to have, and it’s hard to speak with authority about a band’s work if you don’t know all of it, if you don’t know biographies of the various musicians involved, or their connections to other bands, etc. This is especially true of a band like Yes, who have been active for well over 50 years, who seem to rotate members in and out every album or two, and when they have, at this point, 23 studio albums, multitudinous solo albums by various members past and present, and other bands that various members have played in either before, during, or after their time in Yes…
I’ll pause here to note that lineup changes are such a constant that there are no original members still recording and touring with Yes at this point. The closest is Steve Howe, who has been with the band on and off since their third album, and having been out of the band for pretty much all of the 1980s. Sendond longest-standing member of Yes currently is Geoff Downes, whose first album with the band was Drama (1980). It’s probably worth discussing whether or not the current band calling itself “Yes” is really Yes, Since nobody there now was there when the band was named. Maybe I will sometime.
Magnification is their nineteenth album, the last one to feature the majority of Yes’s creative main lights. Singer Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, and bassist Chris Squire are all on this CD, as is Alan White, their longest-standing drummer, who came into the band when Bill Bruford moved on after their fifth album Close to the Edge. Magnification is the only Yes album to not have a keyboard player, and their second to utilize an orchestra, the other album to do so being Time and a Word, their second album. The orchestrations on Magnification are by Larry Groupe, and they both serve as a replacement for a keyboardist, and also stand on their own as orchestrations with their own identity.
The space that the orchestrations take in the recordings present a problem, making the sound a bit muddy – too many of the strings and winds occupy the same tonal space as instruments already in the band, the way that they recorded the orchestra gives each of the acoustic instruments too much presence. Guitar lines get lost in the mix, Squire’s normally bright, spritely bass lines are dulled because the instrumentation is so extra that they have to minimize the punch that is so much a trademark of the Yes sound. I believe that this is also a criticism laid on their previous orchestral record, though it was original guitarist Peter Banks and organist Tony Kaye that were pushed to the side then.
To my mind, Magnification harks back to Time and a Word, back to the fundamentals of the band, yet marks the years of the band’s growth. I like both Magnification and Time and a Word, the performances themselves are up to the Yes standard, and the songs on each are emotive, complex, yet more concise than the band’s most expansive work. Another treat here is that Chris Squire sings lead on “Can You Imagine,” which will remind the true Yes fan of Squire’s one solo album Fish Out of Water (my favorite of all of the myriad solo albums by Yes members) which, incidentally, is another rare example of orchestral Yes-related music.
There are still a few of the latter-day Yes albums that I haven’t gotten around to, and others that just aren’t that great in my opinion. Magnification’s songs are engaging, and for once, sixty minutes of new material created with the extra expanse of a CD in mind doesn’t cause me to pine for the more concise albums of the vinyl era.
I think Magnification, while not without its problems, ranks in the upper echelons of the band’s recorded output and therefore gets spun regularly during my valuable listening time.
One of the things that’s drawing me to this particular style of music is that I have no interest in playing it. It’s just music I can listen to and appreciate without feeling the urge to pull out my guitar and start learning it, because I am otherwise focused creatively and learning prog songs would take up far more free time than I have. So I’m free to just appreciate it.
I admire the amount of effort that goes into making good prog rock. The rap on prog is that it is full of tuneless, mindless noodling. I strongly disagree. I find prog music — the best stuff, at least — to be inventively melodic, passionate, intelligent music.
Genesishas been the greatest surprise of this phase of my music listening. I have never really “gotten” Genesis. The closest I have until recently has been a sincere appreciation for Peter Gabriel’s first for solo albums and a passing interest in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. At this point, I’d say my favorite Genesis album is Selling England by the Pound, although I really have a great fondness for Trespass, Nyrsery Cryme, and Foxtrot as well. I love Peter’s voice, but I have to say that though he has a timbre very similar to Peter’s I seem to have some resistance to Phil Collins’s voice. He was too prevalent in the pop culture at a certain point, and I can’t get past the annoyance I felt at his ubiquitousness. Even Trick of the Tail, which I can hear is musically on a par with Selling England, leaves me somewhat cold. I think of Trick of the Tail is the trio doing the quintet’s sound. I know Steve Hacket was there, but he was a player much more than he was a composer on that record. The vast majority of the material came from Collins, Banks, and Rutherford.
Other older bands have made their way back into my current rotation. In the past I’d stopped with Moving Pictures by Rush, Drama by Yes, and The Wall by Pink Floyd. I haven’t gotten any farther with Floyd, but I have spent a fair amound ot time with a few later albums by each of the other two. I have a new copy of Signals by Rush in my CD player right now, but I have also recently picked up Roll the Bones and Presto. None of the three quite compares with the first eight albums, although none of them are bad, by any means. I hope to spend more time with them. Yes, on the other hand, has given me a late-period album to compare with their earlier catalobue in Magnification, which I’ve been quite impressed with. In the matter of later-period Floyd or Roger Waters solo, let’s just say I haven’t been motivated to seek them out, really. If I want something newer that hits those Pink Floyd buttons, I am much more likely to go to Porcupine Tree.
A few years ago, I started a series of posts where I would listen to Porcupine Tree’s albums chronologically and write about each next album on Facebook. I never made it past Signify, but not because of the quality of the music. It was more a matter of my wandering mind. I actually quite like Signify, as a representative that early part of their catalogue. It’s transitional: they started to have their own sound on it. I might have been excited if I’d continued through to some truly great albums like Fear of a Blank Planet and In Absentia. I also have The Incident, which is a fascinating record. I love that it’s a long CD and an ep. The 4-song ep is particularly good. The hour-long “main” CD is some sort of concept album or other, very distinctively structured.
Two other more “modern” prog bands I’ve taken a liking to are Transatlantic and Wobbler. Transatlantic is a modern-prog “supergroup” with members of Marillion, Spock’s Beard, the Flower Kings, and Dream Theater. I’m currently trying to sort out whether or not I think Transatlantic is too squeaky-kleen for me, but I think the answer to that dilemma is probably “no, they are not too squeaky-kleen for me.” They’re very sincere and very good. Their playing is super clean, but doesn’t squeak. I have three of their albums: SMPTe, Whirlwind, and two verions of their last one, The Absolute Universe.
My friend Butch, when I introduced him to Wobbler, said “Oh, yeah, kinda like Yes meets Gentle Giant.” and that’s accurate. Absolutely ferocious playing throughout the two CDs of theirs that I own, Dwellers of the Deep and From Silence to Somewhere.
It’s been great to hook my ears into this music. I’ve found that music which doesn’t require my full attention isn’t really worth my time, and I’ve found all of the above music to reward deeper listening, to not have truck with anything resembling “postmodern irony,” — I am SO done with irony for irony’s sake — and that it requires so much dedication to play prog well that there is no way to fake it.
I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future.
Broadcast From the Brain Radio 
You must be logged in to post a comment.