(This review contains two firsts for the blog, first by doing two albums simultaneously in a single entry, and finally having an entry that features albums chronologically connected to each other.)
While the previous record, Sitting Targets, hints at the sound Peter Hammill's K Group would strive for, the pair of albums recorded with the K-group as the core lineup (plus contributions from David Jackson, David Lord and Stuart Gordon between the two albums) provide an interesting chunk of PH's career that makes sense to explore together, providing a sound palette that is certainly distinctive as a "PH sound" while utilizing a lot of tricks that aren't frequently heard in the rest of the discography. As with the previous album, there is a direct line toThe Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, with its melodic songwriting and insistent, if highly syncopated rhythms from drums and guitar, as well as sometimes-frenetic soloing, this time from John Ellis and David Jackson rather than Graham Smith. It's clear that even with a working band, PH doesn't always do "band recordings," with evidence in the liner notes and on SofaSound suggesting that songs for at least the Enter K session were sometimes tracked live, sometimes built up in the sculptural way PH has worked in the past. The tunes on this album do seem to be a somewhat focused effort to achieve chart success, certainly a less messy PH than on the previous few albums - tighter rhythms, tighter hooks, tighter fills, the works - but plenty of room for some nice experimentation to sneak in, almost subversive given the context of some of these nice, less brooding piano ballads and peppy guitar tunes. It's a wonderful thing to witness, to be shocked by the angular and aggressive instrumental break that interrupts the tidiness of the A section of a tune like "Labour of Love," or the rocker that springs out of the ballad beginning and ending of "The Unconscious Life." A friend mentioned that he was impressed by PH incorporating weirder tunes into the K-Group repertoire (certainly a blast to hear them break into some Van der Graaf or early PH tunes), but I find the ease in which he'll slip an odd time signature or unplaceable studio effect into the context of what appears, by every other measure, to be a "regular song." And, lest we sometimes forget, PH is pretty damned good at writing and playing regular songs, even if he's made his mark with a tremendous expansion of what is permissible within the format of a song. The questions, I'm sure, could go on in that manner nearly infinitely. I'll stop them here.
Enter K is a fine document, seven songs in the original release (with the excellent "Seven Wonders" on the re-release) that provide a really nice range of tunes and ideas. Opening track "Paradox Drive," with lyrics somewhat impenetrably suggesting the waking world in struggle with dreams, moves from a bright, major key hook before expanding into a more ambiguous, open riff. The song has a strangely circular structure, and the contrast of the whole-tone intensity of the "chorus" as it leads back into the opening hook is quite daring. In just under two minutes, the song has given you a blueprint for the album, and seemingly the K-group. You don't get this much energy elsewhere on the album, except perhaps on "The Great Experiment" (although that tune is less consistently weird, piano riffs in parallel fifths anchoring the driving 4/4 pulse of the tune.), and on the A-section of "Seven Wonders," which is about the closest PH comes to (in my book) to a Bowie-esque rocker, before that tune expands into rolling, weirdly accented set of rhythm changes that give such a great emphasis to PH's true snarl on the lead vocal. "She Wraps It Up" has a sort of pseudo-Orchestral feel to the arrangement, placing insistent piano chords, synth obbligatos and bass licks, but also a syncopation that seems to allude, unexpectedly, to 60's R+B and pop. It's a subtle influence for sure, and gives the song some real punch to it, even while the lyrics could be equally likely a science fiction metaphor or a literal tale of of an exchange of energy.
The ballads are equally inspired, although they seem to be where some of the strangest sonic material appears on this album. "The Unconscious Life" begins with a brooding solo piano chord progression, joined by an incredibly low, close-miked vocal performance by PH that is rather discomforting. The tune is filled out with a backbeat, some agile bass work and a growling sax line that seems to be half-quoting John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," before returning to the solo beginnings, gathering some ambient aid from John Ellis' E-Bow and a little fragment of a sax solo on the repeated final chord. It's a fine arrangement, the fragmentation of it amplifying the surreality of the lyrics (which seem a companion to "Paradox Drive"). "Don't Tell Me" is a fine tune, even if the tone of Jaxon's wailing saxophone instantly dates the recording to the early-to-mid 80s. The use here is a bit more tasteful than the type of pseudo-orgiastic excess of certain flavors of smooth jazz and slow jams, but the tone is still extremely reminiscent. This is a tune I enjoy live, especially hearing the extreme resonance that is captured in the solo version on PNO GTR VOX - the studio version is quite good, avoiding the cliches one might associate with a ballad of this type, a sordid tale illustrating the insecurity someone might feel immediately after a tryst. But I find the tune to be more effective when it is most exposed (hearing PH navigate the difficult piano part live 9 times out of 10 is always impressive), with a bit of rhythmic freedom to allow some of the stark cadences to ring out in full.
Hard to classify a tune like "Accidents" since its only immediate sonic predecessors to my knowledge are in PH's earlier catalogue. Built around several drum tracks of different speeds (some reversed), the tune begins with a creaky stomp, eerie ambience produced by a reversed piano loop, with harsh synth overdubs responding to the vocal line, before finding an off-kilter chorus with an extremely satisfying synth. The rhythm here is fairly angular, but in the context of the tune feels right, feels unnecessary to question. This, "Accidents" has in common with "Happy Hour," which when looking at a chart of the tune with its multiple, fluidly shifting and accented time signatures, seems like a satire of prog-rock complexity (in one section I counted no less than 8 rhythm changes between 5/8, 6/8 and 9/8 if I did my homework correctly). But it's almost totally unnecessary to pay attention to, subversively introducing severe complexity into an easygoing meditation about the culture of social drinking. Here, the insistent rhythm changes follow the contour of the lyrics, which are quite cleverly phrased, and subtly hint at the increasing lack of balance as the narrator of the tune drinks throughout the evening. This is a tune which proves to me with certainly that PH is NOT prog, and yet that he has learned everything useful that could be learned from it as a composer. In my opinion, it's the most interesting long form tune he would write until "A Headlong Stretch" over 10 years later.
Patience has shorter statements but no smaller ones, each of these tunes reaching for grandeur in various areasI find it to be less consistent, scratching my head at some of the choices made in the studio arrangement a few times more often than I do with Enter K but not much more. Many of the tunes here seem to have companions on the previous album, although certainly not all. "Just Good Friends" seems to be cut from the same cloth as "Don't Tell Me," dealing with the same insecurities between people who might be lovers on unequal footing, although I find I enjoy the studio version more than I would expect, with an interlude and the tune's concluding section, the guest contributions of Lord and Gordon adding a great deal to the tune. "Comfortable" is a brooding piece of storytelling in concert, PH really stretching the range of his voice in order to dig into the mind of his character, a woman seeking some comfort from the ritual of church if not the spirituality of it. He's written more eloquent songs detailing his commitment to humanism over organized religion, but what this one lacks in narrative sympathy is made up for in manic guitar, drum and panpipe overdubs during the instrumental sections. I'm less impressed by this version of "Traintime" - perhaps once you, too, see the video of Peter Hammill stalking the stage with a full orchestra backing him on this tune, you find it hard to see it with anything less than that intensity. It's an intensity he's able to convey in smaller live formats, even solo, but that property seems to be missing here, a weak backbeat during the B-section taking away the majesty of that chord progression and accenting the tune in a way that just feels strange. The tune itself is great, and the A-section is passable, the nice, proto-jazz touch of Guy Evans on the kit always enhancing PH's flirtations with compound meter. But I find that something abstract but essential in the production falls off the wagon at the 1:40 mark and doesn't seem to return for the rest of the tune.
When this album wants to be energetic, it sells it, Guy Evan's killer drumming often being complemented by some great guitar hooks shared by Ellis and Hammill. Film Noir is explosive tune, bursting out of the gate with a lush, almost orchestral hook. The tune tells of a actress having some confusion between her life and her role (light reading for PH fans). The tune makes the full rounds, settling into a brooding, muted verse before finding that hook again, followed by a proper guitar solo from Ellis, recognizably virtuosic but still retaining some blues roots within some of the angularity. Jeunesse Doree is a calculated dig at a subset of youth culture set to a coiled 6/8 beat and maintains excellent form, disintegrating and rebuilding somewhere close to the middle before the driving A-section riff propels the song again through to the end. It's got a finality to it that seems to remind the youth being addressed that they, too, will age some day. "Now More Than Ever" recalls the philosophical pinings of both "Paradox Drive" and "The Unconscious Life," although with a feel and harmonic structure that more firmly recalls the former. The tune is built around a heavy 5/4 bass riff that seems perfectly logical before some guitar interjections harmonically re-orient the section, setting it off kilter. There's some fluid transition between the sections, each in a different meter, and here is another example of PH's ability to experiment with extreme complexity without drawing a ton of attention to the fact that he's doing it - the tune maintains the unease throughout, answering the questions of the lyrics with further questions, and it's quite a success.
"Patient," tangentially the album's title track, begins out of swelling E-Bow notes before the brooding arpeggios that form the core of the song. I have to say that the lyrics, implying to me a corruption of a doctor/patient relationship, are genuinely disturbing, the harmonic un-ease created by the continuously unresolving chords supplementing them almost too effectively. I find some of the sudden intrusions of lead guitar and drums seem to lessen some of the songs impact (the drum entrance at 5:16 and concluding flamenco-style guitar are still a little baffling to me), although the sparseness and tone of Nic Potter's bass is especially well-captured here. Generally, this recording sounds great, and there are lots of quirks to it, such as the slightly out-of-phase arpeggios John Ellis overdubs when the first section returns - and the overall spaciousness can't really be replicated by a live performance, no matter how much reverb is on the PA. Among the tunes on this album, this replicates the feel if not the sound of the PH of perhaps 5 years prior, maintaining a connection to the songwriting tradition while really going out on a limb in terms of lyrical and musical focus.
To keep up the focus here, I'll write about The Margin+ next, the official live document of the K-Group. It has been highly worthwhile to examine these three albums so close together like this, although there are few other groupings of albums that seem to so thoroughly share the same DNA in the PH catalogue that I've yet heard - and of course, as he continues, PH has taken greater steps to avoid producing two similar records back to back. But it is nice to have, over the course of these three albums, a document of a developing musical sub-identity for Peter Hammill, one that seems to take a few staggered, subversive steps toward mainstream listenability even while it reinforces the quirks that ensure that PH has rarely been as easily digested as any of his contemporaries.
