PROG NOSIS July-Aug 2009

MARCO ROSSI travels back to a time when prog rock bands roamed the earth and grown men in floppy hats squabbled over mellotron settings while spotting connections between Bach and The Hobbit.

A failsafe way to initiate lively, spittle-flecked debate – perhaps even leading to chest poking, or the bumping of hideous man boobs – wherever two or more portly bearded gents of a certain age are gathered in a pub is to throw down a gauntlet in the form of this seemingly innocent query: “define prog rock”.
Some people, not unreasonably, will passionately attest that “prog” should mean “progressive”, and will nominate restless, cerebral envelope pushers such as Radiohead as the true inheritors of the prog mantle. Others will attest with equal vehemence that prog is defined by a strictly codified set of stylistic cues and ideals which ossified three-and-a-half decades ago: and it is to adherents of the latter principle that I’m addressing these next remarks.

My days have been brightened no end by discovering the existence of the marvellous Norwegian neo-prog magi WOBBLER, whose magnificent album Afterglow (Termo) finds them partying like it’s 1972, with absolutely everything that this entails. They’re doing their idiosyncratic thing right now but they look, and sound, as though they just stepped out of a glacier, which has to be the polar opposite of having just stepped out of a salon. They’re a proper prog rock group; which is to say that they all look like Bill Bailey. (A couple of them look as though they might have eaten Bill Bailey.)
More to the point, they bring formidable technical expertise and an informed passion to a set of songs combining Gentle Giant-style medieval complexity with melodic passages of ravishing, thrilling power. They set out their stall straight away with ‘Imperial Winter White’, which buffets the listener with seven-and-a-half big old minutes of fervent Gordian knot creativity before the vocals even come in. Later in the song, they drop in a passage which knowingly nods to the ‘Willow Farm’ section of ‘Supper’s Ready’ by Genesis with such hearty enthusiasm that you may find yourself standing up and applauding, if you’re of a mind to be so demonstratively naff. Besides which, you’ve got to love any band which namechecks every instrument. There are two Mellotrons in here, not to mention a Steinkopf soprano crumhorn…

It would indeed appear that these are salad days for music which broadly falls under the neo-prog and neo-psych umbrellas. As if Wobbler weren’t reason enough to fling fistfuls of ticker tape from high windows, along come new albums by recent faves THE EARTHLING SOCIETY and MOOCH to raise the pleasure quotient in the Rossi household to critical levels.
The thing I love best about modern mavens of space rock The Earthling Society is the genuine whiff of countercultural subversion about them. Sci-Fi Hi-Fi (4 Zero), like all the best acid rock, is a potent combination of brutal physicality and mind-melting otherness. It’s like being thrown about in the back of a six-wheeled Ford Transit being driven home from a gig through a series of star clusters. The twittering electronics, NEU!-style juggernaut momentum, sunspot guitar and cavernous, pinging reverberations of ‘Tempel Ov Flaming Youth’, for example, play to their myriad strengths to devastating effect. Wherever they’re going in the cosmos, you’re going also. You don’t have any choice.
Sci-Fi Hi-Fi comes with the stated aim of summoning forth the dark side of ’60s America – “Manson, MK-ULTRA and mind control”, even if it all sounds giddily Elysian to me – and 1968a (Ambientlive) by Mooch likewise seeks to move on from the beatific playfulness of last year’s 1967 ½, even if the aural palette is still, by and large, a head-swimming meld of Dr Silbury’s carefully enunciated vocals and languid, bee-buzzing instrumentation, decorated here and there with bursts of “electric viper violin” courtesy of Sorceress Sadie.
The instrumental ‘Freeze Freak’ reveals a hitherto dormant edginess, and the backing track curdles to winningly sinister effect halfway through ‘The Resurrection Of Hippie’, but Mooch can’t escape the dreamy pull of their own innate loveliness for long; and I’m not complaining. Fine lyrics also, particularly in the reflective reverie of ‘Getting Back To ’68’.

Pausing only to nod appreciatively in the direction of highly promising, lockstep-tight St Helens neo-popsikers THE MURMURS OF TENSION – whose five-track Awkward Aura EP reveals them to be quaffing deeply from the same well of urgent, minor-chorded, reedy keyboarded inspiration which fuelled the early Coral – we alight upon the altogether indescribable Welsh whimsy of LORD GAMMONSHIRE. Lord Gammonshire’s Guide To ‘Everyday Sounds’ (Bitter Buttons) lobs a succession of ideas at the listener with such tireless fervour that it’s a bit like being lashed to a canvas while Jackson Pollock hoses you with an “everything” gun.
Duncan Gammon, the Lord in question, sings in an appealing light tenor not unlike Bid of The Monochrome Set and evidently has a mind like a freshly upended toy box. Against a backdrop of good-natured ’70s soft rock textures – imagine a lo-fi Caravan at their most personable – arresting images, textures and voiceovers rise and fall in the mix like smalls in a tumble drier. Once you adjust your ears to the superabundance of sound, the album is an airy delight, at its most accessible on ‘Summer Smash’ and ‘Big Red Book Of Dreams’. These could even be hit singles, if the world was ready to accept The Feeling undergoing a collective grand mal seizure.

Meanwhile back in the land of old gold, Atomhenge continues its HAWKWIND reissue programme with painstaking remasters of Quark, Strangeness And Charm, PXR 5 and Live Seventy Nine. Quark is the pick of this particular bunch, nattily dressed in a cardboard outer sleeve and nicely tricked out with a bonus CD of Rockfield Studios session tapes and ’77-era live tracks. More pertinently, it also boasts the still compelling Middle Eastern swirl of ‘Hassan I Sabbah’, an enduring Hawkwind classic and one of the definitive examples of their patented transcendence via agrarian riffing approach.

Posterity has been less than kind to JADE WARRIOR for some reason: a pity, as their moodily enraptured approach, constructed around the flutes and congas of Jon Field, often encapsulated moments of great serenity and flat-out bliss, and deserves to be better remembered. Kudos then to Repertoire for issuing Eclipse and Fifth Element, two albums recorded in 1973 – but never released at the time – by a band directly descended from the July bloodline. Long-standing fans may be pleasantly surprised to learn that a new album is in the works following a successful reunion at the Astoria last year.

Speaking as we just were of the July bloodline, Faerie Symphony (Esoteric) by July mainman TOM NEWMAN now finally reappears after an eternity in the wilderness. One could speculate forever on just how massive a set of balls it must have taken – visible from space, perhaps – to release a delicate, ethereal instrumental album called Faerie Symphony at the height of punk rock ferment in ’77: what counts is that it has now been given a belated second chance. Memorable melodic motifs are few, granted, but as a mood piece it achieves its aims rather well in conjuring forth a world where faerie folk caper in the moonlight to the gentle lilt of flageolets; unless flageolets are some kind of bean? Definitely one for the Tolkein heads in your social circle in any case.