#428 Gentle Giant - Acquiring the Taste

I always liked Free Hand, swapping music tips with my dad over the holidays lead to getting some more Gentle Giant.

Oh prog, proggy prog prog. All the pomp, all the complexity, all the indulgence, the sweeping bombast, and based on this album, Gentle Giant just might be the proggiest band out there that's still listenable. More interested in legitimately weird time signatures and structures than Genesis and more adventurous in terms of instrumentation and sounds than Yes (but more exciting than the often-formless King Crimson), Acquiring the Taste is an album with one foot firmly planted in prog's classical influences and the other in the face of conventional rock's conventions, with its nose whiffing at a smoldering jazz corpse in the distance. In other words, the band stretches and stretches, sometimes seemingly for its own sake, but usually to good effect.

The House, The Street, The Roof provides a perfect example, the song seems formless, herky-jerking along, meandering, but suddenly the puzzle is solved and the song coalesces into straight up relentless overdriven, organ-drenched stomp, replete with killer guitars. And then, of course, the whole thing falls back apart and toddles off into the night.

There are hints of proto-math rock here, gestures suggesting that the structures represent hidden themes, driven my patterns outside the creative force of men, which is alienating, but human touches arise often enough to keep you engaged. Just as the title track finished twinkling along, Wreck throws you a bone, and The Moon is Down's rollicking organ lines are downright delightful.

These first impression reviews are impossible, more so with an album like this that indulges in so little repetition and convention, but that still gets my attention. A hedgey 4/5

You might like this if: you like complex, slightly jazzy, curiously pretty, genre-bending prog rock on the order of Yes, early Gabriel-era Genesis.