Van Der Graaf Generator - Complete Discography [FLAC]

Van der Graaf Generator are a progressive rock band from Manchester, England, formed by singer/guitarist Peter Hammill, Nick Pearne who played organ, and drummer Chris Smith, who also played various wind instruments. Hugh Banton replaced Pearne, Smith left the band, and Keith Ellis and Guy Evans joined on bass guitar and drums respectively. Popular mainly in Italy, they incorporated an intense, more dismal sound into their music, similar to contemporaries King Crimson, who also had a jazz influenced sound. Other distinctive elements unique to Van der Graaf are the use of the Hammond organ and keyboards as the main layer of sound, various woodwind instruments and saxophones with an electronic twist, as well as the overall lack of guitar as a main instrument, despite King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp appearing on two of their albums.

The Aerosol Grey Machine

Although these characteristics are very strong on the following albums, The Aerosol Grey Machine is quite in contrast to those albums. The largest difference is that all of the signature instruments the group are known for are absent from this record. The keyboards still play a role on the album, as does an extremely dominant acoustic guitar, a trait that would soon vanish. With a bit more of a psychedelic influence than other albums, the progressive roots are still fairly strong with most tracks over six minutes in length and extended instrumental sections. In The Court of The Crimson King, is generally credited with ‘inventing’ progressive rock, but among the debut albums of future prog bands, this record is one of the most progressively inclined than albums such as Yes and the debut albums of bands like Genesis and Pink Floyd.

Aquarius and Octopus, the two songs in excess of eight minutes in length, show Hammill’s emerging knack for writing longer progressive rock songs that would be so integral in later albums. Orthenthian St. and Necromancer are two enjoyable straightforward rock songs that show the immaturity of the record, with no real element to hold it all together, which would later come with Hammill’s vocal style and lyrics, as well as brooding saxophones and organs. A few of the songs are quite catchy however, and there are some good bass lines throughout some songs which hold attention, namely on Orthenthian St.. the longer songs hold a general progressive rock style, with keyboard prominence and instrumental sections. The songs are all worth listening to, they just lack emotion, unlike the album’s successors.

As is expected, there are some unmemorable and throwaway tracks. The Aerosol Grey Machine is completely devoid of any sense, and is similar to ELP’s Are You Ready Eddy? released a few years later, with an extremely short tune devoted to a fun yet completely pointless melody, with a slight psychedelic feel to it. Black Smoke Yen is a neat track, but is too short for its own good, being about a minute long. Although the tracks are worthless the combined length of these two songs is about two minutes, so they really don’t detract from the album’s quality. Running Back and Into a Game are good tracks, the only problem with them is that after many listens of the album, I still have trouble remembering how these tracks go. They’re still worth hearing, however, and sound good when listening to the album, even though they’re a bit boring at times, since Peter Hammill’s songwriting was a bit lackluster on these tracks, a forgivable offense, with this being his first album.

The main plague in this album is the lack of emotion. Later albums feature bizarre cacophonies and twisted saxophone sections that invoke a certain feeling unique to VDGG albums. This album contains none of those elements, let alone any real emotion. These songs are just rock songs with a psychedelic tinge and a progressive tinge, and have no value or special emotion to bring the listener back to this album instead of other VDGG albums or even other albums in general.

The works of Van der Graaf Generator are generally noted for their dark and unsound style of symphonic progressive rock, and this album has a much lighter mood in comparison. Inflected with elements of psychedelic rock, especially shown in the nonsensical lyrics and short tune The Aerosol Grey Machine, progressive rock, and just plain sixties rock n’ roll, The Aerosol Grey Machine is an immature yet enjoyable start offered by the band. Despite the lack of substance in the lyrics and music, as well as a limited amount of emotion, the album is simply an effort to find a suitable sound and uncover various fortes of the band members, who would soon change anyways, such as front man Peter Hammill’s unique and dynamic voice; not yet utilized, which yields some disappointment for fans of later albums working back through Van der Graaf Generator’s catalogue

H To He Who Am The Only One

The foreboding crawl of the Hammond organ is what made Van Der Graaf Generator one of the darkest and most engrossing of all the early progressive bands. On H to He Who Am the Only One, the brooding tones of synthesizer and oscillator along with Peter Hammil's distinct and overly ominous voice make it one of this British band's best efforts. Kicking off with the prog classic "Killer," an eight minute synthesized feast of menacing tones and threatening lyrics, the album slowly becomes shadowed with Van Der Graaf's sinister instrumental moodiness. With superb percussion work via Guy Evans, who utilizes the tympani drum to its full extent, tracks like "The Emperor in His War-Room" and "Lost" are embraced with a blackened texture that never fades. The effective use of saxophone (both alto and tenor) and baritone from David Jackson gives the somberness some life without taking away any of the instrumental petulance. H to He is carpeted with a science fiction theme, bolstered by the bleak but extremely compelling use of heavy tones and the absence of rhythms and flighty pulsations. This album, which represents Van Der Graaf in their most illustrious stage, is a pristine example of how dark progressive rock should sound.

The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other

The second album. It was released in 1970. The album was reissued in re-mastered form, with two bonus tracks, in 2005.

While this is the second album in the Van der Graaf Generator catalogue, it is really the first proper album by the band. Their previous album, The Aerosol Grey Machine had been written and recorded as a solo record by singer and main songwriter Peter Hammill, but because of a deal with the record company, was released under the Van der Graaf Generator name.

The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other was recorded at Trident Studios, London, 11–14 December 1969. Trident was one of the most advanced studios in all of Europe at the time. Most of the album was recorded on an 8-track reel to reel machine. However, the song After The Flood was recorded on a new state of the art 16-track recorder. It was one of the first such 16 track recordings made in the U.K.[citation needed]

The album credited Hugh Banton with writing the cello parts on "Refugees", but he was not given an actual songwriting credit. The first U.S. issue of the album was released by the Probe Records division of ABC Records also in 1970. It featured a different cover than the U.K. version.

The title is taken from artist John Minton: "We're all awash in a sea of blood, and the least we can do is wave to each other."

In the Q & Mojo Classic Special Edition Pink Floyd & The Story of Prog Rock, the album came #15 in its list of "40 Cosmic Rock Albums".

Pawn Hearts

Van Der Graaf Generator's third album, Pawn Hearts was also its second most popular; at one time this record was a major King Crimson cult item due to the presence of Robert Fripp on guitar, but Pawn Hearts has more to offer than that. The opening track, "Lemmings," calls to mind early Gentle Giant, with its eerie vocal passages (including harmonies) set up against extended sax, keyboard, and guitar-driven instrumental passages, and also with its weird keyboard and percussion interlude, though this band is also much more contemporary in its focus than Gentle Giant. Peter Hammill vocalizes in a more traditional way on "Man-Erg," against shimmering organ swells and Guy Evans' very expressive drumming, before the song goes off on a tangent by way of David Jackson's saxes and some really weird time signatures -- plus some very pretty acoustic and electric guitar work by Hammill himself and Fripp. The monumental "Plague of Lighthouse Keepers," taking up an entire side of the LP, shows the same kind of innovation that characterized Crimson's first two albums, but without the discipline and restraint needed to make the music manageable. The punning titles of the individual sections of this piece (which may have been done for the same reason that Crimson gave those little subtitles to its early extended tracks, to protect the full royalties for the composer) only add to the confusion. As for the piece itself, it features enough virtuoso posturing by everyone (especially drummer Guy Evans) to fill an Emerson, Lake & Palmer album of the same era, with a little more subtlety and some time wasted between the interludes. The 23-minute conceptual work could easily have been trimmed to, say, 18 or 19 minutes without any major sacrifices, which doesn't mean that what's here is bad, just not as concise as it might've been. But the almost operatic intensity of the singing and the overall performance also carries you past the stretches that don't absolutely need to be here. The band was trying for something midway between King Crimson and Genesis, and came out closer to the former, at least instrumentally. Hammill's vocals are impassioned and involving, almost like an acting performance, similar to Peter Gabriel's singing with Genesis, but the lack of any obviously cohesive ideas in the lyrics makes this more obscure and obtuse than any Genesis release.

Godbluff

Three reasons why Van Der Graaf Generator never quite managed to make the same impact on the general public of the 70’s as Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes did:

Reason 1:Van Der Graaf Generator are a band that defines the darker side of progressive rock. Each of the four tracks on the album tells their own tale of tortured minds, ancient battles and dark fantasies. The lyrical work from Peter Hammil is one of the core aspects of the music and embodies each track with a feeling of individuality. Each of the lyrics in turn hold their own literary merit and are reminiscent of looking into the mind of a madman.

Reason 2: The music here is just as dark as it’s subject matter. Herein lies one of the albums biggest strengths: How the music supports Peter Hammil’s vision. If for instance he is singing about a dark twisted world on the edge of our conscious as he does on “The Sleep Walkers”, the music will transport you there. Other examples that can be found are the ending of scorched earth with its wailing and screaming keyboards, as though to signify the death of a warrior in battle, and the melancholic atmospherics of “The Undercover Man” which take you back to the pain of growing up and accepting adulthood.

Reason 3: Godbluff differs from a traditional progressive rock album, in that it is not a concept album and there is little to no use of electric guitar. The band instead opts to make the Saxophone and Keyboards as their main instruments of choice and this manages to succeed in ways that the electric guitar would simply not be able to. In “Arrow” a wailing saxophone plays over an eerie drumbeat and sounds desperate, almost tortured. Because the lyrics involve both of these emotions by the bucket load, it succeeds in supporting the music by magnifying the emotions conveyed.

If there is a track that sums up the album as a whole in one package, so to speak, it would definetly be “The Sleepwalkers” Here everything the band has been trying to achieve works. From the emotion and atmosphere and the lyrics that speak of a dark twisted fantasy world. The same ingredients are used on all the other tracks and the result is a progressive rock classic and the definition of more Avant Garde progressive music done right.


Still Life

Released in the latter half of 1976 as a half-hearted attempt at some sort of commercial focus in the U.K. and U.S., World Record suffers from several ailments: there was much tension in the band at this point, particularly between leader Peter Hammill and keyboardist Hugh Banton. In the end, the band would split apart, with Banton and wind player David Jackson leaving, while Hammill and drummer Guy Evans recruited replacements. World Record is very much a divided record, sounding beautifully clean, but lacking in both performance and focus. Evans plays as well as ever, but without the creative spark of earlier records; Hammill, meanwhile, was responsible for the rambling, scattered "Meurglys III (The Songwriter's Guild)," a lumbering piece named after one of his guitars. Of the cuts present, the best are the operatic "Masks," which mines one of Hammill's favorite themes, that of identity, and "Wondering," written in collaboration with Banton. "Wondering" is beautifully hymn-like until the very end, when it suddenly becomes querulous and uncertain, ending the album both with a note of hope and a desperate question

The Quiet Zone - The Pleasure Dome

By the middle of the 1970s, Van Der Graaf Generator's sound was subtly changing from their early incarnation. Buoyed up by the success of their 1975 reunion album, Godbluff and the reception its follow-up, Still Life received, their 1976 release, World Record was altogether harder and more song focussed than its predecessors. There is crispness in their attack and longer pieces such as ''A Place To Survive'' are stripped-down and less embellished than works of old.

As 1977 approached, the group split; instead of calling it a day, Peter Hammill felt that there was, er, still life in the group: dropping the 'Generator' from the name and, to compensate for the loss of Hugh Banton and David Jackson, Hammill and Guy Evans brought original bassist Nic Potter back into the fold and added Graham Smith from String Driven Thing on violin. The resulting album, The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome was released in September 1977, and it survived intact at the height of new wave, because its terse, opaque songs struck a particular chord in the new climate, proving that venom was not solely a punk's prerogative. ''A Sphinx In The Face'', a continuation of Hammill's obsession with growing older is an ever-shimmering highlight as is the swooning ''Lizard Play'' and ''Habit Of The Broken Heart''.

The double live Vital was the noisy sign-off to Van Der Graaf. Recorded at London's Marquee during the second punk winter, it is desolate, dark and heavy, a mixture of new material and classics, delivered sparsely and aggressively. All VDGG originals are shredded with Hammill in loud rock guitar mode. Quiet Zone leftover ''Door'', ''Urban'' and finally, ''Nadir's Big Chance'', still maliciously (and deliciously) burst forth. Although VDG imploded, this era paved the way for one of the most interesting interludes in Hammill's career setting his course as a dark, electro-acoustic one-man band.

With Present demonstrating 27 years on that they haven't lost it, it's difficult to think of comebacks more impeccable than Van Der Graaf Generator's. These reissues offer three more reasons why so much residual love for this arty, noisy and heartfelt quartet remains.

Vital

With the recording of this live performance in the care of drummer extraordinaire, Guy Evans, this incarnation of Van der Graaf Generator, as always, speaks volumes in it's work. With his ear, that of a seasoned engineer, the mix is bass-end heavy and has the dynamic control of expansive tension rarely heard on live recordings. "Vital Live's" sound has not suffered the over-dense dramatics that many live acts end up with, cramming the kitchen sink into filling out the obligatory 'wall of sound' which is often illusionary at best. To fit onto it's original CD release missing is "Sci-Finance" and "Nadir's Big Dream", although i