Van Der Graaf Generator - Existential Prog-Rock

If there's one progressive band that deserves the label “existential”, it's surely Van Der Graaf Generator, and if there's one band in that field that survived the late-Seventies punk earthquake, at least in critical esteem, it's still VDGG.

Too skilled, too far removed from exhibitionistic indulgence and virtuosic excess, too profound and dramatic, and ultimately too forward-looking, not to be remembered and admired even today.

The aesthetic and philosophy underpinning VDGG's music, moreover, doesn't transcend reality into the fantastical, as with Genesis, nor dissolve it into the indeterminate, as in the grand musical ambitions of King Crimson, nor wrap it in aestheticizing and ultimately reassuring forms, as in the formalism of Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes; instead, it develops reality through the symbolism and metaphor of psychodrama, through the cathartic force of the anguish of becoming.

Not fairy tales, elves or gnomes, but the anguish of reality in music that, almost from the very start, lives out a sense of drama in a key that is epic yet at the same time everyday and suburban; in this sense a band far ahead of its time, already subtly but unmistakably pointing toward moving beyond progressive rock as a stylistic category, shifting the genre's criteria instead toward compositional strategy and artistic and emotional ambition.

The band made its recording debut in 1969 with Aerosol Grey Machine, and was made up of Hugh Banton on keyboards, Keith Ellis on bass, Guy Evans on drums, a mysterious Jeff on flute, and Peter Hammill, author of every song and undisputed leader, on guitar and vocals.

The album is generally little regarded and dismissed as transitional, but in fact it already contains, albeit in an incomplete and somewhat confused form, all the elements of the years to come: music shot through with a strange, subterranean tension, held together by Hugh Banton's organ, an antihero of the keyboards in an age of soloists, and pervaded by the tremors of Hammill's voice, still timid and flute-like at this early stage; the songs, however, have a melodic structure that, while already containing complex elements and a strong tendency toward chiaroscuro, comes across as somewhat unclear and uninvolving, resulting in music that is emotionally powerful but formally confused and indeterminate; the songs are often carried by acoustic guitar, an instrument the band would later all but abandon, lending the arrangements at times an almost singer-songwriter feel; the album nonetheless contains two remarkable tracks: "Afterward" and "The Necromancer".

A year passes, and The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other comes out, with a line-up of Hammill, Banton, Evans and David Jackson on horns, and it feels as though a decade has gone by, such is the leap forward; Hammill's songwriting is far more mature and structured, Banton's organ traces unmistakable harmonic swirls, the voice sounds fuller and more convincing, gaining in personality and aggression, and then, to complete the picture, there's the addition of Jackson's sax, whose lyrical, dissonant style would define the band's sound for years to come. The first side of the old LP, moreover, is superb, with the tension and harmonic refinement of "Darkness" and "White Hammer" and the lyrical crescendo of the extraordinary ballad "Refugee", certainly one of the band's best-known songs.

The album wasn't a commercial success, but it didn't go unnoticed, given that none other than Fripp himself lent his guitar to a track on the following H To He Who Am The Only One, an accomplished record, flawless across all five tracks, among which stand out the melancholic, piano-led "House with no door", the unsettling, romantic "Lost" and the aggressive "Killer". H To He is an album in which the band's dark, dramatic sound takes full shape and comes into its own, while remaining extremely refined and never short of highly effective melodic openings.

In the end, though, it was a transitional record, and that became clear the following year, in 1972, with the release of Pawn Hearts, rightly regarded as VDGG's masterpiece and one of the cornerstone albums of progressive rock as a whole. It's hard to describe the suite "The Plague Of Lighthouse Keeper", with its emotional ups and downs, its theatrical vocal delivery, and the splendor of the passages where Hammill's piano dissolves the anguish into a dramatic, literary romanticism; hard to describe the alienating tension of a piece that tells of another, looming world, of a musicality that is almost alien yet present, impossible to ignore. Such splendor risks overshadowing the other two tracks, two more masterpieces in their own right, "Man-erg" and "Lemmings".

After Pawn Hearts, Hammill disbanded the group to pursue his solo projects, before surprisingly reforming it in 1975 with Godbluff. This marks the start of the second phase of Van Der Graaf's career, an extremely interesting evolutionary phase that was nonetheless largely ignored and underrated by audiences, even those devoted to the genre, and by critics alike.

Godbluff is a good record, and a somewhat disappointing one at the same time. Amid tracks with a romantic aftertaste like "Undercoverman" and the screamed aggression of "Sleepwalker", the band seems unable to recapture the wonders of the earlier period, though a greater urgency and dryness begins to emerge in the arrangements, with Hammill's voice often rising to a desperate howl.

"Still Life" would do better the following year. While the opening "Pilgrim" takes us back a few years, the subsequent title track is something terrifying and in some ways unprecedented and unmatched, starting unsettlingly with just voice and organ before the full band comes in on a track that is desperate in its twisted unfolding.

The following World Record would do even better: the tracks take on something alienating, the arrangements are intricate yet also more schematic than in the past, and the existential tension of the songs remains sky-high, from a potential hit like the solemn "Wondering" to the minimalism that peeks through on the long, complex "Meurglis III". The outer shell still belongs to progressive rock, but underneath it a different aesthetic emerges, rougher and less consoling.

World Record is the best album of the band's second phase, if only for the presence of the aforementioned, over-20-minute "Meurglis III", quite possibly one of Hammill's finest compositions, an intricate, strongly pictorial and theatrical piece, and for the near-perfect level of instrumental interplay, particularly between Banton's organ and Jackson's sax.

The following year saw the release of "The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome", with Graham Smith's violin replacing Jackson's sax. The quality remains excellent, and the introduction of the violin further heightens the music's lyrical and melodramatic aspects, interacting perfectly with Hammill's voice. The album, however, does contain a few weak tracks and doesn't quite match the level of its predecessors.

Perhaps Hammill sensed that the generator was running out of charge, and in 1978 the band brought its arc to a definitive close, but not before releasing a live album, Vital; on the cover the musicians appear as lifeless statuettes, a fitting introduction to a record that is the logical conclusion of VDGG's musical journey and in some ways its most extreme distillation: an album of unbearable, almost brutal tension, bitter and desperate, played in a harsh, abrasive style, often driven by stark electric guitar chords and the voice of its leader, ever more dramatic and theatrical, yet at the same time far removed from noisy, cacophonous excess or naive spontaneity; in its own way, an album much closer to a certain strain of new wave than to progressive rock, one that represents the emotional distillate of everything the band had always been, channeled time and again into different expressive forms.

With Vital, the band's story comes to an end; Hammill will go on as a solo artist with mixed but always honest results, a group alien to the easy traps of mannerism and influential even beyond the borders, however vast and shifting, of progressive.

Surprisingly, 27 years later, the band re-forms and releases the album Present: 2 CDs, one short (38′) of songs and one long (more than an hour) of studio improvisations. “Every Bloody Emperor” kicks things off and it's already a gut-punch, a few chords of liquid electric piano and a sax with a familiar air, and when Hammill's booming voice comes in your antennae are already up. Then a flute accompanies the voice, Hammill huffs into the microphone, the track rises in tone and you start to smile. Catchy melody, the organ comes in, tries out a turn that crashes against a sax solo barely kept on track, a return of the opening theme and off we go. Gorgeous. Really gorgeous. “Boleas Panic”, written by Jackson, is an instrumental that's at times searing, played entirely between a fine sax theme and an organ that pushes and twists in the background. A boiling, magmatic whirlpool. A scream with no lyrics. The new VDGG opt for live takes, and it feels like watching a studio live set. “Nutter Alert” is the second catchy track of the bunch, driven by a Hammill more declamatory than ever, with a sax raging between order and epilepsy.

Then “Abandon Ship” and “In Babelsberg”, feverish and trembling, pick up from where VDGG left off in the 70s: with “Vital”, with that instinctive, harsh, cutting, abrasive fury of their momentary epilogue, they pick up from where progressive had run aground like a white whale, shimmering but inert; they pick up from the shifting, irregular trajectories that solo Hammill touched on without ever fully diving into them; they pick up from the premise that a band of men past fifty can still sound like an indie band, brushing against the intensity of chaos without ever taking its creative shortcut. The first CD closes with “On The Beach”, with a melancholy Hammill on piano accompanied by a Jackson in a cool jazz mood.

After listening to the 37′ and 34″ several times, the feeling of a fine homecoming is very strong. After listening to the second CD, you realize the guests are setting off again. Improvisations. A progressive band releasing an hour of improvisations. Among the historic bands, only King Crimson have so far shown real ease with the genre. All the tracks spring from musical and atmospheric intuitions that coil around each other, crumble and then come back together, in an endless labor of creative effort placed in the immediacy of the relationship with the instrument. A rock, distinctly Van der Graaf-ian sound; a couple of tracks, like “Crux” for instance, even sound like instrumental sketches of songs still in the making — and maybe they are.

And then there were three. David Jackson had a falling-out with Peter Hammill some time ago and left the band, which responded by putting a new studio album into the works. As a trio. Titled Trisector (2008).

The opening “The Hurlyburly” is a pleasant but inconclusive instrumental, with Hammill doing what he can with the guitar riff, the organ opening up in the background, and Evans cementing it all together. More interesting is “Interference Patterns”, the first sung track, with keyboard minimalism and those paranoid, overly convoluted moments that are scattered throughout the band's discography and Hammill's solo work.

“The Final Reel” introduces one of the album's leit-motifs, an existentialist romanticism that is dark at its core, yet not devoid of an almost reassuring sweetness that will surface more than once over the course of the listen. A piano introduction, a track that builds, a melodic line that's not exactly irresistible, an organ as old-fashioned as ever holding everything together, Evans spreading things out in the background. The following “Lifetime” follows the same path, almost romantic I'd say, nothing out of reach, but a hushed, nocturnal atmosphere, just lightly streaked with shadows.

“Drop Dead” sounds like a sung version of “The Hurlyburly”, flimsy except for a decent drive. Much better then is “Only A Whisper”, with its seemingly endless fade. “All That Before” flaunts an exuberant muscularity, just slightly smoothed out by a fine job from Banton on organ.

And so we reach the heart of the album, the most anticipated track, the mini-suite (12′26″) “Over The Hill”, a convoluted track with a circular structure, oversaturated with music and pathos. The album closes with “(We Are) Not Here”, negligible except for the fact that, in its keyboard loop and ragged vocal, it revives a new wave aesthetic.

Compared to the previous album, the production is better, the recording is better, the performance is better too; it also comes across, in some way, as a more complete, well-defined album. The absence of Jackson is frankly barely felt — the arrangements have been handled well, and Banton's work on organ, however old-fashioned, is excellent, so much so that the organ sound even evokes a proto-progressive era.

After a ragged live album like “Live At The Paradiso”, Van Der Graaf Generator return with their best record since the 2005 reunion. And yet, anyone who loves novelty for its own sake should steer clear of A Grounding In Numbers: it's a very fine record, but neither in sound nor in substance does it carry any urgency of contemporaneity, except in its gift for concision and its happy variety of themes. The album sounds like a condensed version of a good chunk of the band's repertoire. There isn't a single track bearing the mark of an outright classic, yet the level of songwriting and performance is as high and tight as the production, with Hugh Padgham handling the mixing.

The album opens with Banton's organ phrasing, followed by Hammill's vocals unfurling into an inspired romance. The lightness of certain harmonic choices — the opening of “Mathematics”, for instance — even takes us back to Hammill's “Fool's Mate”, even though the band leader's baritone timbre here has little in common with the light-tenor frequencies of the 70s. “Highly Strung” has a turbulent opening pace that seems to come straight out of “Nadir's Big Chance”, before resolving into a track with an odd-metered verse and opening into an extremely straightforward, almost AOR chorus. The instrumental “Red Baron” opens onto an unsettling ambient sound, while “Bunsho” is a ballad for electric guitar with a varied, nervy structure.

“Snake Oil” moves through odd time signatures with constant variations that carry a progressive flavor, built on obsessive, psychotropic riffs, dissonances and openings that are the band's hallmark. Another instrumental, “Splink”, brings back acid-tinged sounds, with an inspired grace. From a slide we move slowly toward a danse macabre that introduces the theme that will become “Medusa”, with hysterical overdubs descending from Barrett-esque psychedelia steered into the theatre of horrors that the trio managed to sketch out like no one else in the early 70s. “Embarassing Kid” leans on a guitar riff that's not exactly memorable to wind its way once again through rhythmic contortions.

“Medusa” is an excellent track; the melody immediately opens onto the Ossianic, gothic soul of a Hammill at his most inspired, here backed by a superb arrangement. With the lovely “Mr. Sands”, the restless organ of Banton's “Godbluff” era returns, here also backed by a Mellotron, for a track in the finest prog tradition. “Smoke” returns to the lightness of Hammill's first album, akin to “Nadir's”. “5533” finds, in its paroxysmal rhythmic articulations, a stylistic signature that isn't especially convincing. Closing this disarmingly fresh album for a band so far from young is “All Over The Place”, a track that gathers together all the album's defining traits: rhythmic fragmentation, nimble harmonic choices, melodramatic openings with interwoven vocals that drag everything into a dense black magma, and richly varied, meticulously crafted arrangements. The coda leading into the finale is spine-tingling.

A choral work, chiseled with great mastery, made up of structures elaborately and artfully built on geometry, and in some cases, swollen with emotion too. Tracks that possess the gift of concision as much as of arduous construction, and yet — only for those who love progressive rock.

Just one year later, and in very close proximity to "Consequences", Hammill's splendid solo effort, Van Der Graaf Generator return with ALT. The band's twelfth studio offspring brings with it a total revolution in sound and an attempt to change skin and show an unseen, "new" side of the band, in which Hammill and co. try to flirt with improvisation and ride an avant-garde rock laced with concessions to pure noise, but the only result is the total loss of their personality in exchange for a guise that suits them poorly. Thus, the fourteen tracks that make up the album, evenly split between short fragments and long rides, largely run aground amid Canterbury-esque echoes, dissonances and noise reverb devoid of emotional impact or any ideas that haven't already been explored everywhere else. What ALT completely lacks is a road, a destination, but even more simply, a clarity of intent. Instead we find music made "just to make it", as if the only intention were to show the world that, after thirty years of an honorable career tied to a movement and a genre, one can still revolutionize one's own path and sound. Which might even be true, were it not that a revolution without ideas loses meaning from the outset, especially when it tries to immerse itself in a field, that of the avant-garde, in which the concept is the principal element. For this reason, we would have preferred that this unseen side of Van Der Graaf Generator had stayed that way.

They say that before dying, our whole existence flashes before us in a flashback. Who knows if that's exactly what Van Der Graaf Generator had in mind when they released Do Not Disturb. After nearly fifty years of career, Peter Hammill's band continues to explore the hybris of human existence, although the true common thread of the album is the resurfacing of memories, which inevitably allude to the end of a cycle. In "Do Not Disturb", in fact, what comes through, both in the music and in the lyrics, is the temptation to hang up the instruments and put up on the wall that "do not disturb" sign that separates us from the world around us. Despite the presence of some rather enjoyable passages, there's no denying that the album, as a whole, lacks driving force. Memories aren't enough; the musicians' fatigue — understandable, given their age — brings with it music that is more weary and less assured than usual, despite a more conspicuous presence of turbulent segments compared to the other post-reunion albums. This is the case with the dark cavatina of "Aloft" which, like many of the following tracks, has all the appearance of a mini-suite, a collage saturated with antithetical moods.

In this parade of memories, a stop in Italy ("Alfa Berlina") could hardly be missing. It's the typical sounds of traffic that open the track, its nostalgic aura then evoked by Banton's organ and by Hammill's melancholy words (⟦Q1⟧), his unusually carefree singing, in memory of youthful freedom, set against a sumptuous rhythm. One of the pillars of Van Der Graaf Generator's career, however, has always been Hammill's passion for bleak, existential stories; so we also find a solitary vignette of a hotel room, which towards the end starts taking on horror-tinged overtones ("Room 1210"). To a greater extent than on previous albums, the trio tries to make up for the absence of David Jackson, partly thanks to Banton's unprecedented work on accordion. This new direction seems to be hinted at by "Forever Falling", "Shikata Ga Nai" (Japanese for "it can't be helped") and, even more so, by "(Oh No, I Must Have Said) Yes", which almost seems like a parody of progressive rock itself, with a Led Zeppelin-esque riff that veers toward jazz-fusion around the midpoint. In "Brought to Book" and in the semi-instrumental coda of "Almost the Words", it's oddly almost the spirit of Richard Wright that emerges instead, seeping somehow into the interplay between keyboards and guitar.

When the curtain finally falls, there's a deep darkening of mood. Hammill's tone of weary resignation looms over Banton's sacral organ, while the final words of the lyrics ("it's time to let go") write — in pencil — the word "end" to the legend of Van Der Graaf Generator.

Contributions by Claudio Milano ("A Grounding In Numbers"), Matteo Meda ("ALT"), Valeria Ferro ("Do Not Disturb").

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