HENRY COW (1973)
also called Leg End (Legend) and The Henry Cow Legend
8/10
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In the turn of the 21st century, the least-known groups have risen out of your friends' obscure recommendations and become the subject of a dissertation by academics. Henry Cow, a group formed in Cambridge, England by Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, is among them - the slow reviving interest in the band is lukewarm comparing to the likes of some obscure band recording at a garage and saying "baby" and making it to an HBO soundtrack, but it is alive and well as a legend itself for the niche audience. Forgotten in the world because their left-wing politics, as expressed in their later works, specifically in the late 1970s, was stigmatised by the fervent anti-communism and anti-socialism, they remain an unforgettable footnote in a person of interest's biography. But certainly, they are more than just a footnote...Â
The first instrumental album, self-titled, or most often referenced as "Legend" (varying spellings) and "The Henry Cow Legend", this album was released in 1973 for Richard Branson's record label Virgin, stacking up against Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Gong's Flying Teapot and Kevin Coyne's Marjory Razorblades, before his notorious entrepreneurship exhibited today.
Nirvana For Mice, a Fred Frith composition, is a clever, conventional jazz-rock instrumental work inspired by the likes of Frank Zappa and John Cage, as Frith would use Cage's chance music methods to generate melodies that seemed a bit off, and bassist John Greaves executes the bassline of his melodies in the manner an Uncle Meat era Zappa. It then bursts into a free form improvisation solo by Geoff Leigh on tenor saxophone, who seems to stumble and fumble around than offer a soulful solo; otherwise uninteresting and skippable. Closing in the improvisation comes with a drone and a motif that gets a bit tense but too basic.
Amygdala, a Tim Hodgkinson composition, refreshes the harshness of the first track with a lush section with modulating chords on Hodgkinson's combo organ and Frith's filler countermelodies stacked neatly with the overdubbed, elaborate organ melody. Like their influences, the piece can get a bit frantic and abrupt, with another section including a tasty piano enticing many listeners something, before they could intensify onto sections to another. Conventionally intense but also consistently lush, with motifs repeated in another key possibly as a way of expressing a call in a musical key and response in another key. The woodwinds by Hodgkinson and Leigh do a great service to Hodgkinson's composition where both of the woodwindists deliver a spicy voice, a noticeable improvement over the first track, with subdued drums playing an active kind of rhythm rather than a passive kind of rhythm. The song closes out with a neat growl from Greaves' fuzz bass, mirroring the style of Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper and a tense, dramatic and subsequently, quieter motif.
Greaves and Frith's composition, Teenbeat, including the Teenbeat Introduction and its Reprise, is the pinnacle of the album; a demonstration of Henry Cow's use of tape editing in an experimental, dreamy way while staying conventional, a trait that wouldn't last, past this album, for Henry Cow as their years in the music industry progressed. The guitar interlude by Frith shows a whimsical side in the band, perhaps, folky before descending into action where the band comes in full power, locked in unusual time signatures and unleashing. The Fred Frith Factory Riff played as an acoustic and electric guitar duo serves as a basis for the improvisation of Tim Hodgkinson on alto saxophone. While more forgiving than Nirvana for Mice, Hodgkinson is at least listenable as an improviser, where he stuck to a conventional solo consistent with the musical key, or mode, for a lack of a better term. The clarinet solo abruptly ends the improv and slowly closes out the song with tenser. The Reprise of Teenbeat blasts off with a blistering guitar solo by Fred Frith that could be best described as a grungy John McLaughlin type of a solo rather than a Robert Fripp styled solo, which Frith is often compared to. Stingy and stiff, but it's beneficial as Frith gets a chance to develop his style in the studio, after being in the concerts and all. After the sting withers, the ensemble wraps it up with a bit of more lush preludes and with a literal reprise of a motif, just like the beginning of the main theme before ending off with another motif, which confirmed my suspicion that Frith was a bit struck by the Mahavishnu Orchestra (the rhythm seems to resemble Dance of Maya, for instance) as an influence.
The Tenth Chaffinch is at best a throwaway track that should have never been analysed; though it includes a great deal of free jazz improvisation, it offers absolutely nothing and is meant to bridge between one song over another.
The Nirvana Reprise, stripped down to the basics, as Frith wrote the piece, contains three guitars; one playing the melody and another striking chord and finally another playing the countermelody. In this piece, Frith plays it in a slow style albeit down a semitone of the musical key, which vaguely resembles a piece for a post-rock band. With the Yellow Half Moon and Blue Star, as an extract, is a ballet written, again, by Frith, played like a contemporary classical piece in a jazz arrangement. With stiff rhythm striking again in this piece, the melodies shifts between augmented and diatonic in a creative way, and finally settles for an evocative melody and tensing again before crashing into another, this time, bombastic and a bit too sentimental.
Hodgkinson's composition Nine Funerals of the Citizen King makes a rather intriguing yet pretentiously outdated (that it makes Curtis Mayfield look like Kurt Vonnegut) commentary of a monarchy and primitive consumerism. There is an ordinary free life, but beneath it is a king ruling them, and they admit it pithily, that they bargained for relief but are frustrated, finding out the king pays more to someone who is more privileged than the citizens and have no choice but to work and buy, and so forth; inside the quote is an elaborative way of describing the alleviation of a painful, boring routine:
"You make arrangements with the guard
Halfway round the exercise yard
To sugar the pill
Disguising the enormous double-time the king pays to Wordsworth
~Tim Hodgkinson
In which sugaring the pill is an abstract way of trying to get accustomed to the new reality. The people have realised that one way or another, they'll never get as much attention as Wordsworth does with the King; this is mirrored with an archaic Indian-Hindu religious belief where if you live in a particular caste, you will never grow out of it; simply put, you're born, and you will die in it. Accounting for that, it certainly reflects Hodgkinson's studying of social anthropology, prior to forming the band, but the lyrics remain specific to European styled kingdoms. An obvious reference that Hodgkinson penned was to "The Hunting of the Snark", a collection of Lewis Carroll poems: "... the Snark was a Boojum ..." and concludes with a chorus of "a rose is a rose is a rose" and "said the Mama of Dada of 1919", which evokes a sense of perpetuity, which is more pronounced near the end of the song; such effect that Hodgkinson used would support an interpretation that this song is about being stuck in the status quo and accepting the miserable consequences, it would be somehow relevant for today. The arrangement is sombre, matching the lyrics the songwriter wrote, but poignantly powerful. As the song closes out, the signature tension of the band in its early years comes out again. Yes, that tension; the band never seems to get enough of it, doesn't it?
The production work in Henry Cow's first album is abysmal at best, making its contemporaries like Caravan's For Girls Who Plump in the Night and King Crimson's Larks Tongues in Aspic seem as well produced as Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and Ebb and Kander's Cabaret. Chris Cutler's muted, clunky drums and poorly recorded and mixed instruments are attributed to bad placements of microphones supposedly, and possibly rushed recording sessions; but much of these gaffes are overshadowed by excelling compositions by others. At the same time, this kind of production also paved the way for lo-fi musicians and producers which therefore opened many possibilities as to what one would do if it's not in the highest fidelity.
For an album fully produced by a self-reliant recording studio provided by its label with young audio engineers like Tom Newman and Mike Oldfield, I can excuse it, but it's a second rate Zappa tribute band at best, fully European and free from Americana influences. Much of the compositions that I seem to enjoy were written by Hodgkinson who possessed a great deal of modulating chords (augmented by the fact that he was self-taught on music theory) - though Frith is a bit freshman-ish (his later works would seem a bit more developed like in Gravity).
