Van der Graaf: The Quiet Zone / The Pleasure Dome (remaster)

It's always interesting to see what happens when stubbornly non-commercial musicians stumble into the some possibly commercial music. If any Van der Graaf album had the chance to reach a broader audience, this one was it. The music here shows a bigger emphasis on beats, on songs with a real "chorus", some hooks and some pretty accessible lyrical content when compared with the defining and often complex components of the VdGG and Hammill catalogs. The addition here of Graham Smith's violin echoes some of the carefully developed staccato passages from King Crimson's Larks Tongues in Aspic, with similar, emphatic results.

As tumultuous as the music itself is, the lyrical range displays a somewhat unique combination of looking in and looking out. From the corrupting influence of commerce and markets (Chemical World) the blind alleys of faith (Habit of the Broken Heart) and Hammill's incessant pursuit of the "I" (Sphinx in the Face) it's all still too smart and too aware to break through to that broader audience, but by choosing this subject matter so carefully, the ideas expressed remain current after some thirty years. Chemical world? Think Enron. Faith? Think about the evangelical infiltration into secular politics. Identity? Do we know ourselves any better now that we can play video games on cell phones?

While it was always easy to assume that the studio time given to these guys to do what they do would have been far less than -- I'm guessing here -- any number of disco artistes dragging their shop worn nonsense 'round the labels in 1975, be assured that the remastering is well worth the price of readmission. This, by the way, is true of all the recent VdGG reissues -- and the excellent notes by Mark Powell put this work into historical and critical context.

The sound quality far exceeds that of the original import vinyl, and certainly outperforms the original CD versions. Which is a big, big deal when it comes to the music of Van der Graaf. Given the technology of the mid-1970s, they had to be an absolute beast to record, due precisely to their unshakeable addiction to absurdly broad, limit-cracking dynamic range. The LPs always sounded way too compressed. This CD goes a long way to restoring the pindrop-to-earthquake range of the band, and the force revealed here begins to show these guys off in the best possible way, at long last. It's way past time to finally and really hear this music the way it was very nearly meant to be heard.

Track Listing
1) Lizard Play
2) The Habit of the Broken Heart
3) The Siren Song
4) Last Frame
5) The Wave
6) Cat's Eye / Yellow Fever (Running)
7) The Sphinx in the Face
8) Chemical World
9) The Sphinx returns
Bonus Tracks:
9) Door
10) Ship of Fools
11) The Wave (Demo version)

Added: November 13th 2006
Reviewer: Kerry Leimer
Score:
Related Link: Band Website
Hits: 2939
Language: english

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