Completism can become a specifically degenerative disorder, cropping up in populations as diverse as Hummel Figurine obsessives who must cope emotionally and monetarily with a growing catalog of more than 4000 cloying and graven images starting at about $100 each to those lost amid and endlessly cycling among bits and chunks of Beatles memorabilia by applying all manner of testing and testimony to little scraps of cotton fabric said to be a swatch of some Holiday Inn pillow once slept on by Ringo. Luckily for those of us who live in a world less addicted to cataloging, indexing, authentication and acquisition, Ringo was somewhere in the American Midwest at the time, and nowhere near Italy's more fervent and devious Turin.
So, before we make the now obvious and simple leap into the practice of relic worship and its attendant wars and executions, let's tread softly through our own Volumes of Collector's Edition King Crimson releases and the repackaged DVD Audio (gotta ask here "Digital Video Disc Audio"? Really?) SACD, HDCD, bonus-tracked, remastered and liner-noted, mini-lp'd reissued 24-bit anythings and everythings and ask ourselves aside from a clearly economic benefit to others just what the particular value of such behavior might be? Surely just a somewhat more public form of self-gratification?
If that is the case, when it comes to Gentle Giant and Scraping the Barrel, let's instead call it a curatorial rather than completist pursuit and instantly feel better about ourselves and more ennobled by our interests.
If anything, the work of Gentle Giant continues to grow in stature. During the 1970s they may have seemed marginalized, especially to U.S. audiences, by the then more popular successes of Yes, King Crimson and Genesis, to name just some of the peer group. Yet, there was always something distinctive about Gentle Giant. Their music demanded some greater effort on the part of the listener. They were rarely, if ever, too flashy or too showy. Their writing and performing seemed so precise, so absolute that it was hard to imagine anything that the music was lacking, or that anything could be added. They managed a sort of off-balance balance, if there is such a thing.
Scraping the Barrel is an honest enough name. Had this collection of outs and fragments been released a few years after Gentle Giant disbanded it would have seemed to be almost useless. But given the distance of some thirty years, it comes across as a compelling and important document. But, again, you must make adjustments as a listener. Like Under Construction but on a grander, more obsessive scale, Scraping the Barrel is a technical marvel that needs to be approached with an interest in some things that are atypical to most people's way of listening to recorded music.
If your interest is new work, the "new" pieces here derived from a reunion seem less than remarkable, and in comparison to the body of work that only seems right. As the first two of four discs shuffle their way through a chronological re-imagining of studio releases from the initial Gentle Giant to the curious end times of Civilian the real interest is revealed. And this is an interest in process, in the way in which music is approached by the composer. By getting a snippet of vocal work here, the development of a bass line there, the music Gentle Giant listeners are familiar with begins to take shape over multiple takes and variations. It's not as boring or academic as it might seem because if the music of Gentle Giant shares one overriding characteristic, it is the characteristic of tightly enmeshed, mutually dependent parts. Hearing some of the parts free of their surroundings adds an immense sense of appreciation to what you already know of the finished work.
The extensive collection of samples nearly nine hours of MP3 files must be of interest to Modern Day Composers. The addition of extensive downloadable samples do a nice job of projecting Gentle Giant into a new sort of future while the other discs let us in on the process of their compositional and recording processes, adding the final layer of detail on to their remarkable studio work.
Now, back to completism: Any music that even brushes the world of pop is usually deemed disposable, along with the circumstances of its creation. Back catalogs can be messy as any admirer of Mozart and the endless revisions to Kφchel can attest. But for a group that was dogged by contract and label issues during most of its career, that mess is further entangled by all manner of issues. Here, the history gets un-blurred. Scraping the Barrel, its four discs and 32-page guide put all the band's work in context and in perspective, closing the door on the history while opening the history to greater scrutiny.
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