This isn’t just prog…..this is extreme prog….Van Der Graaf Generator’s 1976 album World Record gets a remastered reissue in a three disc set.
This comprises of a remastered version of the original album mix and the single B-side Part One along with new stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound mixes. The blu-ray disc also includes the 1976 promotional film for Wondering.
Now, VDGG were always a “Marmite” band. You with loved them or found them far too “out there” to be tolerated. I’ve always been in of the former opinion and World Record is the band at their mid-1970s peak.
Dark, intense, bleak, heavy, stark, ferocious, complex, and once the penny drops, compelling. A unique band.
Peter Hammill delivers his always challenging lyrics in his astounding vocal range from the quietist whisper to the angst-ridden roar, nowhere more so than during the epic Meurglys III, The Songwriter’s Guild.
Behind him. Guy Evans complex drumming together with the variety of sounds produced by Hugh Banton’s organ and mellotron keys and David Jackson’s saxophone all makes for something unique. Not forgetting Hammill’s edgy guitar riffs.
To this day, just shy of half a century since it was originally released, World Record stands as a fine example of a band so far ahead of it’s time.
When She Comes grows in to a pulsating number after the squeaks and squawks of the intro before it breaks out in to the bleak, yet catchy, heaviness. Here it is:
A Place to Survive makes me feel slightly unsettled. More of that dark, pulsating heaviness and Hammill’s bleak, roaring throaty vocal. Then Masks completes what was the old side one from the vinyl days being almost melodic in comparison.
Next comes that twenty minute epic of Meurglys III, The Songwriter’s Guild. Hammill’s sensitive yet angst-ridden ode to his guitar and the loneliness, isolation and challenge of song writing.
This is where Hammill demonstrates the vocal range and also meanders about on his guitar effectively as the song moves between passages and styles from the quiet to the full on brutal without losing control is quite something. Lyrically and instrumentally sublime.
The lead-out section of Meurglys goes rather prog/reggae which doesn’t always work though I find it nicely atmospheric.
Wondering closes the album is is perhaps the closest VDGG came to a prog/ballad with the peeling keyboards.
World Record marked the end of the “classic” VDGG line-up before Hammill dropped the Generator and resurfaced in 1977 as simply Van Der Graaf with a revised line-up releasing The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome and a more what might be called “traditional” prog style yet still distinctive.
Their Live album – Vital – from 1978 is not to be missed. As is World Record. They don’t make ‘em like VDGG any more, and probably never will.
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