2008-04-02
Although it's been only three years since their double comeback album, "Present", VDGG already embrace a new release. Though it is a much more communicative album, but in segue to their resume, it's filled with delirious visions and a new line up.
"Present", the double cut from 2005 that brought VDGG back from the old prog-rock dinosaurs limbo, sounded like they never left, or just haven't listened to anything new in the last 30 years. For that album Peter Hammil, Hugh Banton, Guy Evans and David Jackson came back to work their unique magic, welcoming Hammil's creeping vocals dancing to the enchanting schizophrenic rhythm of the band's music.
"Trisector" brings the band back to their trio format, leaving Jackson's brass behind, and is an album made by an active, mature band, one that doesn't try to please anyone but themselves.
In a world where there's an entire single of a girl singing about an umbrella, to claim this album as accessible is on the verge of pure surrealism, but when my ear easily adapts to a new VDGG album I mark it as a relatively catchy album. Don't get me wrong, this album is filled with madness, whispers, screams and orgasmic Hammond cries - it’s as bi-polar as you would expect their music to be - but the group had their crazier moments in past albums.
Hammil's lyrics, whether they tell of the end of a love story (or might it be life's end?) in the hissing ballade "The final reel", or if he contemplates about aging and modern times in "All that before", are shaped as hallucinations, twisted pictures and broken verbal speeches, all those are spiced with a well-educated English manner – these marks him to be one of the lyrical geniuses and mind twisting poets that ever were and ever will be.
"Trisector" is arranged as a 'being high' experience; it starts with the bit odd, but not too terrifying instrumental piece "The Hurly–Burly" that already informs about the adventures you're about to experience for the next hour or so. The track that segues it, "Interference patterns", begins with what some might say is typical a Hammond prog riff mostly. The choruses are where VDGG let out their circus of horrors go loose; Hammil conducts this craze with his chaotic melodies, whipping the instruments with his sharp wit while everything explodes in a systematic controlled manner – A maze that's hard to escape.
"The final reel" and "Lifetime" seem like islands of sanity, a calm quiet evening at home, almost blues oriented, and they peak into "Drop dead" and leave you unprepared for the epic attempt "Over the hill". 12 minuets that bring back the old grey machine that wrote "Pawn Hearts" and "World Records".
It's been 40 years that VDGG exists in its different formats, but it remains one of the bands that rise real excitement and challenge with each new album. Sometimes it seems that bands like that come back to life just to show all the youngsters how it's done with style, elegance and mind expending ideas. All the other 70'S dinosaurs can stay at ease as long as Hammil, Evans and Banton keep coming around to remind the world how it used to be done.
Roy Povarchik
