Picchio dal Pozzo - Picchio dal Pozzo

To round out this week's Canterbury Scene focus, here's one of the best examples of how the scene's sounds eventually transcended their geographical and physical origins, and a few even more obscure groups in Europe carried the Canterbury influence in an expanded and often quite interesting and artistically successful direction.  On their 1976 eponymous debut, Italian group Picchio dal Pozzo manage to fuse the gentle synth atmospheres and vocalizing of solo Robert Wyatt with space rock jams not unlike those of mid-70s Gong, all the while sticking to a very Canterburian classical-jazz instrumentation that's heavy on flute, xylophone, oboe, keyboard and fuzzed-out bass and guitar.   

Like so many of my very favorite albums, part of what I love about this album is simply how the music sounds--from the first fade-in acoustic guitar notes of "Merta" the tone of this album is like a warm bath--enveloping, soothing and somehow comforting in spite of its more challenging moments.  Though it's easy to trace this group's influences to Canterbury, there's something about their hazy, dreamy sound and penchant for mischievous wordless vocals that is totally their own.  "Cocomelastico" follows with a direct segue into an awesome-sounding guitar/saxophone counterpoint melody underpinned by layers of spacey synths and some sort of twisted lounge music with suitably gently goofy singing.  As you can see from the lyrics provided on the band's official website, the few words to these songs are mostly nonsense and whimsical wordplay; perhaps one of the Canterbury scene's greatest strengths in terms of longevity is that, unlike most progressive bands, its groups never seemed to take themselves too seriously!

The album's darkest track and arguably its centerpiece is the magnificent "Seppia," beginning with a minor ostinato and some well-chosen dissonant note pairs in the bass before stating a dramatic oboe-led melody and dropping into on of the most deliriously hypnotic fuzz bass riffs in Canterbury history for a synth/xylophone/vocal jam that lasts a good six minutes before dropping suddenly into a quietly avant-garde flute/xylophone/bass trio and closing the tune with some spoken word and a stately, mysterious reed-led section.  The number of sudden surprises, dynamics, details and layers of beauty in a track like this are my total ideal--it's at once accessible and traditionally melodic, while at the same time playing with dissonance and bizarre choices.  The genius of Picchio dal Pozzo's approach seems to be their use of gentle instruments and textures to explore these potentially grating musical moves; they're not going to offend anybody too blatantly, but if you pay attention you realize that there's a lot more going on here than it might initially appear.

"Napier" and the rest of the tracks present more densely-packed, swiftly-moving ideas, quirky but accessible melodies and almost narcotic timbres.  While the last couple of tracks are perhaps less obviously memorable in terms of melody and structure, their humble beauty does improve with further listening and the texture and atmosphere suits the rest of the album's mood so well that the disc trails off in a dreamy whisper that makes me want to start over immediately.  Though it can be argued that the heavy Canterbury influences make Picchio dal Pozzo's debut a bit derivative, as far as I'm concerned we could do with a few more great Canterbury albums and the quality of this music is so consistent and the atmosphere is so uniquely dreamy that it really doesn't bother me; sometimes doing something really well trumps doing something first, and you'll often find there are subtle wrinkles of originality hidden within.

Picchio dal Pozzo is one of my favorite Canterbury albums and is probably favorite Italian progressive album (though there are only a few Italian progressive groups who have actually clicked with me; Stormy Six, Area and Museo Rosenbach and maybe one or two others who manage to do more than rehash the less interesting aspects of symphonic prog).  I'm also really excited to say that this album is back in print on CD--just reissued by Italy's Goodfellas label at the end of 2011.  Now I can review it guilt-free and point you to one of my favorite online storefronts, Recommended Records, as a great place to purchase this CD and support these artists. Obviously, this album is highly recommended, as is the group's second and final studio release, the more challenging and RIO-flavored (but equally rewarding) Abbiamo tutti i suoi problemi, which has been consistently commercially available--more on that album later!

Hatfield and the North - Hatfield and the North

To delve further into the dense stuff of the Canterbury Scene, Hatfield and the North's 1974 debut is a great place to explore how the scene evolved both personnel-wise and sound-wise as the 70's wore on.  By this time Soft Machine was firmly on a jazz-heavy fusion route, with Robert Wyatt long-since departed, finished with his next project Matching Mole, a paraplegic and releasing his first masterpiece, Rock Bottom, the same year.  Gong and Caravan were already very different bands, with drummer Pip Pyle gone from Gong (to drum for Hatfield and the North) and guitarist Steve Hillage added to the fold, and bassist Richard Sinclair departing Caravan, also to work with the Hatfields.  By the time of this album's recording, the core group was rounded out by Egg (among other groups) keyboardist Dave Stewart and Matching Mole/Delivery guitarist Phil Miller.  My intention isn't to get overly cluttered with names and group references, but rather to show just how intermingling the Canterbury Scene was (and continues to be, to some extent)--Hatfield and the North can in some ways be considered the first Canterbury supergroup as it was formed from members who had already demonstrated their abilities on the classic albums of other Canterbury groups.

Sound-wise, Hatfield and the North amply demonstrates how the Canterbury sound continued to get more sophisticated, more refined, and jazzier.  Unlike mid-70's Soft Machine (or the trace jazz elements found in Caravan, for example), Hatfield and the North's debut sound is one of fusion of jazz harmony, complex composition and improvisation with appealing, gentle melodies.  The complexity of these compositions is far from the relative pop-simplicity of Caravan's songs, yet Richard Sinclair seems to have no trouble accommodating his bass skills to the material.  And don't think that this group is just going to sound like a summation of all the things the members did before--this album is rife with seamless transitions and sub-one-minute segue tracks, and the mission of the vocals (the lyrics for which are mostly tongue-in-cheek nonsense) seems to be to give listeners an accessible insertion point into what's often complex and difficult-to-get-the-first-time music.

Though it's not his group, per se (at least not as much as later incarnation National Health was), Dave Stewart's keyboards provide the most noticeable framework for this music--fluidly transitioning between Rhodes electric piano, Hammond organ, various synthesizers and acoustic piano to provide both texture and melodic substance.  "Son of 'There's No Place Like Homerton'" boasts some of the most Egg-like contrapuntal puzzle keyboard of the album, with a complex, ever-shifting atmosphere abetted by airy, ethereal contributions of the "Northettes" (background singers Barbara Gaskin, Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal, who also contributed to Egg's Civil Surface album, released the same year).  Robert Wyatt guest vocalizes on "Calyx," eventually joined by Richard Sinclair in a delicate, wordless duet.  It's these kinds of complex but unassuming moments that make Hatfield and the North's two albums so rewarding on repeated listens.

I have to admit that it took me quite a few before my attitude shifted from mere respectful appreciation to all-out enthusiasm--I'm beginning to think that there's something about the language of jazz harmony that's fundamentally different from that found in most rock and pop--you have to have to acquaint yourself a certain amount with it before it stops just sounding like silly noodling and the multiple facets possible with extended harmony start to shine through.  The songs here don't often "rock out" (even by Canterbury's gentle standards), and the often major-key extended harmonies are much more reminiscent of later smooth jazz music than their darker minor counterparts being explored by Soft Machine and Henry Cow.  The band does manage to get pretty uptempo and a little more aggressive in sound on the fast-paced "Rifferama," which features Gong saxophonist Didier Malherbe and on which Dave Stewart coyly quotes the "I Never Glid Before" melody.  "Shaving is Boring" is likely the album's most epic composition, treading some darker territory with some Mahavishnu Orchestra-like ostinato patterns, gnarly Canterbury fuzz organ and an uncharacteristically distorted and noticeable contribution from Phil Miller's guitar (we won't quite get to see him cut loose until National Health's Of Queues and Cures, which fulfills all of Hatfield and the North's promise and then some).  Richard Sinclair does his best Robert Wyatt in the vaguely sexual "Licks for the Ladies," displaying that his sometimes subdued vocals aren't without a considerable amount of nuance.  He also manages some of the album's funniest quirky Canterbury nonsense vocals when "Big Jobs No. 2" recapitulates the second track with metacommentary on the band's hopes for commercial success.

It's interesting to see how all of these Canterbury figures continued to develop their distinct but collective musical visions while at the same time working for some kind of commercial success.  As the band morphed into National Health and progressive music became less and less popular in the late 70's, it became clear that the golden days of having label support and a mouthpiece through which to broadcast these ideas were drawing to a close.  Luckily several of these musicians have soldiered on to make more worthwhile music, but we also have a legacy of densely enjoyable recordings and ideas to engage in the present.  This album is warmly recommended along with the band's sophomore effort The Rotters' Club, as well as National Health's self-titled debut and the aforementioned Of Queues and Cures--more thoughts on those records later!

Get it here.

Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink

It's been a while since I've written about any Canterbury Scene bands, and I'd still like to further explore how the music has expanded past its original physical scene into a recognizable style, but also what it was like when the style and membership of the scene was still concentrated in just a few bands.  You can't do that without talking about Caravan, which--aside from Soft Machine--probably has the most members closely tied with the early Canterbury Scene.  Like Soft Machine, Caravan started in the late 60's, boasting members from the formative Canterbury band Wilde Flowers.  Also like Soft Machine, Caravan was instrumental in defining what has come to be known as the Canterbury sound, although in a considerably different way from the Softs.  Even at its early poppiest, Soft Machine's sound was always firmly rooted in jazz, while I'd say Caravan is more tied to psychedelic rock with some elements of jazz and progressive, and by most accounts they perfected this distinctive blend with this, 1971's In the Land of Grey and Pink.

In case you were worried, the bouncy opener, "Golf Girl" assures us of this album's origin--the trombone, flute, juiced-up organ and goofy lyrics ("on the golf course/we talk in Morse") are undeniably Canterbury.  Compared with Soft Machine, though, this is definitely rock, and while it seems Robert Wyatt was mostly just screwing around (albeit quite entertainingly) with his lyrics, there's a sincerity with Richard Sinclair's words and delivery that adds a dimension of warmth to Caravan's whimsy.  "Winter Wine" turns a 180, with a psychedelic folk bent and a bunch of fantasy imagery that seems to support the album cover (which, by the way, is fucking awesome--I want to go there).  Though Sinclair's vocals do seem a little inconspicuous on first listen, a surprising amount of nuance becomes apparent when you come to learn the songs a bit better.  The mutual Canterbury influence is apparent in how he and guitarist/vocalist Pye Hastings make up a sort of two-man approximation of Wyatt--Hastings' vocals rest in the thin, upper register Wyatt treads so often (check out the delirious cowbell pop of "Love to Love You (And Tonight Pigs Will Fly)", while Sinclair's lower range seems to prefigure the fragile humility so often found in Wyatt's post-Soft Machine work. 

The title track revisits the "Golf Girl" feel with some more stoner-hippie-fantasy-nonsense imagery ("we'll pick our fill of punk weed and smoke it it till we bleed--that's all we'll need") as well as some sparkling piano and a great organ solo.  I find it interesting how the band employs a classic Canterbury (Mike Ratledge) innovation like the fuzz organ, but use it in a totally different way.  This brings me to the epic, side-long closer "Nine Feet Underground," which assures us without a doubt that Caravan's lead solo instrument is Dave Sinclair's organ.  While the other Canterbury groups are no strangers to long solos, Caravan seems content to set up a fairly straightforward rock riff-based jam and allow Dave Sinclair to stretch out with several minutes-long organ solos.  While it's a repetitive approach and Sinclair's style is nowhere near as technically erudite as Mike Ratledge's or Dave Stewart's, for example, there's something about Caravan's hazy/catchy psychedelic atmosphere and the tone and Sinclair's tone and note choice that just clicks perfectly.  It's amazing how well a 22 minute-long song can mostly subsist on jams and organ solos (though Pye Hastings and Richard Sinclair each contribute a vocal section) but I think it owes to memorable, melodic chord progressions and Sinclair's willingness to effectively alter the tone and effects of his instrument to expand his ideas and change up the palette.  The song's conclusion pits barnstorming riff sections against some of Sinclair's most groovily aggressive soloing (though some say it rips of "Sunshine of Your Love," I'm not sure Cream can really lay creative claim to an entire musical interval--suffice to say the two riffs are similar-sounding and Cream's came first).  Amazing--that is, if you like longform jamming.

It seems there's a Canterbury Scene band for every mood and season (well, not really, but the scene demonstrates surprising depth while still conveying a distinctive sound), and for me Caravan is the catchiest, most mainstream of the lot, which is probably why they remain one of the bands who is more often discovered by younger listeners, even achieving mention in Mojo, which sports nary a mention of most other Canterbury luminaries, except Robert Wyatt, who seems to show up several times an issue these days.  This album is warmly recommended to psych/prog fans as well as Canterbury disciples, and it's worth mentioning that If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You and Caravan for Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night are nearly as rewarding.

Get it here, or deluxe here.

Please enjoy the back cover, too:

Egg - The Civil Surface

The sound of a ticking metronome opens Egg's third and final album, 1974's The Civil Surface.  I don't think there's any better sound to introduce a band like Egg, whose music is probably the most classically-influenced of all the Canterbury bands and is typified by Mont Campbell's precise, intricate compositions that are filled in by Dave Stewart's interweaving organ and keyboard parts and driven by Clive Brooks' undeniably exact skills at the drum kit.  The Civil Surface is really more of a reunion album for Egg (not to be confused with newer group, The Egg), as the group had broken up in 1972--luckily for us, they had another album in them and here develop the sound of their first two albums even further.

Being a reunion album, The Civil Surface is a bit of a fractured collection.  Therein lies the main stumbling block regarding my ability to enjoy Egg--they present some of the most interesting and "out" ideas of any of the Canterbury (or any other progressive bands, for that matter), but when it comes to crafting a cohesive and really great album, they were never really able to make it happen.  The ideas really do reach rarefied heights, though.  The aforementioned opener, "Germ Patrol" is perhaps most typical of the group's overall career sound, with plenty of Canterbury fuzz organ and bass, jazz harmony and ear-surprising twists.  It's on this track I most notice a common complaint with The Civil Surface--the drums are mixed extremely loudly, and it's especially painful when Brooks goes for the high-hat, with lots of sibilance that can be really sharp and hard on the ears.  Because of this, the album doesn't really sound good on a lot of sound systems (especially ones prone to treble-y sound), and the more you push the volume to discern the compositional intricacies, the more the drums get in the way.  The song plays effectively with additive rhythms and builds on its somewhat anonymous melody, though, and features nice clarinet and bassoon from Henry Cow guests Tim Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper, respectively, and some signature french horn from Campbell.  This style reprises on the confusingly-titled mid-album "Prelude," which also features wordless female vocals reminiscent of those which would later appear on related acts Hatfield and the North and National Health.

The album's crowning achievement is undoubtedly "Enneagram," which Mont Campbell supposedly composed in response to composer Aaron Copland's criticism that his "Long Piece" (from The Polite Force) was merely music of repetitions and didn't develop.  Campbell certainly took Copland's words to heart--over its 9 minutes, "Enneagram" develops Egg's tricky rhythms to their fullest, alternating between driving hard, fuzzed-out riffs and spacey sections where Stewart's keys flitter away with echo and the cymbals provide a backdrop for Campbell's bass runs.  The song's rousing conclusion fuses heavy toms with stuttering organ and bass unison.  It's really interesting to hear Dave Stewart's keyboard work in the midst of the 70's; though the compositions are mostly Campbell's, there are keyboard moments that recall both the gentle jazzy interludes of previous band Khan as well as crisp contrapuntal figures that predict breaks that show up later in National Health and Hatfield and the North.  Though that style dominates here, I think it displays Stewart's abilities to play to different styles but also forge a distinctive style of his own when the time came for his compositions to dominate.

As for the rest of the set, there's material that echoes Egg's earlier work ("Wring Out the Ground Loosely Now"), featuring what are probably Campbell's weakest vocals to date and some mainly textural guitar from Gong and future solo star Steve Hillage.  Compared musically and lyrically with "Contrasong" from The Polite Force, it doesn't hold up so well--depending on how you look at it, the vocals either add variety to or awkwardly interrupt a mostly-instrumental album.  There's also plenty of material exhibiting some modern classical vibes, like the interesting and blithely-plodding "Nearch" which joyfully experiments with continually-increasing amounts of silence, and two wind quartets, which only feature Campbell from the Egg lineup.  To my ears, the sprightly first quartet ironically echoes some of Copland's more accessible works, albeit with a little more dissonance, and the second experiments more with longer-sustained notes and a sort of rocking eighth-note rhythmic figure.  The quartets are good, in my opinion, but if you came to Egg looking for their more rocking tendencies, I can see how you might find them irrelevant and cluttering.  As I mentioned earlier, despite a wealth of creative ideas, the album can't seem to weave its variety into a really good flow.  Still, I manage to enjoy it quite a bit every time I hear it!

Thinking about Egg in the context of their whole discography and the Canterbury scene in general, it seems like their strengths lie more in their rhythmic and contrapuntal pursuits rather than their melodies--even the best songs here are difficult to recall melodically, in part due to the fact that only bass and keyboards contribute to the melodic statements.  Though melody probably wasn't on top of the list of the band's intentions, I can't help feeling that this contributes in a mildly negative way to their overall accessibility--but hey, we're talking about the Canterbury scene already, so there's no need to worry about billboard charts!  Judging by his recent interviews on the BBC's progressive rock documentary and on blog friend It's Psychedelic Baby's recent interview, Mont Campbell is fairly bitter that he wasn't allowed to fully flower as a composer and musician because the music business wasn't nurturing enough.  It's the sad truth, but three albums released on fairly large labels is a whole lot better than similar artists are getting these days!  Sometimes we just have to nurture ourselves.

Gong - Camembert Electrique

Back to the Canterbury scene, but certainly not too far of a step away from free jazz or even RIO, here we've got one of the all-time great Canterbury albums and one of the most frenetic psychedelic rock albums of the early 70's.  Even though he's not British, Aussie Gong bandleader Daevid Allen was a member of that most embryonic of Canterbury groups--The Soft Machine--which, along with other proto-Canterbury group The Wilde Flowers, was at one time home to members of most of the scene's later core bands.  If ever there was a hippie, it would be Daevid Allen--he was famously refused reentry into the UK when attempting to return from Europe because of overstaying his visa on a previous trip, so he remained in Europe (mostly France) and formed Gong.  It's for this reason that Gong is one of the most (if not the most) international of the original Canterbury bands. 

Although Cambembert Electrique isn't the Gong debut (that honor goes to 1970's Magick Brother), it's undeniably the beginning of what most people consider the classic form of Gong--the one that concerns itself with Allen's hippie mystical and anti-establishment vision shrouded in mythology of teapots, Pothead Pixies and mythical planets, all displayed over some of the craziest jazz-influenced psychedelic music to be heard in the entire era.  The story of the planet Gong is first broached in the sound-effect heavy opening introductory snipped voiced by the "Radio Gnome"--from there on out, though, the album is a nearly nonstop barrage of weirdness, humor, noise, rock and jazz that knows no equal--in the Gong discography and elsewhere.

"You Can't Kill Me" offers a pretty solid template for the album--Allen's winding but catchy compositions feature a lot of repeating figures and ostinati, looping rhythms and noise, while the lyrics hilariously toy with ideas of reincarnation and karma, while his partner Gilli Smyth contributes heavily-reverbed high-pitched moans, groans and what became known as "space whispers."  Though on first listen this music might sound like utter chaos (well, it is chaotic, but not necessarily utterly), closer attention reveals an almost punk rock-like attitude supplemented by Didier Malherbe (distinctly "French" saxophone style) and Pip Pyle (unparalleled prowess on the drum kit, later to become one of the most experienced Canterbury journeymen) both of whom seem to have no difficulty negotiating Allen's compositions and their innumerable and quickly-transitioning ideas.  Though the tumultuous Gong lineup later featured the more-lauded guitar hero Steve Hillage on lead guitar, I find Allen's guitar style particularly impressive for its audacity (just listen to the noise he conjures up on "You Can't Kill Me").

The album continues to plow an increasingly eclectic furrow with the organ-driven music hall "I've Been Stoned Before," where Allen goes from comical farce to sounding like he's going to shred his vocal chords in torment in just about 2 1/2 minutes.  "Mr. Long Shanks" (see above video) transistions from gleeful carnival jazz rock ("The man in the parlor/you know what he's after") to a Gilli Smyth space whisper tour-de-force at its halfway point, while "I Am Your Animal" finds the female vocalist projecting a more aggressive (even x-rated) performance over Allen's spiky repeated riff, which morphs into a rapid-fire vocal barrage that ends with Allen madly yelling about licking the moon.

After a couple of sound collage interludes ("Tu veux un Camembert?") the band returns with the forward-looking (to later Gong albums) "Fohat Digs Holes in Space," which spins an atmosphere out of Allen's "glissando" slide guitar--the part when he seamlessly drops from the eerie high register into the midrange before 40 seconds is breathtaking.  I'm not sure if glissando is really the correct word for the playing style, but that's what Gong fans have decided to call it--anyway, it's that echoey spacey sound that starts about 30 seconds in.  The song's eventual rock riff is one of the album's catchiest, with Allen extolling some beat-cum-hippie poetry ("mirror mirror, on the wall, who's the biggest fool of all?") before another overdriven sax and lead guitar breakdown.  The beginning of "And You Tried So Hard" is the closest thing to folk rock to be found on the album, though it quickly weirds itself out with more Gong flavor.  The album closes just as powerfully as it opened with "Tropical Fish"--one of the band's most effective mechanisms is doubling the melodies on guitar and sax for a stabbing effect--with a heaping handful of bizarre riffs and lyrics ("seem like a typical witch to me/seem like a tropical fish to me"), a spaced-out interstellar desert in the middle ("I couldn't believe my eyes....") and closing with the almost martial invocation of the moon goddess, "Selene," and a recapitulation of the album's earlier machine-gun lyrical themes.  The Radio Gnome returns to remind you that the ride's only just beginning, and you'd better believe him.

Although the full on Gong mythology isn't in narrative form here, the lyrical themes set the scene for the epic Radio Gnome Trilogy to come.  Though Gong may have equaled the fun, trippiness and quality and ideological resourcefulness found here on later albums, they did it from a spacier angle, and sadly this album is in many ways one-of-a-kind with its energy, barrage of ideas, and noisy edginess.  It manages to incorporate a lot of jazz influence without committing to long-form jazzy passages (like so many later groups, including Gong would do) by radically changing from idea to idea in short periods of time.  Their arrangement style here is one that was certainly emulated by later Canterbury bands, and it's easy to tell that Allen's association with Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers was a mutually-enriching one; his idiosyncratic sense of humor obviously influenced to a large extent the sense of whimsy and insubordination prevalent in a lot of the Canterbury scene's later music.  My only complaint with the Charly CD reissue of this album is sound, which is quiet, treble-heavy and not as full as I imagine it should be.  Let's hope for a good remaster.

Until then, you can get it here on CD or MP3.  Oh, and if you listen to any of this and think Gong don't sound like typical hippies, take a gander at their ridiculous get-ups.  Allen appears not to mind being stapled in the face...and that's quite a wizard staff.

Henry Cow - Leg End

There is apparently some debate as to whether Henry Cow can accurately be deemed part of the Canterbury scene as an actual physical scene, but to me they're both clearly a part of the scene (due to guitarist Fred Frith's geographical origins and the band's association with Robert Wyatt both live and on his Rock Bottom and Ruth is Stranger than Richard albums) and part of the Canterbury scene as a genre of music that blends rock, jazz, folk, experimental and a playful sense of whimsy.  Henry Cow is one of my favorite groups in or out of the Canterbury scene for the complexity and dense melody of their music, the way each member of the group contributes in an identifiable and irreplaceable way, for the way they blend avant-garde compositions with improvised music across their sparse but evolutionary discography, and for the fact that their music remains challenging but listenable no matter how many times I return to it.

Leg End is the band's 1973 debut--it doesn't take too many seconds after the rimshot that kicks off "Nirvana for Mice" before it's obvious that Henry Cow is probably the Canterbury band most influenced by avant-garde modern classical music, which shows in their compositions' weaving concentric circles of odd-metered counterpoint as well as a hefty dose of atonality and dissonance lurking behind and within the jazzy melodies.  The sound is saxophone-heavy, with at least two horns at most times, and Fred Frith's guitar is often double-tracked, while some synthesizer fills in the background not covered by the manic drums and restlessly probing bass lines.  "Nirvana..." sort of sums up a good part of the band's mission on Leg End, consisting of a vibrantly intricate composition which quickly dissolves into a jam over which Geoff Leigh's saxophone runs rampant in an ecstatic free jazz testimony.  Interestingly, the rest of the group's vamping mechanism during Leigh's solo acts as a sort of improvisational version of the composed sections, as each band member sticks with a different meter and improvises accompaniment.  The parts interweave, at times synchronizing and at other times sounding rather tenuously held-together.  For me, it's exhilarating.  If you weren't already awake, the song-ending staccato blast will ensure either your attention or annoyance (these guys are admittedly not for everyone).

The rest of Leg End follows a similar path, though there is a superabundance of ideas, great variety in mood and melody, and some more surprises in instrumental arrangements, including flute, clarinet and Frith's violin.  The Tim Hodgkinson-penned "Amygdala" boasts an ever-shifting melodic structure that dabbles in the types of Renaissance style that is Gentle Giant's stock in trade, while the dark and cacophonous "Teenbeat Introduction" goes further down the free jazz rabbithole before swelling gloriously into Frith's "Teenbeat" composition.  "The Tenth Chaffinch" sounds very much like one of the group's live improvisations (mostly unreleased until the release of the box set The Road), blending musique concrete (pre-recorded sounds) with totally atonal, unstructured improvisation.  The album closes with an odd track, "Nine Funerals of the Citizen King," which actually features a vocal arrangement.  Though the music is extremely dense (perhaps even impenetrable on first listen), further listening reveals melodic motifs that pop up in "Teenbeat" and return again throughout "With the Yellow Half-Moon" and again in "Nine Funerals..."

For me, Leg End and the rest of Henry Cow's discography represents the real deal when it comes to progressive music--genre is irrelevant, and the band unflinchingly incorporates modern musical concepts into a sound that assaults the ear with surprises at every turn but remains a fun and energetic (especially Chris Cutler's drums, which rival Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine-era drums in energy and creativity) listen with innumerable moments of twinkling beauty.  I've heard the band's earlier material compared with Frank Zappa and the Mothers' albums from the same period, and while I can see a general stylistic similarity (jazzy, complex compositions, lots of noise and craziness), Henry Cow sounds so much more out-of-this-world and surprising to my ears, while Zappa's compositions (and especially his guitar playing), idiosyncratic as they are, always remind me directly of something I've already heard before.  This album is the perfect example of music that doesn't need lyrics--when it sounds and feels this indescribable, why limit it with the trappings of lyrics?

The whole Henry Cow discography can be found at Recommended Records, which is owned and operated by drummer Chris Cutler, or here, if you don't want to pay in GBP.

Steve Hillage - Fish Rising

Here's another later Canterbury favorite.  Due to its associations with jazz, the Canterbury scene was never as guitar-centric as mainstream rock.  Nevertheless, Steve Hillage is certainly one of the biggest Canterbury guitar heroes and probably the most accessible one in terms of his style and technique.  He was a member of both Arzachel and Khan, then joined Gong in the early 70's.  This, his first solo album, features numerous Gong members as well as Henry Cow's Lindsay Cooper on bassoon and Egg/Hatfield and the North/National Health keyboardist Dave Stewart.

Like a lot of the classic Canterbury albums, I treasure this one for its variety, intelligence and light-heartedness.  1970's progressive rock music is often associated with bloated epics, overseriousness and romantic-period leanings, but I believe that the music on albums like this is actually more progressive in the literal meaning of the word--yes, there are epics (steer clear if you don't like long songs!) but the primary goal is advancing music past the established forms and status quo.  Hillage manages to challenge us with his compositions but simultaneously provides some of the tastiest guitar ever laid to tape.

The opening suite is the longest on the album, building from gentle psychedelia with jazzy soloing to a harder sound, more reminiscent of Gong.  This is much more centered on Hillage, though, and the compositions are organized around nice, identifiable guitar riffs and themes, though there's a great ostinato section with some furious soloing by Stewart.  "Fish" and "Meditation of the Snake" are shorter experiments, the first being a fast-paced Gong-like discussion of different fish and the second being a delay-guitar soundscape.

Side two is more hypnotic and repetitive than the first--"Salmon Song" may be my favorite track, with a spacey riff and a barnstorming set of dual solos.  Similarly, "Aftaglid" features several repeating patterns that act as platforms for Hillage's guitar soloing.  The key to these long songs is organization, as the mood segues seamlessly between gentler, quieter parts and heavier soloing, never wearing out each riff and always following with a change of texture.

The only bad thing about this album is that I bought three more Steve Hillage albums hoping they'd come close and none of them quite match the glory of Fish Rising--I don't mind Hillage's voice, but the New Age lyrics get heavier and heavier-handed on later efforts, and though the more song-oriented sound is in some places successful, many of the guitar ideas are just restatements of things heard here and on earlier Hillage collaborations.  It's a bit disappointing, but this album is so good and so full of ideas that Hillage can't be blamed for being unable to match their breadth and quality on every other album.  At least we've got Fish Rising. 

Observant readers may notice that this one is another deep pull from my tiny but cherished vinyl collection.  Out of the few records I own, I have to say that this one sounds better in its remastered CD version; the vinyl is actually a bit muddy (not well-balanced between clarity and heaviness the way my Captain Beyond LP is), making it hard to catch the small details that this album is packed with--I think I know what's going on because I recognize the riffs but closer listening reveals numerous quieter passages and depth uncommon in guitar-oriented rock. 

Get the CD or MP3s here.

Robert Wyatt - Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard

Robert Wyatt's first album after the career-defining Rock Bottom is not likely to satisfy any relative newcomers looking for a reprise of its predecessor's dark catharsis and cohesive brilliance.  To longer-term initiates, though, it's a solid representation of what's most often expected from Wyatt from his Soft Machine days to his more recent work.  In many ways, I think this album sets the template for his material from the last 15 years in terms of the wealth of guest contributions (John Greaves and Fred Frith from Henry Cow, Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno) and its unevenness.

Like most of Wyatt's post-accident music, the sounds here are gentle but quirky, moodily psychedelic and jazzy in that classic Canterbury way.  The whimsical, melodically-challenging "Muddy Mouse" segments punctuate the first, "Richard" side of the album (or second, depending which version you have), breaking up the hypnotic groove and progressive sonic layering of "Solar Flares" and the equally languid, spine-tingling "Five Black Notes and One White Note," which plays with gorgeous intervals on a magnified level, similarly to some of his later work on Dondestan.  Wyatt accomplishes some of his best vocal trumpet impressions on the side-closing "Muddy Mouth" as well as some pretty humorous and casual singing regarding the world's oceans.

The other, "Ruth" side of the album is rather different, featuring much more conventional song structures, as on the jazzy sort-of-funny (mostly for the words) "Soup Song" and the slightly quirky blues of "Sonia."  "Team Spirit" is a more rocking, long-form song about a football that stretches into more interesting territory with some cool sonic excursions.  The dirge-like "Song for Che" closes the album on a fittingly valedictory note.

While Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard rarely succeeds in the same ways Rock Bottom did, it's pretty typical of later Wyatt--despite its status as a mixed bag of sorts, there is plenty of experimentation going on and it's a pleasant listen without ever being too hard on the ears.  If you manage your expectations and can forgive the album's inability to stack up to its predecessor, it'll be a good gauge of how much you'll likely enjoy Wyatt's later albums. 

Get it here on CD, or here on MP3.

Fred Frith - Gravity

Gravity, Fred Frith's first post-Henry Cow solo outing, is an album positively packed with ideas.  From its through-and-through dance/rhythm concept, to the dizzying array of styles presented by each song, to the mottled textures of Frith's fantastically wrinkly songs to the man's all-over-the-place guitar playing, a lesser group would have make a career's worth of albums out of the ideas present on just half of these songs. 

The songs presented here tread middle-Eastern themes and modes ("Hands of the Juggler"), Scandanavian and British folk ("Don't Cry For Me" and "A Career in Real Estate," respectively), as well as more familiar Frith subjects like melodic jazz (on "Spring Any Day Now" I could swear he single-handedly created the template for all Nintendo music to come) and the avant-garde ("Year of the Monkey," "Crack in the Concrete").  We also get a taste of classic Canterbury humor with a totally wonky-melodied but somehow recognizable rendition of "Dancing in the Street."

I think what sets this apart from other 80's (and beyond) Fred Frith albums is the driving energy, which must in part be attributed to the backing bands--Samla Mammas Manna on the A-Side and the Muffins on the B-Side--who lend able, ballsy and often manic flesh to the bones of Frith's compositions.  Additionally, it's probably the highest concentration of pure guitar shredding ever collected on one Fred Frith album (including his solo guitar albums)--the avant-garde rock songs here have some of the most complex riffs, lead lines and soloing I've ever heard the man play, and considering the rest of the projects he's been involved in, that's really saying something.  Songs like "Norrgarden Nyvla," with its majestic-turned-insane distortion-soaked lead lines contrast yet sit perfectly comfortably near the clean Massacre-esque riffing and unbalanced sliding he pulls of on "Slap Dance."

At times the music gets quite atonal and almost mathematical in its composition (though Frith's kind of atonality rivals Captain Beefheart's in its sense of melody), but somehow it's more listenable (if still quite busy) than a lot of other avant-garde music--even examples from Frith's own canon.  Probably its greatest asset is its sense of humor and the aura of fun surrounding the whole album--a sense of humor that was surely lacking from the final days of Henry Cow and the entirety of the Art Bears project.  To hear this album immediately after Western Culture is to believe against plain evidence that avant-garde can be fun.

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Soft Machine - Third

I've been thinking and thinking about which album I should review in order to broach the subject of the Canterbury scene--something quintessentially Canterbury, exhibiting all of the hallmark characteristics.  Ultimately, I'm not sure that's quite possible--there are albums that seem textbook Canterbury but aren't really that great, don't feature any of the important Canterbury musicians, or are just too obscure to introduce a phenomenon that's simultaneously a scene built around specific bands and people, but also a genre and approach to music that's ultimately transce.nded its origins to produce a lot of great music that has absolutely no connection to the original scene.  So, instead of attempting to find the Canterbury exemplar, I've decided to just pick one of the very best albums by arguably the most well-known Canterbury band--Soft Machine's Third.

On Third, Soft Machine became something very different from what they were on their first album (an organ-driven jazzy psychedelic pop group) as well as their second (an even more abstruse psychedelic group augmented by jazz instrumentation)--on Third, Soft Machine became something more like a jazz combo playing a more serious and epic version of what they played on Volume Two.  It's early jazz-rock fusion of an undeniably British stripe--the booty-shaking Afro-American elements that drove the seminal fusion behind Bitches Brew is nowhere to be found, replaced instead by some sort of dark, intellectual, avant-garde European sensibility.

Take the Hugh Hopper-penned opening track, "Facelift," for instance.  The live-recorded behemoth of a song opens with Mike Ratledge's outrageously overdriven organ (a classic Canterbury element) in a flagrant barrage of sound--it's arrhythmic, amelodic and fucking righteous--it's not notes, it's sound.  Say what you will about overintellectualization robbing "rock" music of its bestial nature, there's something primal in the howl and shrieks that Ratledge calls out of that thing that destroys the system in a whole other way.  It's a good six minutes before the lurking horns fall in step and state the song's main theme over Hopper's fuzz bass (another Canterbury staple).  The melody is a thing of dark imperial grandeur, threatening and tense, suddenly shattering into a driving rock beat, with Elton Dean's saxophone battling with Ratledge's organ for shrieking supremacy.  Through some clever editing (this is a live concert, remember) we cut away to Ratledge on a hypnotic electric piano vamp that prefigures Hopper's 1984 album.  A forboding flute solo, then the whole thing slowly builds back into the main theme, suddenly run backward and the song closes with analog tape squeals.  We're already a long way from home--the last vestiges of pop instincts of Volume Two have been sacrificed to the jazz gods--and what a ritual it is, with some crushing solos from Ratledge, Dean and Caravan's Jimmy Hastings on flute; the free jazz influence here is much stronger than ever before, with texture and chops reigning supreme.  Robert Wyatt, that most-celebrated of Canterbury figures, "only" plays the drums, effortlessly making the complex changes and driving the whole beast forward with imagination and verve.

"Slightly All the Time" lightens up just a bit, built on songwriter Ratledge's odd-metered electric piano riffs' interplay with Hopper's looping bass intervals.  Wyatt shines several times on cymbals.  The multi-part song treads some slow-groove territory and abruptly shifts between hypnotic vamps and manic "The Price Is Right Theme Song From Hell" excursions.  Just when you think the group's diving undersea to Sun Ra's Atlantis, "Moon In June" comes along--Robert Wyatt's thin, high, lispy vocals remind us where the band came from.  The album's third epic suite combines Wyatt's playful whimsy (another Canterbury cornerstone) with the band's newer experimental bent, soon wheeling away from Wyatt's vocal meanderings to fast riffing to a warped soundworld of slowed-down tapes, skittering violin and Wyatt's wordless voice blending with the other unrecognizable instruments as the thing rumbles to a close.

The double album finishes on the dreamiest number of the bunch, "Out-Bloody-Rageous."  Again, it's more about sound, timbre and texture as several minutes of delay keyboard collage bookend the extended suite, also appearing at the midpoint.  The driving melodic sections are again backboned by Ratledge's keys--he often solos on organ over his mightily complex electric piano riffs.  The song is similar enough in mood and style to match the rest of the album well but it takes a few listens before its individual character shines through--after all, there are only four tracks but they're each almost 20 minutes long; surely a little attention will help unlock their secrets.  I love the alien sense of melody on this album as well as its cohesiveness and foreboding majesty--it's an unexpectedly dark turn in the progression of Soft Machine's albums, but it's also a masterpiece in composition and fearless exploration of jazz fusion, which at the time was brand new.  It's hard to believe the direction other artists took the genre as the decade wore on--why would you ever want Weather Report when fusion can sound this threatening?  I didn't fully appreciate this album until getting the 2007 CD remaster--the earlier CD reissue's sound is quite murky which, combined with the material's murkiness, makes assimilating the song structures and recognizing and appreciating the melodies much more difficult.  Plus, the new remaster has three live bonus tracks.

So, Soft Machine was home to a number of Canterbury luminaries--Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Kevin Ayers (formerly) and Elton Dean--and exhibited (actually, it often created) many classic Canterbury musical traits from the jazz influence, the sense of lyrical humor, fuzz bass and overdriven organ, as well as the general experimental spirit of the entire scene.  As will be apparent as I review more good-to-great albums from this scene, its characteristics are fluid enough that they're not immutable, and "Canterbury" became more of an attitude toward music that transcended its geographical origins.


Get it here on CD, with a bonus disc.