The Greatest Prog Harmonica Player Of All Time
Steve Hackett left his gig as the guitarist for Genesis (where he was a member from 1971 to 1977) for a full-time solo career for one main reason: he got bored. True, there were some tensions between Steve and the other members of Genesis, whether because of the others feeling like Steve had made his first solo album too soon, or because of Steve feeling that not enough of his material made it onto their albums (he was especially irritated about "Please Don't Touch" getting left off Wind and Wuthering in favor of "Wot Gorilla"). If one was to narrow the cause of his departure to specific factors, though, it would come down to two (this is paraphrased from Steve's own accounts): (1) while helping to mix Seconds Out, he realized he was sick of playing "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" over and over, and (2) he had written a song ("Hoping Love Will Last") that would never be recorded as long as he was a part of Genesis, simply because it required a female singer and the band was averse to bringing in outside elements. Once it became clear that Genesis wasn't going to allow Steve to grow and develop in ways that he wanted, he took off for good.
The mindset that drove Steve's departure from Genesis is worth noting because it largely informs his career as a whole. While Steve never stopped being a guitarist first and foremost, and while his twin loves of prog-tinged instrumental passages and classical guitar flourishes certainly form the bedrock of his career, he also consistently showed an interest in stretching himself and seeking to incorporate new influences. He didn't seek out popularity, but he didn't shun contemporary styles and approaches either, and he also had an interest in incorporating influences from Japan, Brazil and wherever else. This, combined with his continual interest in expanding his list of collaborators, helped to give a measure of artistic relevance to Steve's career long past what would have been expected from a former guitarist for a 70s prog rock band. Of course, his risk-taking sometimes produced pretty terrible results, not helped by the fact that Steve's 80s vocals sounded somewhat like an inferior version of Trevor Rabin's, but this continual desire to stretch also helped Steve have one of the better late-period career stretches of any notable prog musician. There are ups and downs, and not every idea that looks good on paper ends up sounding that great, but his career ended up pretty impressive on the whole.
If there's a consistent theme across Steve's albums, it's that they're not so much about songcraft (or the instrumental equivalent) as about interesting ideas crashing into each other. Sometimes it's about having disparate ideas within a single track, sometimes it's about having two tracks next to each other that are entirely different, but variety and contrast are definitely Steve's allies. Sometimes the individual ideas are certainly great enough to stand up without the benefit of contrast, but there's no question that the often bizarre flow given to Hackett's albums by the odd confluence of ideas tends to lift them in my eyes. If you prefer your albums to have thematic and sonic unity, then Steve Hackett albums (with some exceptions) might not really be for you, but if you don't mind some herky-jerky in your album flow, he's definitely worth getting into.
There are a lot of other details to cover in relation to Steve's career, especially regarding his incredible talents as a guitarist, but those will get plenty of mention in the actual album reviews. Overall, I'm giving him a 3-star rating, and that 3-star rating is surprisingly solid; his late career surge helps considerably, bumping the rating from a borderline level up to a no-doubt-about-it one.
Steve Welte (03/13/13)
I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed when I first saw the three star rating; but then I remembered that I'd not
absorbed much of his 80s or 90s output beyond Defector (good), GTR (ugh), Guitar Noir (meh), and Darktown (great). Shortly
thereafter, I bought the first Genesis Revisited album, and your overall rating became more justifiable in my eyes. :P
Hackett is one of those artists who, IMO, needs a long-term collaborator or three to bounce ideas off of and to shoot down the
crappier ones; while his work with Roger King since the late 90's has produced a lot of good if not great music, I think someone
who would push back stronger, and have more ideas of their own - especially when it comes to forming ideas into actual songs -
would take them both into the musical stratosphere. Because, let's face it, Hackett has rarely been short of musical inspiration in
a wide variety of areas; but he's also not the best at taking said inspiration and producing cohesive songs, let alone albums. I
quite enjoy the potpourri approach on some albums, but I wish he'd stop the general approach of "slam several widely varying ideas
together and call it a song", let alone try to put out a more musically cohesive album from time to time. While this approach can
work quite well sometimes, it annoys me as much as it
produces something truly interesting; for every "Every Day" - with a catchy and bouncy pop song progressing into a minimalistic
guitar showcase, there's an "Emerald and Ash" - a good, albeit somewhat bitter ballad, with a jarringly-out-of-place hard rock
interlude. I tend to enjoy his output more when he sets a general tone for an entire album, and then produces a series of
variations on that mood (e.g., Voyage of the Acolyte or Darktown).
Still, I give the guy a lot of credit for exploring as many musical areas as he has, for the large amount of music he's made
which I do enthusiastically enjoy, and for trying his hardest to keep exploring new musical influences and collaborations while
producing a large volume of high-quality work into his 60s, especially while his erstwhile bandmates have retired or slowed down
their rate/quality of output considerably. I look forward to the rest of your reviews of his output. :)
Best song: Shadow Of The Hierophant
This is a 1000% prog rock album. Five of the eight tracks are instrumental, the song names all reference Tarot cards, the lyrics might as well be sung in French, and everything about the album screams out THIS IS SERIOUS MUSIC FOR SERIOUS LISTENERS. From a certain perspective, it's a far more concentrated dose of prog rock on the whole than any Genesis album to that point; yes, Genesis albums had their fair share of "serious" music, but they also had a tendency to lighten the mood at just the right times (the lighter songs are often an irritant for Genesis fans, but I think the consistent inclusion of such material was one of the great strengths of the Gabriel era of Genesis). On this album, the music may sometimes get gentle, but it never remotely approaches lightweight, and this both helps and hurts the album. Steve was still a little bit away at this point from his future tendencies to mix things up, that's for sure.
Still, this album makes for a delightful listen, and part of this is because the sonic texture is far more varied than on a given Genesis album. Aside from the standard instrumentation, Steve's brother John contributes flute, and there are contributions from others on oboe, English horn and cello. There's still plenty of keyboard - Steve wasn't going to abandon one of the most important foundations of solid art rock just because Tony didn't want to help out - but the keyboard parts are very much a part of the ensemble, as opposed to an entity showing much personality (which, for better and worse, Tony Banks' keyboard parts always had). The star, though, is clearly Steve's guitar, and my does he take advantage of his new freedom. If you've ever felt any sense that Steve was underused relative to his abilities in Genesis, then the opening "Ace of Wands" will reinforce that feeling something fierce. Yes, the song is more than just a guitar showcase; all of the various parts are memorable, and there are solid sequences where the majestic keyboards become the focus and the guitars fade into the background. Ultimately, though, the song's most notable features come from its rapid dash from guitar lick to guitar lick, some electric and some acoustic, with Steve mixing speed and minimalism in the way only he could and showing a stronger guitar tone than on most of his Genesis work.
"Hands of the Priestess I" and "Hands of the Priestess II," which sandwich "A Tower Struck Down," show off Steve's skills at making gentle instrumental music (whereas "Ace of Wands" and "A Tower Struck Down" show his skills in making energetic instrumental music). The first part features John's flute and Steve's guitar going back and forth on an atmospheric melody over a soft acoustic part, and the second part brings out a happy exchange of flute, English horn and guitar, with a momentary reprise of one of the themes briefly played in the middle of "Ace of Wands." "A Tower Struck Down," in contrast, would be a borderline heavy number if the guitar and the bass didn't sound so goofily wimpy (which is all the stranger given that there are two people playing bass in the song); I like the song, and it has multiple interesting sections (and some GREAT atmospheric keyboard parts in the middle), but the song almost sounds unfinished in spots (in contrast, the version on Genesis Revisited II decades later sounds fantastic).
The first vocal on the album comes from Steve on "The Hermit," and while he's no great shakes, he's definitely not bad either, though to be fair the vocal melody (a fairly nice idea repeated over and over) doesn't require much of him. The song itself is quite lovely, though; the melody goes nowhere, but it's an atmospheric nowhere, and the arrangements (especially the fantastic solo by the oboe or English horn, I admit I'm not 100% which) are very pleasing to my ears. "Star of Sirius" is a more upbeat acoustic ballad, this time featuring Phil on vocals, but Phil is basically just another layer in the delightful atmosphere whenever he sings. No matter, the slower parts are beautiful, and the faster parts give another opportunity to hear Steve doing his speedy minimalism thing oh so well.
After another instrumental, the classical-guitar-turns-into-ambience of "The Lovers" (only 1:50), we come to the album's finale and defining track. "The Shadow of the Hierophant" (which has enough contributions from Mike that it warranted a songwriting co-credit) is about as pompous as prog can get without crossing a suckiness line, and all the better for it. The first half (the vocal half) is basically two ideas alternating back and forth; a fantastic slow guitar line supported by STRONG keyboards, and an acoustic ballad with Sally Oldfield singing lyrics I still don't remotely know after owning the album for a very long time (aside from an occasional "Has the moon eclipsed the sun"). Honestly, I don't care that I don't know the lyrics; the singing is so lush, and the vocal melody so beautiful, that I'm perfectly willing to let the song have the same effect on me it would have if I was listening to something from an opera (where I wouldn't know the words because I wouldn't speak the language). Once the "song" portion ends, Steve breaks into the most emotionally charged 40-second tapping sequence I can imagine, before pulling out a brief guitar melody that rivals anything he did with Genesis, and the ending sequence begins. Oh, that ending sequence. It's just one relatively simple theme, repeated over and over (starting on solo vibes before the guitar comes in), building into a more and more dramatic arrangement, over the course of five minutes. I listen to it, and I know it's not much, and I know on a certain level it's a giant put-on, but it's just such a giant steam-roller of sound and power and that I can't get myself to care. It's one of the best stretches in Steve's career, that's for sure, and it helps make the track into one of the best of Steve's career.
On the whole, this is also one of the best albums of Steve's career, but I'd still say it falls a smidge short of greatness. It's just a touch short of genuinely classic tracks, and it has some stretches (like in much of "Tower") that don't sound quite right, and quite honestly it sounds much closer to a generic prog album than it does to the sort of album that Steve would be making later. But if it doesn't quite make it to greatness, it's still awfully close. Fans of 70s Genesis, and 70s prog rock in general, should be all over this.
Steve Welte (03/13/13)
If I recall correctly, the band took a few months off after the Lamb Tour before getting together again to work on what would
become ATotT; and since Steve hadn't contributed much musically to TLLDoB (as compared with Peter, Tony and Mike), I can certainly
see why he'd feel justified in taking some time off to do his own thing. Granted, Tony complained in the Genesis auto-bio "Chapter
and Verse" (an excellent read, by the way) about Steve not saving much material for ATotT, but then he (and Mike, I believe) vetoed
a fair number of the contributions which Steve did bring to the table in '75/'76, so it's not like much of what went into Acolyte
would've probably ended up on a Genesis album, anyway.
I like this album better than you, but then I like Spectral Mornings less than you do, so "different strokes". I tend to view
the opening 5-song stretch as one long piece with multiple sections, and I think that this 'piece' is excellent, as such; one of
the best 70's symphonic prog pieces I've ever heard. "Hierophant" is very good, but it took me a while to warm up to it; hearing it
performed live on the "Fire and Ice" DVD/live album from a year or two ago helped change my mind. This original version is quite
good, but lacks the fire of the FaI version.
I agree that the album lacks the humor or surreality of Genesis albums, but I've never found it to be really pretentious
(despite the....odd....lyrics); more of a "come see all of the cool musical ideas I have" approach, especially as compared with,
say, yer random 70's ELP album. Overall, probably a D or E from me.
Steven Highams (rawdon.lilly.gmail.com) (06/13/13)
I am so glad you like this one (well, you do; sort of), because it’s my favourite Steve Hackett album, though I agree that Spectral
Mornings is a more accomplished record. It’s tempting to think that some of this stuff should have been on A Trick of the Tail
instead, but then we wouldn't have Voyage, would we? I like Voyage more than Trick (though I like that one too). I have never
really been convinced that this was recorded as merely something to do in the wake of Gabriel’s departure from Genesis; it wouldn't
fit in with that whole concept of the Tarot cards thing, which sounds well thought-out and a little more planned, a little more
calculated, than if this were only a time-making project. Maybe it’s a bit of both…
The only problem with albums made by instrumentalists not known for their vocal talents is that, with all the guest vocalists, it
never sounds like a complete record. I mean, look at Please Don’t Touch; I enjoy it, but with Richie Havens, Randy Crawford and
the guy from Kansas (is it just me, or does he sound like Chris Thompson from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band?), it does sound
dangerously close to a various artists compilation album (and I'm not all that impressed by that highly-rated title track either –
sorry), or probably more like one of those big projects of the day, like Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, which features Chris
Thompson, Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, Julie Covington, etc.. That’s not really a problem here, though you do point out the lack
of cohesion. I don’t think anyone could argue with that. No, it doesn't achieve greatness, but greatness doesn't always create
favourites.
What saves this album from that lack of cohesion for me is the musical beauty; this is a very beautiful record, and I think ‘Star
of Sirius’ is one of the most uplifting tracks I have ever heard, along with its contemporary, Eno’s ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’. I loathe
Phil Collins more and more as I get older, but he does a good job here; I’ll give him that (though I can never forgive him for
turning Genesis into Kajagoogoo, or for turning Eric Clapton into Genesis masquerading as Kajagoogoo). Those ‘Hands of the
Priestess’ tracks and ‘The Lovers’ too; very pastoral (and I do love pastoral). The latter reminds me of In the Court of the
Crimson King (once you get past ‘Schizoid Man’). ‘Ace of Wands’ is a compelling opening track…
Sally Oldfield, who sings on ‘Shadow of the Heirophant’, should be better known. When she is known, it is usually as Mike
Oldfield’s sister (she can be heard on Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn, etc.) or maybe even as Marianne Faithfull’s convent friend from
Reading, but she had a sizeable UK hit in ’78 with ‘Mirrors’, from her Tolkien-inspired album, Water Bearer, which is worth seeking
out if you’ve never heard it. It’s reviewed on the Ground and Sky prog rock site, though it’s more prog folk than prog rock and
filtered through a more feminine… um… filter… (stumbles into horrible inarticulacy – curses!) than real prog rock.
Yeah, the Tarot stuff sounds like gobbledegook to the uninitiated, and I am one of the uninitiated, but this LP makes me feel like
I should become initiated. It may be a little pretentious, but a healthy dose of pretention is, well… healthy. Who knows, I might
start throwing the I Ching next…
Good to see the Steve Hackett page expanding (haven’t visited for a while); well done, you!
Best song: Narnia or Please Don't Touch
All that pent-up irritation with compromise, and the corresponding reveling in the chance to make albums without having to answer to anybody else, dominates this album, but while I'm usually more positive than not towards the eccentric flow of Steve Hackett albums, I actually feel like the lack of cohesion somewhat hurts this album. The more I listen to this album, the more I feel like it was made in a bit of a snit, as if Steve decided early on that he wasn't going to be restrained and that every single idea he had was going to make it onto the album. Well ... a little restraint might have helped. "Carry On Up the Vicarage" is probably a better track than one based on such a silly idea (having one vocal pitched down while it harmonizes with another vocal pitched up to sound like a chipmunk) should be, but it's not great either, as there's not much memorable other than the big Tony Banks-like chords that pop up every so often. And why the strange sample at the beginning? "The Voice of Necam" is also a little problematic, sounding like a dumping ground of every spare idea lying around. Why the carnival music at the beginning? Why the segue into the (albeit quite nice) directionless harmonies? Why have this suddenly cut off into an unfinished fragment of a classical guitar piece? And why have this wedged in between the title track and the closer?
The song quality is pretty mixed overall, even putting flow concerns aside. There are some big highlights, of course; the opening "Narnia" probably would have been a hit had it been allowed to be issued as a single (the vocals are done by Kansas' Steve Walsh, and his company wouldn't allow a single release to go forward), and given that it boasts a wonderful rolling guitar line, a bouncy main melody (with bits of barroom piano!) and non-banal lyrics about an all-time great children's story, I can't say I'd mind. I'm also quite partial towards the combination of "Land of a Thousand Autumns" and the title track on the second side; the former makes for an eerie-as-hell atmospheric prelude, full of the best "futuristic" sounds Steve could coax from his guitar, and the latter is a great instrumental that absolutely would have made Wind and Wuthering a better album had it been included. The piece is based off three main guitar-driven ideas; a slow rising theme (with pounding bass and busy percussion underneath), a hellish and noisy theme, and a goofy upbeat theme (with a fun flute part dancing around it), and the track does a good job of shuffling them in and out until it suddenly stops and "The Voice of Necam" shows up.
The rest is ok. Two of the tracks feature guest appearances by Richie Havens on vocals, and while they're not career highlights, they're rather nice. "How Can I?" is a jaunty acoustic ballad that doesn't have especially strong hooks but makes good use of Richie's voice, and the closing "Icarus Ascending" is a slow pounder in the main parts with piano buried deep for texture and Steve's guitar constantly winding its way up top, though it also detours into a sequence that's every bit as slapdash in mood and style as "The Voice of Necam." It definitely shouldn't have been 6:32, though, however nice the flutes over the extended synth-based coda might be. "Racing in a" is a semi-forgettable 5-minute rocker, "Kim" is a decent duet between flute and acoustic guitar, and "Hoping Love Will Last," for all the hub-bub of kinda being the song that ultimately broke the prog Genesis apart, is kinda underwhelming. Randy Crawford gives a nice enough vocal performance, but she can't completely save what's ultimately just a decent soul-based ballad, albeit with bits of Steve's familiar guitar textures sprinkled throughout. Honestly, the most notable part of it is how weird its placement is; it's immediately followed by the "Land of a Thousand Autumns"/"Please Don't Touch" pairing, after all.
The truth is, this is much closer to a "typical" Steve Hackett album than is Voyage (or even Spectral Mornings), but in this case that's to its detriment and not its benefit. One thing I would definitely not do is pick this up after only hearing the albums that bookend it; it's just way too confusing an experience for somebody expecting something more prog-rock-ish, and the song quality isn't really enough to make up for the choppy flow. If you're interested in getting into Steve's solo catalogue, make sure you pick up a few albums from later in his career (not just including the ones adjacent to this) in order to get a feel for the man. This is definitely more of a good album than a bad one, but getting this too early could prematurely make you give up on him, and we wouldn't want that.
Best song: Spectral Mornings
The opening "Every Day" is definitely one of my five or so favorite Hackett tracks, which is made all the more interesting by the fact that I'm not all that wild about the whole first half of it. It's not bad, just kinda pedestrian, though I guess the "Every day! Every day! Every day! ..." bit is notable. But once the vocals disappear for good, holy cow. The guitar dances along to the main song portion, as if getting in some warmup laps, and once the guitar completely takes over, it's pure heaven. Every serious Hackett fan knows the guitar part in the last three minutes practically by heart, but if you're a Genesis fan who hasn't gotten around to Hackett solo yet, let me stress this: the guitar part in the second half of "Every Day" obliterates every great guitar part Hackett had recorded to that point, including the "Firth of Fifth" solo. It's memorable, it's cathartic, it's full of ecstatic climaxes, it's carefully constructed and minimalistic, and in short it consolidates and expands on every positive aspect that Hackett had yet demonstrated. Go hear this track now if you haven't heard it yet.
And yet, for all that, it still pales to the greatness that is the closing title track. Whereas the guitar part in "Every Day" had some elements of speedy exhiliration to it, the exhiliration created by this track comes from a small set of perfectly written guitar lines, played slowly and over and over, working with a great supporting keyboard part (with a breakdown in the middle where the slow keyboard chordings dominate and Steve's guitar parts both carry the melody and almost turn into ambient music). It's on the short list of the most beautiful pieces in my collection of rock music, and it's a piece I can listen to over and over again without getting remotely bored with it. It's also my favorite piece to use to close out mix CDs; I've made only a few mixes in my life, but "Spectral Mornings" has closed out three of them, and it always seems like an appropriate ending.
The rest of the album is really good, too. The first side's Asian-flavored instrumental, "The Red Flower of Tachai Blooms Everywhere," instantly makes me feel like I'm in a Japanese garden, and it's a really lovely use of two minutes, especially because of Steve's use of a koto. "Lost Time in Cordoba," as suggested by its title, is quite Spanish-tinged, but it has a similar atmosphere (if a little more mournful) to and is every bit as enjoyable as its counterpart (I quite like the way the Spanish guitar parts mix in with the bits of flute). Among the two menacing instrumental parts, one of them technically isn't a pure instrumental; "Tigermoth" starts off with four minutes of hell (in a good way), with great guitar tones and big keyboard sounds and textures that sound an awful lot like some of the things Andy Summers would pull out with The Police in the next couple of years, but then it inexplicably turns into a gentle ballad with a memorable vocal melody and silly lyrics. "Clocks - The Angel of Mons," however, doesn't let up its intensity; the "verses" are driven forward by a nagging clock rhythm under some ominous synths, while the "chorus" features an ominous and memorable riff played mainly by Steve. I'm not thrilled with the drum solo at the end, but at the same time it feels like the logical conclusion to the track, and it's really brief, so I don't especially mind it. Also, who had the goofy idea to release an edited version of this as a single? It was 1979!!!
The remaining two tracks do a nice job of rounding out the album. "The Virgin and the Gypsy" is kind of a callback to the more mystical aspects of Voyage (think "Hands of the Priestess"), but somehow warmer and more inviting. Peter Hicks gets in his best vocal performance of the album, with lovely backing harmonies from Hackett, and John Hackett's flute steals the show just as it did so often on the debut. And finally, "The Ballad of the Decomposing Man" is the album's brief excursion into goofy levity, smooshing jazzy bits in with vaguely Caribbean music and featuring Steve on his first instrument: the harmonica. Prog purists will, of course, feel irritated by having this track in an otherwise rather straightlaced stretch of music, but things like this are just par for the course with Steve, and I'm quite happy that it's here.
In the end, even if Steve slightly repeats himself (a cynic could see "Clocks" and "Tigermoth" as too similar, or "Red Flower" and "Cordoba" as too similar, though I wouldn't agree), this album is ultimately the best demonstration of Steve's strengths as a composer, as an arranger and as a guitarist, and thus I give it the highest mark among his albums. If you're interested in getting into solo Steve, start here.
Best song: The Steppes
The non-instrumental tracks are fairly sparse in the first 70% of the album (five of the first seven tracks are instrumental), though the album ends with three pieces with vocals to compensate. Neither "Time to Get Out" nor "Leaving" is especially strong in terms of melody or other standard measures of song quality, but they're both very pleasant and make me glad that I'm listening to them when they're on. "Time to Get Out," for seeming like a pretty chill song on the surface, has a lot of hustle-bustle in the details (becoming most apparent in the little nagging synth riff in the breaks that feels like it's going twice as fast as it really is), and I really like the simple guitar additions in the last 30 seconds or so. "Leaving" never jumps out in any particular moment, but it's a combination of pretty and sad that I like a lot, and there are some haunting atmospherics in some of the vocal and synth parts that definitely don't sound like anything Hackett had done to this point. Among the ending group, "The Toast" is a moderately go-nowhere ballad, and the album doesn't gain much from its inclusion (its best part is a tender flute part, but it's not one of the more moving flute parts on a Hackett album so far), but "The Show" is a great disco-influenced pop song with a marvelous synth riff (if this is a guilty pleasure, then lock me up), and the closing "Sentimental Institution" is a retro (as in, from the 20s or 30s) jazzy ballad, made to sound as authentic and old-timey as possible. No, these don't make for the same kind of rousing conclusion as Steve managed on the last album, but I kinda like that Steve switched things up so much.
Among the instrumentals, one is great and four are good. The opening "The Steppes" makes Steve's guitar the star right away, but in a vastly different way from "Spectral Mornings." The best comparison for the track, I think, is one I never see mentioned by anybody; unless I'm completely delusional, the track bears the strong influence of Bowie's "Warszawa," coming within a hair of quoting it repeatedly. Where Bowie took its mournful theme and built a half-ambient piece around it (though eventually sticking in some wordless vocals in the second half), though, Steve sticks to this track's own theme (a dark, heavy guitar lick with a serious Eastern tinge) for about half of the track before allowing the second half to alternate between the main theme and various expansive solos based around the theme. No, it's not as good as "Spectral Mornings," but it makes for a hell of an opener.
A couple of tracks later comes "Slogans," which is just dark goofy fun. Beyond the main riff (which opens the piece and then appears after an incomprehensible distorted voice in the middle that I've decided is saying "Beware the mighty Megatron!"), which I suppose is supposed to be ominous but ends up being a little silly, the song is ultimately a giant guitar/synth noodle, but in the hands of Steve there's enough in the way of restraint and interesting tricks to keep it enjoyable. The side-closing "Two Vamps as Guests" isn't an amazing acoustic instrumental on its own, but I like the way it works in quotes from "The Steppes" and "Leaving" without drawing too much attention to them, and I enjoy it plenty in context. "Jacuzzi," which opens side two, is the necessarily happy and uplifting balance to "The Steppes," and while Steve's guitar parts have nice moments, the star of the piece is definitely John's flute, especially when it's featured on top of the keyboards. I guess a lot of it (especially in the second half) could be dismissed as a bit too close to late 70s Jethro Tull, but that wouldn't knock it down too far in my eyes. And finally, "Hammer in the Sand" is a (mostly) keyboard piece that sounds a lot like solo Rick Wakeman at its most tasteful, and Steve's guitar contributions come in the form of atmospheric texture in the second half. I like it!
No, this isn't an amazing album, but it's a really good one, and it shows that, just as with his former bandmates, he could have a relatively smooth transition into the new decade. Granted, things got a little rocky later on, and a lot of the open-armed embracing of contemporary technology will seem a little jarring to somebody more oriented to the sounds of earlier years, but other than the relative shortage of essential classics (even "Jacuzzi," as much as I like it, isn't quite a classic, and neither is "Slogans" or, as much as I'd like to tell myself it is, "The Show"), I can't think of much in the way of bad things to say about this album. There are better Hackett albums for sure, but not that many.
Best song: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
What makes the album most frustrating, though, is that it has a lot of wasted potential. "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare" (an instrumental full of amusingly effective horror movie synths, good guitar work and some pounding bass from Steve himself) and "A Cradle of Swans" (a decent enough acoustic instrumental) are obvious highlights, the type of material that could serve as the bedrock for a good Steve Hackett album, but among the other tracks, only the opening "Hope I Don't Wake" (which opens with several Steves harmonizing before turning into a rather cheerful pop number) and "Funny Feeling" (a decent successor to "The Show," as it's a disco-based number dominated by synths but with a striking guitar part that pops up now and again) congeal into something I can mostly enjoy without reservation (though the vocals in each are weak enough that I still fidget). The most irritating offender is "Overnight Sleeper," which I consider a good instrumental wasted; I mean, it would be completely bonkers, combining up-tempo cheeseball synths with bits of moody guitar with train-imitating rhythm parts, eventually building into a cheerful (with bits of flute) and then angry climax, but it would work as a decent Defector knockoff. Instead, though, we have Steve's weak voice trying to add urgency to the proceedings but instead largely undermining it, and the track ends up sounding pretty weak on the whole.
The other three tracks are all unremarkable synth pop, and yet there are those little bits of decency coming out from time to time, taunting me and making me wish they'd be recycled somewhere else. "Picture Postcard," amidst its badly sung half-hearted New Wave messiness, has an organ-y synth riff that sounds like Tony Banks in one of his better Duke moments, and this almost fools me into thinking for a second that I like the song (which I don't). "Can't Let Go" is a seemingly endless bad Police imitation, and yet there's that menacing introduction (before the synths get too silly), and there's a guitar part in the middle (matched by a synth) that sounds fairly inspired (if very much early 80s). And the closing "Turn Back Time," uh, well, I could see it improved into something better with a few revisions; there's potential here with a little less in the way of adult-contemporary keyboards and a better vocalist.
So yes, there's definitely enough good here to keep me from outright hating the album, but when so many of those good parts are presented in such an unforgivably irritating way, it's hard for me to be too positive about the album. At least it's short.
Best song: Camino Royale or India Rubber Man
It's too bad, then, that a large chunk of the album really isn't that good. The first two instrumentals are a letdown on the whole (the third, "Hackett to Pieces," is basically just a reprise of ideas from earlier in the album); they each have some nice guitar work, of course, and they have multiple ideas combined with each other, but these are pieces where I hear a lot less in the way of inspiration and atmosphere than I've gotten used to with Hackett instrumentals. For all of the craft and professionalism contained within these, I end up treating them as muzak, and that's not a label I like to attach to music from Hackett. The synths get pretty overbearing, too, especially in "Group Therapy." It's a shame that Steve didn't even bother to throw on an acoustic piece for good measure.
The actual songs have some low points among them, too. "Give it Away" is mediocre even by the standards of faceless early 80s up-tempo synth pop; there's a decent simple guitar lick buried in there, but even that isn't notable compared to the sorts of things Steve had come up with already. "Weightless" is a slow number that might be a little bit better, but there are no hooks to speak of (look, I don't want to judge Hackett by hooks if I can avoid it, but with this kind of music that's the main positive criteria, and he fails here by those standards), and the song makes no impression other than "yup, those are a lot of synths and I don't know where the guitar is."
Fortunately, the other four songs are quite good. I will admit, it's kinda hard for me to make a strong defense for "Walking Through Walls" when I don't like either of the tracks that come after it, but even if it's driven forward by the most primitive of beats, it also has that great keyboard tone, and I genuinely like Steve's singing here. What can I say, when judging generic 80s tracks, sometimes things come down to relatively minor details. Don't forget about the extended single version in the bonus tracks, either.
The opening "Camino Royale," as would be revealed years later, actually has a loose Genesis connection; it has its roots in a dream Steve had where Genesis was singing a song with this song's chorus. Mind you, the chorus is probably the worst part; "Only the fool learns to get through" strikes me as a silly phrase, and Steve's voice, on its own, isn't quite up to the task of giving the phrase any resonance. Then again, the music of the chorus (both the chord sequence and the vocal melody itself) is quite nice, and it makes for a good balance to the music of the rest of the song. The opening instrumental passage would have fit in perfectly on Yes' 90125 a year later, and I mean that as a compliment; the inspired (though clearly 80s) guitar playing, the strong keyboards (with tones hearkening back a few years) and the mildly tricky rhythms would feel perfectly at home next to "It Can Happen" or "Changes." The main portion of the song is fun, too, with Steve putting his vocals in a very low register as he sings over a weirdly atmospheric bit that has tinges of Latin and jazz rhythms without any of those individual influences dominating. For what it's worth, Steve once went on record as saying this is his best song, and while I don't quite agree with this, I can see the argument.
The other two tracks couldn't really be much more different, but they're each quite nice. "Cell 151" is borderline epic as far as conventional synth pop goes; the song is dominated by the slow pounding beat, but Steve's vocals provide an atmosphere of desperation not really found in other songs of his, and he does a better job of weaving his guitar in with the synths here than on other tracks on the album. Plus, I rather like the extended instrumental coda (which, granted, largely borrows ideas from "Camino Royale"); there's definitely more drive and power here than in the purely instrumental tracks. And kudos to Steve for managing to get a minor hit single out of this; for all of the elements that don't jump out of their way to make the track accessible to a large audience, the track still works as a pop song.
And finally, there's a lovely gem tucked into the second half, the quiet, borderline ambient, blink-and-you-might-miss-it "India Rubber Man." Fans of Steve looking for a connection back to his 70s work will find comfort here; the quiet, gentle atmosphere of so much of Spectral Mornings is on full display here, thanks to the way Steve's vocals are muffled and the way the keyboards are layered on top of them. Plus, Steve breaks out his harmonica once again, and the effect is magical in much the same way that, say, the harmonica bits in "Cabinessence" (yup, the Beach Boys song) were magical.
Basically, there's about half of a really good album on here, and about half of a pretty bad one too. I slightly lean in a positive direction when putting all of them on the ledger, if only because the instrumental tracks from the worse half are completely listenable, but I definitely can't give this a strong recommendation. If you can get the best tracks from here without getting the entire album, try to do so.
Best song: Horizons maybe?
I like the idea of Steve's career having an album of just acoustic guitar instrumentals (he'd also have another one a few years later with Momentum), and I enjoy the album when it's on, but I'd be lying if I said I had strong feelings for this album. I've always been a fan of Steve including bits of classical guitar on his albums, but my enjoyment of those pieces has always been the way I'd enjoy having a tasty spice included in a meal placed before me. I mean, oregano is nice and all, but "Boy, I sure feel like pouring myself a nice bowl of oregano" is a sentence that would never cross my mind in a million years. Because I've never bothered to learn much (or anything, really) about the world of classical guitar, and thus have no idea where Steve would sit in the hierarchy of the great masters of the style, it's extremely difficult for me to find "good" and "bad" in this album beyond the level of "boy, that's kinda pretty I guess," and thus I feel this album is largely wasted on me. Steve, of course, seems to have a pretty good grip on what he's attempting to do (the liner notes have some elaborate comments on how acoustic guitar can be made to imitate a whole spectrum of instruments, and he's also kind enough to provide brief summaries of all of the tracks), but I can't really get that same grip.
There are, of course, some bits that ultimately jump out at me; I'm struck by the majesty of the opening title track, or the sunny beauty of "Marigold," or by how happy I am to hear familiar material in "Kim" or "Horizons," or similar feelings in other tracks. I also find myself wanting to improvise vocal melodies to use over the chord sequences presented here; quite a bit of the material here, I think, would have made for a good foundation in songs with vocals.
Beyond these bits, though, I end up needing to treat the album in much the same way I'd treat a slightly above average ambient album; ultimately, this album is a bunch of pleasant, perfectly listenable atmosphere, full of tracks I'm happy to listen to individually but would be hard-pressed to want to listen to collectively. Still, there are much worse things in the world, and I don't see why a Hackett fan wouldn't want to hear this a few times.
trfesok.aol.com (12/13/15)
Yes, there isn't a whole lot one can say about an album like this. You either have to like the genre or be a hardcore Steve fan to enjoy it. It certainly nice atmospheric music. My personal favorites are the title track and "Horizons", even if he does nothing new with it. A new instrumental version of "Entangled" would have been very cool.
As whether Steve stands with the great masters of the instrument - -well, my knowledge is also rather limited. After listening and seeing guitarists such as Sharon Isbin and John Williams (no, NOT the "Star Wars" guy; this one is a British guitarist), I'd say, "Not quite". I've read some critiques of the album that say that Steve is rather rambling as a composer and lacks a sense of rhythm as a player. Perhaps that's justified.
Best song: A Doll That's Made In Japan
This album isn't exceptionally good, but it is exceptionally interesting. One aspect that's often highlighted is the album's "world beat" leanings; the album was recorded in Brazil, and there are a number of Brazilian session musicians contributing an ethnic flavor in the percussion and other areas. That aspect shouldn't be overemphasized, though, as Latin music is just one of the influences that makes its way into the whole. There are trace elements of Japanese music, there's a full-fledged blues number, there's New Wave music, there's stadium rock, and there's even a snippet of a Brandenburg Concerto, played on keyboards, shoved into one of the songs just because it can be. Of course, this diversity can't compensate for all of the album's weaknesses; the melodies aren't always fantastic, Steve's singing is still a bit of a liability, and the balance between keyboards and guitar definitely won't satisfy somebody coming here straight from the first few albums. While the diversity can't cover all of the album's ills, though, it can cover a lot of them, and it's sorely tempting to bump up the album a notch in the rating (I'll resist, though).
The first three tracks are essentially all instrumental, even if the first ("What's My Name") and the third ("Matilda Smith-Williams Home for the Aged") do have some perfunctory vocals. Honestly, I find the vocals in "What's My Name" kinda unattractive; this album was my first of Steve's albums from the 80s, and I wasn't quite prepared for how ugly I'd find the "WHAT'S MY NAME??!! AAAH-AAAH-AAAH-AAAH!!!" chant the first couple of times I listened to it. It's important not to focus on the vocals of this track, because they're not that important; I'd argue that the koto breaks that follow those vocals are much more crucial in the makeup of the track. Nah, this track is all about the rhythms of the introduction and the ominous low-pitched synths, which sound somewhat like they're cribbed from bits of Security but not so much that I especially mind.
"The Rio Connection" would probably make a hardcore prog fan want to punch a wall (then again, a lot of the tracks on this album could be used in a sentence of "*track x* would probably make a hardcore prog fan want to punch a wall"), but I rather enjoy it. It's a bluesy number with swing, with Hackett tearing it up on harmonica, but there are lots of synths and guitars making pig noises too, and I like it more than not. "Matilda Smith-Williams Home for the Aged" centers an intricate riff doubled on guitar and synth, but there's an extended passage in the last two-thirds with great atmospheric guitar and keyboard noises (and later some great soloing) featured over the army of ethnic percussion, and the 8 minutes goes by way faster than a track with just these elements probably should.
After "Let Me Count the Ways," the album's generic blues workout (I'm somehow not surprised at all that Steve could sound so at home in the blues, though he really should have considered getting somebody else to sing), we come to what may well be the album's highlight, "A Doll That's Made in Japan." This is where the album's genre-smooshing really reaches its peak; the music isn't really that Japanese (aside from the rhythms, sort of), but the melancholy low-pitched ramblings in the verses give the music a definite exotic feel, and the combination of the up-lifting chorus (though with oddly sad lyrics), the great guitar solo that doesn't do much to attract attention to itself, the smatterings of Japanese phrases spoken by Steve's wife, and whatever else I'm missing make this into, at the least, a minor classic.
The second half of the album is a little worse, but pretty decent all the same. "Duel" features Steve singing in a lower register (where, honestly, he sounds better) and using a great tone (providing texture more than melody) over a steady rhythm to make something that sounds both old and new, and his soloing in the second half (which sounds not a bit like any solo he'd done to this point) is really breathtaking. "Myopia" is a frantic up-tempo New Wave rocker with Steve doing his very best to sound like Sting (yup, George Starostin said the same thing, but it's absolutely true), and it's a hoot, especially when the Bach snippet randomly pops up (the only rational explanation I can come up with for why it's there is that the chord sequences in the rest of "Myopia" are probably inspired by sequences in the rest of the concerto). The album takes a bit of a step down at this point, though. "Taking the Easy Way Out" is just a little bit too boring and lacking in guitar for me to enjoy it that much; it definitely could have used a guitar part (other than just the acoustic bits in the background) integrated into the verses. "The Gulf" is an interesting look at the Iran-Iraq war, full of intriguing atmosphere in the first half, but when it becomes a big synth-heavy pounding anthem, it gets a little bit tacky, though the second half does provide some atmospheric bits of its own (also, a lot of the guitar parts are really interesting). And "Stadiums of the Damned," well, that's one that I enjoy more than I should; an arena-rocker with these kinds of synth parts and a chorus like "With a woman like you, I know that I can change" is something I probably wouldn't tolerate most of the time. Then again, I'd definitely take it over the weaker material from Highly Strung, and I can listen to it multiple times without feeling like I need a shower, so whatever.
All of this, plus the 40-second reworking of "When You Wish Upon a Star" at the end, makes for one heck of a ride. Maybe it deserves a higher grade, maybe it doesn't, but it's definitely the best of Hackett's 80s albums. As long as you can avoid feeling too irritated by Steve's vocals or the occasional overbearance of 80s synths, and as long as ridiculous diversity isn't something that you consider a negative, you should enjoy this album. Well, unless you're hoping for a sequel to Spectral Mornings, in which case you'll despise it.
Best song: Sketches In The Sun or Toe The Line
Very predictably, this setup didn't work out so well. Howe and Hackett never really got on the same page creatively, and anybody hoping for any quality interplay between two of the giants of 70s prog guitar will be extremely disappointed. The guitar playing on this album (rather predictably) isn't so much interplay as it is the two sides taking turns, with one guitarist at any point either dropping from the mix or acting as a synthesizer mimic. Furthermore, while there are some stretches where it's clear which guitarist is currently playing a given part, there are long stretches where both Howe and Hackett disappear behind the wall of generic arena rock they've put up for themselves. Furthermore, even when the parts clearly belong to one or the other, the effect is to call up a nostalgia for when the technique on display was used in a better song. It should also be noted that any parts clearly recognizable as Hackett basically discard all of the advances and experimentation from Faces; it's pretty clear to me that Hackett didn't put a tremendous amount of himself into this project.
The album's big hit was the opening "When the Heart Rules the Mind," but aside from the mildly promising opening (with a nice part clearly from Howe), the track is mostly generic mid-tempo 80s arena rock of the worst kind, and it's only notable for somebody interested in collecting every spare Howe and Hackett lick ever recorded. Much better is the following track, "The Hunter," written by producer Geoff Downes; aside from a pretty decent and compact verse melody, as well as a nice build into the various climaxes ("...only the hunter ... only the hunter ... SURVIVES!!!"), it also has the album's most blatant bit of nostalgia thanks to Howe breaking out his "Your Move" guitar approach in the verses. The song isn't anywhere near great, but it's mildly decent, and that makes for a relative highlight.
The best tracks on here sound the least like the typical material of the album. "Sketches in the Sun" is a solo piece from Howe, with him playing a duet with himself on electric guitar, and it's a delightful use of 2:33 that would have sounded great on one of his solo albums. Of the various "regular" songs, "Toe the Line" is easily the best; the song is a model of restraint in its morph from an acoustic ballad into a slightly louder number, and Howe's brief snippet of slide parts in the last minute is quite lovely. I'm not really sure what role Hackett plays in the song, but whatever.
The other six tracks are absolutely atrocious. The Hackett match to "Sketches in the Sun," entitled "Hackett to Bits" (yup, he's even reusing puns from previous song titles), is a vile bastardization of "Please Don't Touch," but it's still probably the best of the remaining material. The sung tracks might all have different melodies, but they're all built around the same basic formula; mid-tempo arena rock built around disappointingly generic guitar (with occasional bits of individual personality coming through), goofy guitar synths, plodding drumming, and those awful vocals. Oh, those awful vocals. With a better vocalist, some of this material might have been salvagable, but there is no better vocalist to be found.
Anyway, this band wasn't long for the world, and it's just as well. Try and find the best two or three tracks, but stay far away from the rest of this. This isn't the worst project Steve Howe was ever a part of (at the least, it's a lot shorter than Union, and Howe's involvement in that album is much less than his involvement here), but it is probably the worst project Steve Hackett was ever a part of, and that says something.
trfesok.aol.com (06/13/13)
Yes, this was a huge disappointment on so many levels when this was released. The record company hype was something like "there
hasn't been so much guitar excitement since Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were in the Yardbirds together!". Uh-huh -- like any of this
is within a million miles of "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"..
Personally, it seems that Hackett took on the job for the same reason that Bill Bruford later joined ABWH -- $$$. But Hackett, in
particular, seems to be slumming it. "Hackett it to Bits, alright -- he should have shortened his name to "Hack", because that's
how he plays. Really dumbed down his style. Speaking of that song, I played "Please Don't Touch" and the song back to back, and I
was amazed at how much of a self-ripoff (of only one section, though) it is. That's only one example of the half-assed songwriting,
both musically and lyrically. The big, echoey production from Downes, reminiscent of Asia, doesn't help (by the way, Downes and
Howe, the last to leave Yes, always got along -- Howe left Asia mainly due to issues with John Wetton).
All of this wouldn't seem so bad if it wasn't for Bacon. Hackett discovered him -- yet another misstep on his part here -- and his
shrill voice just drags down the songs. He sounds a lot like Styx's Dennis DeYoung, who is, at best, an acquired taste (I actually
like a lot of Styx's 70's music). But Bacon's tones are really annoying and he has a tendency to oversing just about everything!
You hit the highlghts well enough. I like "When the Heart.." better than you do. It's catchy, the opening rfif is interesting,
Bacon's vocal is tolerable, actually overcoming the rambling lyrics. "Sketches in the Sun" is part of Howe's live show to this day
(at a live show I saw in '93, he teased the audience by playing the opening riff from "..Heart.." first). "Toe the Line" (lyrics
by Howe, I bet), is indeed a very lovely song, by far the best of the vocal numbers. I like "The Hunter", too. Downes would later
redo it with Asia in 1997. The production is less murky, and whatever else you might say about John Payne, at least he's a better
singer than Bacon.
The live KBFH album has one big advantage over the studio album. The sound quality is great without Downes in the picture.
Unfortunately,you get all of the album tracks except one -- and the one they leave out, of course, would have to be "Toe the Line".
Instead, they throw in the as yet unreleased "Prizefighters", which is just as overwrought as the studio version. Then there are
four surprises -- two that I think you'll really like, and two, while I don't mind them, you'll hate...
And if you think it couldn't have gotten any worse, you'd actually be wrong! After Hackett jumped ship, they replaced him with
another one of your 80's favorites, Robert Berry. Their second album (working title:"Nerotrend") had Berry writing and singing half
the songs (no Berry-Bacon duets, I don't think - that would really be an assault on the ears). When Arista heard the results, they
rejected the album-in-progress, and bye-bye GTR. Howe fulfilled the GTR contract by handing in ABWH and Union instead.
ilker.regenmag.com (08/13/15)
I've recently found your website for reviews of Prog Rock, and as a fan of the genre and many of the bands you cover on your site, I've enjoyed reading through both your articles and the various comments.
One article where I did find a fair amount of misinformation was on your GTR article.
I'm not going to argue the quality of the album - I personally like it as the '80s arena rock format never bothered me; I was born and grew up in the '80s, so it's just part of my personal soundtrack, along with the earlier music thanks to my father.
First point - Steve Howe did not leave ASIA because he felt a diminishing role of the guitar in the music; he was, in fact, the very reason Geoff Downes was involved in ASIA as he has expressed in several interviews (check out the Yes DVD from 2008) that he likes synthesizers and the interplay between them and guitar. It was also his choice to have Geoff produce GTR because he was actually somewhat forced out by the return of John Wetton - who had left for a period in 1983, to be replaced by Greg Lake (hence ASIA in Asia at Budokon, which was the first satellite broadcast on MTV). Wetton has admitted that his alcoholism at the time caused friction between him and Howe, so his return was contingent on Howe leaving ASIA. There's never been - to the best that I can tell - any animosity between Howe and Downes as they continued to collaborate (Howe appeared on ASIA's Aqua album and several Rare tracks during the John Payne era).
Second point - While this may have been exaggerated for the purposes of the "making of" video, according to Hackett, he had approached Brian Lane about forming a new band, with Jonathan Mover as the drummer. Lane, in his managerial wisdom (again, on the Yes DVD, he's spoken of with this certain amount of disdain on... well, everybody's part) knew that Howe had just departed ASIA, so he suggested the two of them hook up. Whether Hackett was lying/acting for the video's sake or your information is just incorrect, Hackett seemed enthused about the project and contributed quite a bit of material along with Howe equally.
Third point - "Sketches in the Sun" was actually something Howe had been performing acoustically during his earlier tenure with ASIA, as can be seen/heard in the ASIA in Asia at Budokon broadcast. And for the most part, it's not a duet as he performs the whole track on a 12-string electric, tuned to a very different configuration.
Fourth point - while hardly the most renowned session player at the time, bassist Phil Spalding was hardly anonymous as he had just come off a stint playing with Mike Oldfield. So, despite the album's clear AOR leaning (hey, it was the '80s), there was a lot of Prog cred playing on this album.
Also not sure if you're aware that quite a bit of material on Steve Howe's Turbulence album - most of which consisted of what he was writing with ABWH before it got bastardized by the UNION debacle, was also leftover from the GTR sessions; a YouTube search will yield a version of "Running the Human Race" with Hackett performing as well, plus vocals (I'm sure you're eager to hear that since you're not a fan of Max Bacon, LOL).
Your opinion on the album is certainly not unfounded and really comes down to taste, so I won't argue it. AOR did have a tendency to get very bloated in the '80s, but as a fan of the album, there really is a lot of musical prowess going on; I imagine with a different vocalist and perhaps a less reverb-drenched '80s production style, some of it would shine through much more. Alas, as you said, GTR wasn't long for the world and never had a chance, although I do like to think it was in some ways a precursor to Satriani's E3 shows; Hackett upon leaving had expressed that he would've liked to see GTR continue with a revolving door of different guitarists (Brian May being a name he threw in the mix). T'wasn't to be.
Best song: Notre Dame Des Fleurs I guess
Half of the album (four tracks) is actually pretty listenable all things considered, but since two of the tracks were already on Faces, I don't really consider them in my overall assessment. The opening "Cassandra" initially feels like 80s arena rock hell, with Brian May (yup, of Queen) guesting on guitar and Chris Thompson (of Manfred Mann's Earth Band) guesting on (really overdone) vocals, but it's based around a solid looping guitar riff that owes a lot to "Layla" without being a ripoff (actually, the same can be said about the lyrics, the vocal melody and the solo), and the song ends up coming out pretty decently. There's also a perfectly acceptable acoustic number in "Notre Dame Les Fleurs," which would have just blended into Bay of Kings or Momentum, but here seems amazing; the loveliness of this track in this context only reinforces my belief that it was somewhat of a mistake for Steve to release so many of his acoustic tracks together rather than spreading them out better.
The other four tracks are hideous if you're not already addicted to what most people of good taste would consider the worst aspects of the 80s (including the simple programmed percussion which the album credits have the gall to refer to as "virtual drums"). Chris Thompson sings on all of them, and he's definitely no better in this context than Max Bacon was on GTR, so that's a major negative. And the songs, oh dear, they're dreadful. "Prizefighters," featuring a guest performance from Bonnie Tyler on vocals, as well as from The Phil Henderson Orchestra, is schlock of the worst kind, and I don't get how somebody could praise this and put down, say, Invisible Touch (where not even "In Too Deep" came within miles of these depths). "Slot Machine" starts and ends with samples of a woman speaking as if she were at a snooty ball of some kind, but the bulk is metallic synth pop with one of the worst choruses imaginable, and I look forward to never hearing it again. "Don't Fall" starts off with some promise, with Steve bringing in his harmonica, but it quickly becomes an awkward funk-rocker-turned-hair-metal-extravaganza, and all that promise is wasted. "Oh How I Love You" makes a stab at making a tender ballad that's not overloaded with arena rock elements, but the vocals just don't do the song any favors, and it's just as tacky as anything else on the album.
Yup, this was a rough time for Steve Hackett. I like this album a smidge more than I like GTR (again, if I ignore that "Stadiums of the Damned" and "The Gulf" were originally elsewhere, they make for nice relief from the other material, and the other two tracks mentioned are fine), but this is still torture on the whole. There are too many good albums in the world to waste time and money on this, even if it's worth hearing the good tracks.
Best song: An Open Window or The Vigil
If there are significant differences between this album and its predecessor, they would be the following: (1) the classical leanings are often more explicit (one track is based around a Chopin piece, and one of the bonus tracks is a cover of the same Bach piece that Jethro Tull used as the core of "Bouree"), and (2) the pieces are even more about atmosphere and less about memorability. I definitely do not find myself improvising hummed vocal melodies over these pieces like I did over some of the Bay of Kings pieces; for the most part, these are pieces that I definitely appreciate as nice background, but not as a great deal more. It's interesting to read Steve's brief comments on each of the pieces, giving a sense of what he was trying to convey with each, but even so armed with these notes I can't really make the connection between what I hear and what he says.
Honestly, aside from the slightly out-of-place "Concert for Munich," which prominently features an organ-like synthesizer to give some fuller orchestration to the piece, the album doesn't really become that engaging until the bonus tracks, two of which end up being the best pieces on the album. "An Open Window" is a bonafide nine-minute epic; the first 3:20 or so makes for a pleasant piece that would have been one of the best on the album if left by itself, but then there's a dramatic shift in tone, and the piece goes from loud to soft and angry to pleasant and never stops being engaging. "The Vigil" is a little less ambitious, but still very striking and memorable, as it's based around a small number of discernable themes that Steve effectively expands upon. In other words, it actually sounds like something from the Steve Hackett that I liked so much in the first place.
While Steve would do acoustic-centric work again, and while he'd do some classically-oriented work again, this ended up being the last of his all-instrumental acoustic guitar studio albums for a while, and this was probably a good thing. This and Bay of Kings make for some good music, to be sure, but aside from a couple of tracks here and there, they definitely don't make for great music unless you're addicted to classical guitar and it turns out that Steve was secretly a giant in that world (which I doubt). As with its predecessor, this is worth hearing a few times if you're curious and you're already a serious fan, but casual fans probably don't need to bother.
Best song: Camino Royale or In That Quiet Earth
Aside from a single new piece ("Depth Charge," a decent instrumental based around a majestic synth riff, and which would later be renamed "Riding the Colossus"), the material all comes from 1982 or earlier, but that's ok; I wouldn't have minded hearing a random track from Faces, but I can understand not including anything from the acoustic albums, and of course he wasn't going to go out of his way to remind anybody of GTR. I'm a little surprised that a live album with only 14 tracks would include a whopping 5 from Spectral Mornings, but then again that was a great album, and I definitely don't mind hearing material from there again. The title track seems a little odd as a climactic crowd pleaser, but I can understand using it that way, and it sounds fine to me. I'm definitely happy with how the "Every Day" instrumental passage translates into live performance, and it's definitely a lot of fun to have "Clocks" as a closer (especially with the drum solo reduced to almost nothing). I appreciate the renditions of "The Red Flower ..." and "Tigermoth" (drastically shortened, with the song portion eliminated), too.
There are plenty of other attractions, though. I liked "Camino Royale" just fine in its Highly Strung version, but I'm glad I heard this version first, because it's much better. Steve's voice is stronger now than it was when he first recorded the song, and he makes a good choice in allowing there to be some harmonies whenever the chorus is sung; it now sounds fuller and less clunky. Also, the instrumental passage in the middle is great; there's a lengthy sparring between Steve on harmonica and John on flute that should have always been in there, and of course there are nice bits of guitar to flesh it out. Yup, this is one of the main reasons to get this album.
Another main reason is the reworking of "In That Quiet Earth," way back from Wind and Wuthering. The first half of the track is done basically in the same way as it was originally, but whereas the second half of the original featured a goofy mix of "tough" guitars and synths, this version opts for a soft, mystical flute-driven passage in the second half, and it improves things considerably. I like the original version more than I used to, and I definitely like the Genesis Revisited 2 version in context, but this is still my favorite version of the track.
There are nice performances elsewhere, but aside from "Ace of Wands" (from 1981, full of glorious atmosphere and the joy of hearing Steve and his band working so hard to reproduce all of these fun licks) there's no real need to namecheck all of them. Overall, though, while this may not be an essential release (and it's not even his most essential live release), it's still an extremely enjoyable listen for somebody who's heard the first few albums a bunch of times and would like to hear some alternate versions. And really, that's not a bad thing.
Best song: Sierra Quemada or Lost In Your Eyes
There is, of course, some material that I enjoy a lot. The opening instrumental "Sierra Quemada," originally titled "Flight of the Condor," is a fine addition to the list of solid guitar-based Hackett instrumentals; the tasteful synths, the slightly intricate drumming and the minimalistic guitar parts make for the most majestic (not necessarily the best, but definitely the most majestic) Hackett piece since "The Steppes." Of the "normal" songs, I'm especially partial to "Lost In Your Eyes," which starts off sounding like it will be unbearably cheesy (largely thanks to the synth line), but it quickly turns into a pounding harmonica-driven rocker, and so help me I just can't resist the "I see a world lost in your eyes" line at the end of each verse. I guess typical Hackett fans wouldn't like this, but if this had been on, say, Voodoo Lounge, this would have been beloved by a lot of people.
Some other songs have some nice features that make them stand out, too. "Take These Pearls" is the closest the album gets to looking back to Faces, initially centering around an intricate Eastern-sounding xylophone/vibe bit (probably synthesized, but whatever), before breaking out an interesting vocal melody that gets mirrored by acoustic guitar at one point, and eventually culminating in some nice bits of guitar synth. "In the Heart of the City" is the most desperate-sounding song on the album, and while the more upbeat portions are a little jarring, the bulk of the song works for me. The closing instrumental, "Tristesse," makes for a fairly moving finale, based around descending lines and covered in lovely guitar parts, though its impact is fairly muted by not differing hugely in tone from everything that came before.
And really, I just can't escape the sleepiness brought by most of what came before. The goofy, overblown dark "rocker" "Vampyre With a Healthy Appetite" isn't really that good of a song, and it's got an incredibly silly attempt by Steve to sound menacing, but it's such a relief to have some levity that I find myself enjoying it more than a reasonable person should. Everything else is perfectly competent and moody and, for the most part, perfectly tasteful, but it goes overboard on good taste and moodiness in a way that makes my mind register it in much the same way it would register smooth jazz. That's not a compliment.
Again, nothing on here is bad in the same way some material on his 80s albums was bad, and the material reaches some terrific peaks, but while this is a reasonable re-entrance to the world of "normal" albums, this wouldn't have been a good new direction for Steve. Fortunately, I think he knew this too; while it would have been very easy for him to start churning out albums in this vein, he was just a little too restless for such a thing to happen.
Best song: Big Dallas Sky
One of the original tracks on here manages to provide a delightful fusion of Steve's natural compositional tendencies with the blues framework. "Big Dallas Sky" sounds a little dumb at first, what with the low-pitched spoken delivery, but the main guitar line in the instrumental breaks is Hackett at his very best, and the music in the verses is pretty and awfully atmospheric. It's definitely an approach to the blues totally unlike anything I've heard before, and it's a clear highlight.
Of the other tracks, four are covers and sevens are originals (either written himself or in collaboration, but it's not immediately clear upon listening which are which). Among the covers, I find myself most partial towards "So Many Roads," which is full of slow wailing lines played with a great tone, but the opening "Born in Chicago" gets things off to a rollicking start, with some really fun harmonica. Among the originals, I really like "Love of Another Kind" (which has lots of great guitar and harmonica interplay) and "Solid Ground" (based around a fun harmonica riff and featuring a delightful chorus), but that may well just because they're upbeat and they're the first and last originals on the album, respectively. Among the slower pieces, "A Blue Part of Town" is a definite standout (it's a moody instrumental featuring harmonica and keyboards without any guitar), and ... oh wait, I guess the only other slow original is "Way Down South" (which is alright though not really anything special). Anyway, "Footloose" and "Tombstone Roller" are both great up-tempo numbers, especially the latter with all of its elaborate guitar passages (definitely more prog than blues).
The rest of the album isn't really filled with standout tracks, but I quite enjoy the rest of the material on the whole, and in the end I feel quite comfortable giving this the grade I do. Yes, this album is somewhat of an elaborate joke (nobody was expecting this blues obsession to manifest on more than one album, and it didn't), and it's definitely not a great blues album, but it's undoubtedly a good blues album. As of writing, it's quite out of print, and I'd be surprised if it ever came back, but if you can find a way to hear "Big Dallas Sky" and a few other tracks from it, you should.
Best song: It's all quite enjoyable
The first half, as mentioned, has a lot of Bay of Kings tracks, and while these performances don't stray tremendously far from their studio counterparts, there are some nice surprises amongst them, like when Steve follows "Horizons" with brief snippets of a couple of Genesis tunes ("Cuckoo Cocoon," "Blood on the Rooftops"), or how he rearranges "Kim" by having the keyboards play all of the original guitar parts and the guitar play the original flute parts. After the initial stretch of Bay tracks, the album jumps all over the place, blending the Hackett propensity for stylistic mish-mash with his love of low-key instrumentals in a way that the acoustic guitar albums hadn't shown. Aside from a handful of his typical acoustic numbers, there's an instrumental rendition of "Oh How I Love You" (which sounds quite nice stripped of the overdone vocals and 80s production values of the Feedback '86 version), a dash of Baroque-like music in "Bacchuss" (which Steve jokingly refers to as "Ba-rock"), a decent instrumental from Guitar Noir ("Walking Away From Rainbows"), a cover of a movement from Vivaldi's Concerto in D, a piece from the blues album ("A Blue Part of Town," one of my favorites from the album, featuring a duet between keyboards and harmonica), a piano-based cover of the first half of "Ace of Wands" (with Colbeck doing his very best Wakeman imitation) and a piece from a Andrea Morricone (Ennio's son) film score. The balance between variety and unity helps make for a very engaging listen, and is a big part in why I rate this album as high as I do.
Honestly, I expected something much more boring than this (perhaps because of the association with the Guitar Noir track after which this album is named, as that track is a little more sedate than I'd prefer), so this is a very pleasant surprise. A few years after release, this was packaged into a 2-CD set with Guitar Noir, and while somebody might come across that set and consider Guitar Noir as the main reason to consider buying it, this is definitely the better of the two albums. If you're at all curious about Steve's acoustic work, start here.
Best song: Watcher Of The Skies
So how is it? Well, I'll start by stating the obvious: this is an easy album to hate if you're coming to it straight from Genesis without acquainting yourself with Steve Hackett's solo career first. The opening "Watcher of the Skies" (with Wetton on vocals, Bill Bruford on drums and Tony Levin on bass) is done pretty faithfully to the original, aside from adding some unexpected electronic bloops and some orchestral bits in the instrumental passages near the end, but there are a lot of changes made to the other tracks, and generally not for the better. The album's biggest overall fault is that, aside from "For Absent Friends" (which is doubled in length and given some heft in the orchestrations, but still isn't a great song) and the closing "Los Endos" (apparently done live and with great bits thrown in like a quote of "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight"), none of the songs on here surpass their counterparts on the original studio albums. At best, these tracks make for interesting alternate versions that can be turned to once in a while, and at worst they're versions that would almost certainly never be considered if one wanted to hear the track in question. In short, for an album clearly targeted at old Genesis fans, this isn't exactly very kind to old Genesis fans.
Personally, I think the album actually leans more heavily towards the first group than the second group. Of the nine familiar tracks, the only two that I would be fine never hearing again are "Waiting Room Only" (which makes for an interesting, noisy experiment but isn't something I can pretend I enjoy) and, surprisingly, "Your Own Special Way" (which reaches its full potential as a schlocky adult-contemporary ballad, and which it had avoided becoming during the Wind and Wuthering sessions). Otherwise, for instance, I can at least find some enjoyment in "I Know What I Like" becoming a lazy reggae-ish shuffle when it's so obvious that it's a bit of a joke (remember, it was performing this track over and over that helped push Steve out of the band), especially in the silly bits in the middle when Steve starts introducing members of his "band" such as "mellotron strings" and "toy piano." It's nowhere near the original, of course, but this track is perfectly enjoyable to me as a silly gag.
The remaining familiar tracks are "Dance on a Volcano," "Firth of Fifth" and "The Fountain of Salmacis," and while none of them boast all of the strengths of their original counterparts, they're all interesting enough for me to want to hear them once in a while. "Dance" sounds like a total mess at first, starting with a lengthy introduction with bluesy-then-shreddy guitar lines over ominous synths before going into the recognizable portion, and then the main portion features distorted vocals and prominent slap bass parts that are nothing like anything in the original. And yet, while I do miss Phil's vocals, I also feel like Phil's vocals weren't one of the great strengths of the original, so while the vocals are somewhat of a step down, they aren't enough to completely subvert the song (which adds interesting touches and sounds less bland in the ending "lava overflowing" parts than the original did with Tony Banks leading the way). "Firth of Fifth" tinkers with one of the most perfectly constructed and perfectly arranaged pieces in prog history, so of course the mid-section, which strips out the flute and adds some eyebrow-raising twists (the synth/percussion battle is a little silly and doesn't fit in perfectly), won't be as pristine as in the original. And yet, I kinda like replacing the flute with classical guitar, and I like the glockenspiel in place of the grand piano, and there's still great guitar (taking the original part and reworking it in various ways), and dang it getting to 70% of perfection is still ok by me. And as for "The Fountain of Salmacis," while Steve's vocals (distorted and not) are nowhere near what Peter's were in the original (or even Phil's in the Three Sides Live version), I find myself drawn by all of the dancing flute parts in the quieter moments, and I don't especially mind the increased presence of Steve's guitar, and I like that the baseball organ keyboards in one of the breaks (really the only thing in the track that I disliked in the original) are gone. Again, it's not quite up to snuff, but I like this about 75% as much as the original, so that makes for a perfectly pleasant addition to my listening collection.
If there's a significant weak point in the album beyond "Waiting Room Only," "Your Own Special Way" and some small details here and there in tracks I've mentioned, it's in the two "new" tracks. The Selling England-era rarity, "Deja Vu," was originally worked on by Peter and Steve, but it's pretty clear why it didn't make it onto England. Paul Carrack (who also does the "Special Way" vocals) does his best imitation of Genesis-era Peter, but there isn't much in the way of vocals to speak of, and the track goes through long stretches of guitar parts that aren't especially inspired (with various other tacky arrangements thrown in here and there). And finally, "Valley of the Kings" doesn't speak highly for Steve's ability with instrumentals during this period; one of the synth lines near the beginning could have made for a useful portion of a good instrumental, but the bulk of the track is a bunch of underinspired guitar and overly pompous synth parts over a robotic beat, which is a problem for a track that lasts 6:30. This track is one of my least favorite Hackett pieces ever, on par with the worst stuff from his 80s synth pop albums, and it definitely hurts the album.
Despite the various weaknesses the album may have, I can still give it a 7 without too much difficulty. As I said earlier, there are no tracks here that I prefer to their originals (whereas on Genesis Revisited II there are a few instances where I prefer those versions to the originals), and if somebody wants to find a potentially crippling weakness in every track they can, but most of these tracks have so much goodness at their cores that I can't let deviation in relatively small details completely derail my enjoyment. I'd only recommend about half of the album, but if you can find it cheap it's definitely worth a listen. Just make sure your expectations are set appropriately.
trfesok.aol.com (06/13/13)
Yeah, it's a very mixed bag. "Your Own Special Way" is the total low point for me. Even after hearing GTR, I couldn't believe he'd
make something so schmaltzy and totally devoid of personality. I also like "Waiting Room Only" better than I used too -- there a
sort of "Revolution 9 Live" vibe to the first half, and the big booming drums in the 2nd are kind of cool. I wish he had not sung
any lead vocals, although even the best singer could not have rescued the lounge lizard version of "I Know What I Like". But, aside
for the vocals, "..Salmacis" and "Dance.." go along just fine, with, no surprise, more prominent guitar. "..Kings" and "Deja Vu"
don't leave much of an impression. So, "Firth of Fifth", "Watcher.." and "For Absent Friends" (supposedly written originally by
Hackett and Collins) are the peaks, in no small part to the vocals. I hope Steve learned that lesson on the "sequel" to this
album..
Best song: Whatever
For all of the guest stars, this live set is filed under Steve Hackett for a reason: the bulk of the album either comes from his solo career or from the recently-released (this was released in 1998 but recorded in 1996) Genesis Revisited (he also does "...In That Quiet Earth" in a manner similar to that on Time Lapse, as well as "Horizons"). The Genesis tracks ("Watcher of the Skies," "Firth of Fifth," "Los Endos," "I Know What I Like") aren't done identically to the original versions, but they're not quite as startling as they sometimes were on Revisited, so they should be easier for an old Genesis fan to assimilate than the versions on Revisited. Hackett's solo career, aside from "Horizons," is represented by "Riding the Colossus" (formerly "Depth Charge" on Time Lapse), "Camino Royale," a couple of Guitar Noir tracks ("Walking Away from Rainbows," the very silly "Vampyre With a Healthy Appetite"), the ending of "Shadow of the Hierophant" (which is connected to "Los Endos" via a seemingly endless drum solo), "Black Light" (as on There Are Many Sides to the Night, primarily a vehicle by which to tease the audience with old Genesis snippets) and "The Steppes." In all cases, the band members are perfectly game to learn Hackett's material, and in those bits it's hard to tell that this isn't just a typical Hackett live album (aside from having Wetton on vocals).
Fortunately, the setlist is spiced up to take advantage of the unique combination of players, and there are some non-Hackett surprises to be found. There's a lengthy solo Wetton piece called "Battlelines," from a recent (1994) album, that I find passable in an Asia-ish way, but that just seems like a bone that Steve threw to John to help get him on board. Much more interesting are the inclusion of "The Court of the Crimson King" and "I Talk to the Wind," neither of which Wetton had performed during his King Crimson stint way back when. They don't really involve Hackett that much, but again, given the overall amount of Hackett material on the album, I feel like that's by design. And finally, there's an acoustic version (!) of "Heat of the Moment," and it sounds rather lovely. Wetton's change of the lyrics to reflect that the performance year was 1996 instead of 1982 is a little cheesy, but I'm glad they decided to throw in this track.
On the whole, I like this album just fine, yet for all of the good performances and small surprises contained therein, I can't shake the feeling that this album is more of a novelty than an essential part of my collection. According to Colbeck, it was these shows that convinced him that he should retire from live rock performance, on the grounds that looking around the stage and seeing all of these old geezers (who were then only in their 40s mind you) made him decide that live rock music should be done by young people, and I'm not entirely shocked that this would happen. The album is out-of-print at this time, and given the effort and probable cost that would need to be expended to get it, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. If you have some way to find it easily, though, it's worth hearing for the best parts.
Best song: The Palace Of Theseus
This would never be one of my very favorite Hackett albums, of course; ultimately, an album that I would rate very highly would need to prompt reactions more specific than "this is fun and I enjoy listening to it and wouldn't mind listening to it again." Nonetheless, along with the later Metamorpheus, this album shows that Hackett had a genuine gift for using music to create narrative, and that his classical guitar instrumentals could be enjoyed in a way beyond simply appreciating his technical skill. Nothing here lasts long enough to get especially boring, yet nothing feels like it was underdeveloped, and that's a balance that one shouldn't take for granted. Shame on me for getting to this one so much later than his other classical guitar albums.
Best song: The Golden Age Of Steam or Twice Around The Sun
There are some misfires (to varying degrees) on this album, unfortunately, concentrated at the beginning and end. The title track, as well the later "Darktown Riot" (each based around a similar theme), try to create a dark unifying mood to the album, but they strike me as pretty ridiculous; the low-pitched encoded spoken vocals of the former, combined with the wailing saxophones (a waste of Ian McDonald), make for a track that I never look forward to hearing, and "Darktown Riot" ends up sounding like haunted house music. I'm all in favor of Steve being willing to try and fail, but that also means acknowledging that he fails from time to time, and he definitely does here.
I'm also not as thrilled with the opening "Omega Metallicus" or the closing "In Memoriam" as I'm sure some people are. The opening 20 seconds of "Omega Metallicus" sound embarrassing to me; the way the bassline, the percussion and one of the effects come together makes it seem like the album is going to be an album by an old fart trying to make what he thinks the hip young kids are gonna want to be grooving to, and it makes me grumpy. Luckily, the track quickly uses the foundation to build into something much better; Steve breaks out a wide assortment of licks, even sampling the riff from "Cassandra" to good effect, and the assault of guitar sound in its 3:48 is enough to make it worth listening to. Completely different, but also less effective than I think it was meant to be, is the 8-minute "In Memoriam," which is clearly supposed to be a groundshaking requiem (with guitars and keyboards that sometimes remind me of "Epitaph"), but (to my ears) is largely undermined by the spoken parts (in the same voice as in the title track) and the excess length (for the number of ideas). This could have worked at 4 or 5 minutes, even with the spoken delivery, but 8 minutes is way, way too much.
Fortunately, as much as the beginning and ending of the album frustrate me, the middle 7 tracks are enough to leave me with a positive feeling towards the album overall. There are some pretty lovely melancholy ballads on here; "Man Overboard" would have fit in equally well on Spectral Mornings and on Beyond the Shrouded Horizon, "Days of Long Ago" (featuring a nice vocal from Jim Diamond) makes for a great love song, and "Jane Austen's Door," even if it might be a little long for something bordering on adult-contemporary, has some rather moving lyrics and a nice delivery. "Rise Again" almost sounds like Magnetic Fields in the first half, and while the transition in the vocal delivery to screaming in the second half is kinda jarring, the shift in the music from gentle to rocking works just fine for me. There's also a rather curious 7-minute number in "Dreaming With Open Eyes," which starts off sounding like an Eastern-tinged shuffle with some lovely verses, but while the shuffling part ends up taking over and becomes somewhat monotonous, it never stops being attractive and never devolves into muzak, and I like it quite a bit.
As nice as these tracks are, though, the best two are a clear step above, even if they're completely different from each other. "The Golden Age of Steam" is late-period Hackett at his best, a song based around a couple of nagging Eastern-European-ish melodies that instantly transport the listener to a Technicolor version of 30s and 40s Europe, detailing the travels and adventures of a young man in one of the last periods where one could go off and have adventures in the classic European sense. There's only a little bit of guitar (some nylon string bits in the middle for texture), but it isn't needed, and Steve's vocal delivery more than makes up for the lack of his primary asset in the track.
Finally, there's the instrumental "Twice Around the Sun." The rational part of me recognizes that, in terms of overall structure, it's basically a repeat of "Spectral Mornings," what with its A-B-A form, where the A has a few slow atmospheric licks and the B section is an atmospheric contrast that slows things down to a borderline ambient level. I suppose I could be a stickler and say that it's too long and too monotonous, blah blah blah. Well, there's no room for rationality here; once I hear that opening mellotron, I'm pretty much done for. The balance between slow, winding guitar lines and mellotron chords hits me in all of the right gushy prog places, and even if having the final guitar note possibly be the longest single sustained guitar note ever recorded (as the liner notes) is a gimmick (and I kinda feel like it is), it's a marvelous gimmick that makes for a beautiful capstone.
In the end, 2/3 or so of this album is really good, but that remaining 1/3 is so irritating, and so badly positioned, that it can't help but reduce my overall view of the album pretty significantly. Still, this is a case where, even if the overall experience is frustrating, the peaks are so interesting that I have to recommend this to anybody who considers themselves a fan of Steve. For what's essentially the first step in an artistic rebirth, this is quite nice.
Best song: Maybe Brand New or Rebecca
What fascinates me the most about this album is how nonsensical the ordering of tracks is. Most albums try to make some sort of bold statement at either their beginning or their end, but this album starts and ends in a very casual, laid-back manner that one would normally expect to hear in the middle of an album, and elsewhere there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to how tracks are grouped together. It's almost as if Steve first determined which tracks he wanted to include on the album, then used a random number generator to determine the ordering of the material. This may sound like a complaint, but it's really not; the effect is so odd that it's actually quite delightful, and while this relative lack of framing is enough to help disqualify this as a potentially great album, it also, oddly enough, helps make it a more solidly good album. If that seems like a contradiction, then all the better.
Overall, for all of the messiness in the styles and sequencing, this is also a very even album, with only a few tracks that might be considered standouts but without anything that's unenjoyable. With a lot of thought, I can pick out a couple of tracks that I'd consider giving the title of best song, though I can name a few others that I like about as much. "Brand New" has some nice acoustic guitar in its brief verse, quickly builds into a nice anthemic chorus (with an odd watery effect on the vocals), then ends up seeing its instrumental parts go all sorts of places (before ending with the acoustic guitar parts), and the effect is really nice. I also really like the ballad "Rebecca," which has an odd tension in its seemingly mellow verse melodies, a tension that's at least somewhat released during the interesting instrumental break in the middle.
As I said, though, there are a lot of tracks that are quite likable. Some of them are really strange, but that should be expected on a Steve Hackett double album. "The Devil is an Englishman," a cover of a song by a guy named Thomas Dolby, features Steve speaking the lyrics in a low-pitched voice, but the effect is goofy rather than stupid this time, and I quite like the track, which almost sounds at times like something Prince would have done. Much stranger is the 6:40 "Mechanical Bride," which almost sounds like the 90s-00s King Crimson trying to play a cross between "21st Century Schizoid Man" and something from the Roxy Music album For Your Pleasure, and while it goes too long I don't especially mind it. Strangest and silliest of all, though, is "Marijuana Assasssin of Youth," which starts off sounding like a 40's Christmas carol, and then next thing you know it's turned into a medley of standards like "Wipeout," "Tequlia" and the theme to "Batman" before turning into a rocker about needing to grow up and give up rock music and drugs. It's totally hilarious and I couldn't imagine the album without it (it wasn't on the 13-track version, sadly).
The "normal" songs are quite nice on the whole as well. As I mentioned, the opening "Strutton Ground" is awfully laid back for an album opener, but it's very warm and pleasant and memorable, so I have no complaints. "Circus of Becoming" starts off with menacing rising organs, but it quickly changes into fun carnival music (with some nice guitar feedback as texture), eventually breaking into an all-too-brief anthemic guitar-led passage, before returning to the carnival, then returning to the anthemic, then ending on an uncertain note. "This World," sandwiched between "Brand New" and "Rebecca," doesn't quite impact me as much as those do, but I really like the "Please don't take this world from me" chorus, and the contrast between the quieter verses and the chorus, even if that's somewhat old hat for Steve, makes both parts seem better than they might actually be individually. Jumping to near the end of the album, there's a lovely throwback to the vibe of the gentler parts of Spectral Mornings in "Serpentine Song," which is basically a tender ballad at its core but turns into an atmospheric joyride in somewhat the same vein (more so in the last two minutes) as "The Virgin and the Gypsy," complete with busy flute parts from John Hackett (who doesn't appear on the rest of the album and hadn't been around for a while). It was actually the album closer in the original version (the special edition closes on an acoustic instrumental), but it definitely isn't an obvious choice for finishing an album.
There's quite a bit of other stuff on the album, from short instrumentals to atmospheric near-instrumentals (the slightly jazzy "Frozen Statues," the very Eastern-tinged "The Silk Road") to a swaying accordion-based number ("Come Away") to yet another fun blues exercise ("Fire Island"). These tracks, along with much of what came before, aren't anywhere near great, yet they work together to create a very enjoyable whole, and when an album can consistently hold my attention and make me feel pleasant over a long period of time, it's going to get a very good grade from me. If you're interested in getting into late-period Hackett, this is as reasonable a starting point as any, even if his albums in the next decade or so would somewhat surpass it.
Best song: Under The World - Orpheus Looks Back
The first half of the album is nice, with some lovely themes (some of which get reprised later in the album, most notably the main theme in "To Earth Like Rain"), but because it covers the part of Orpheus' life before he experienced pain and sadness, it's a little monotonous in its cheeriness (and it doesn't even cover his time spent with the Argonauts). The only real moment of tension is in "The Dancing Ground," which breaks up a cheery minuet with a disturbing premonition of Eurydice's; otherwise, it's all happy happy happy, culminating in the upbeat but still overlong 12:27 of "That Vast Life." At least this track moves through several ideas, but it never shifts in tone, and thus it becomes more background-ish than I'd prefer for something with its length.
Naturally, the story gets darker once Eurydice dies and Orpheus descends into the underworld to try and get her back, but I like that the music goes beyond formula in depicting these passages. Look, if you're going to make a musical depiction of the Orpheus myth, the quality of your presentation will ultimately rest on how you handle two parts: the attempted ascent from the underworld with Eurydice, and Orpheus' eventual horrible death at the hands of the Maenads. Given this, Steve's decision to write "Under the World - Orpheus Looks Back" as a clear homage to "Mars" strikes me as nothing less than brilliant. The incessant rhythm gives a maddening tension to the track, and the ascent portion, first moving in darkness, then briefly moving into triumphant cheer, then briefly moving into doubt, then clearly showing the moment where Orpheus screws up, gives a perfect depiction of the story. And "Severance," well, that's just fun dramatic darkness, hinting at but not fully playing up his horrible death; it might not be great by the standards of classical, but it's just fine by the standards of a rock guy writing a small amount of classical.
The album then works through the happy ending of the story: Orpheus is buried, Orpheus' spirit is reunited with Eurydice, Orpheus' head keeps on singing, and his lyre becomes a constellation (with reprises of happy themes from earlier). Overall, then, it's not an amazing experience, but it's definitely one I like more than his 80s classical guitar albums. Steve definitely shows himself much more adept at writing for a classical ensemble than most rock musicians would be, and the presence of a coherent (and classic) story ends up providing a beneficial framework. Plus, a lot of the music here could have been reworked for use on one his "conventional" albums without a lot of fuss. If you're into later-period Hackett, this is a worthy purchase.
Best song: Set Your Compass or To A Close
The best aspect of the album is that it has some really top-notch ballads. "Set Your Compass" may be more atmosphere than melody, but it's a gorgeous atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of Voyage, and the periodic "set your compass by your dreams" line could stay in my head forever if it wanted to. "To a Close" is more traditional and conventional, but no less impressive, centering around a set of gently swaying acoustic guitar lines and featuring lovely flute lines, subtle orchestration and fantastic vocal harmonies. A small step behind them, but still a delight, is "A Girl Called Linda," a jazzy French-tinged number that just drips whimsy but never becomes too cutesy for its own good. Oddly, these three songs are grouped close together in the middle of the album, and I somewhat feel that lessens their overall effect, but that's just a small gripe.
The rest of the album is downright nutty, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. "The Fundamentals of Brainwashing" is a solid downbeat ballad in its own right, featuring some nice lyrics ("History is a vinyl record stuck in a groove" strikes me as a really inspired opening lyric) and a great vibe (and a great brief pedal steel solo) once you get beyond the way it sounds like a Division Bell outtake, but rather than moving into a gentle conclusion, the song dissolves into a monstrous instrumental, "Howl," which maintains the same main underpinning set of piano chords but covers it in noisy jazzy anger (manifesting in, well, howling and screeching guitar sounds of pure passion that give way to a nice extended jazz piano solo). The combination of the two tracks makes for a great conclusion to the album (I ripped the two as one track and can't imagine listening to them separately), but it's an extra strange experience to listen to this immediately after "Why" (a minute-long 30s jazz send-up, or basically a more condensed "Sentimental Institution") and "She Moves in Memories" (basically a five-minute orchestral rearrangement of "To a Close"). Maybe the sequencing would make more sense on the 17-track special edition (which I haven't heard yet), but here I'm just kinda baffled.
Coming immediately before the final stretch of the album, and right after the "ballad" stretch, is the "rocker" stretch, and the results are mixed. "Wolfwork" has a couple of nice ideas in the quieter moments, but on the whole it's a bit of a tuneless pounding mess without much to compensate, and it doesn't add much to the album. "Ego and Id" is pretty fun, if only for the novelty of Steve clearly trying to make his sound harder and noisier, and he manages to squeeze some great sounds and passages out of his guitar in the process. And finally, the Dylan cover is rather pleasant and moody, but the choice of song to cover ("The Man in the Long Black Coat") ends up being startling for a reason outside the context of the album; this track had been covered by Emerson Lake and Palmer a dozen years earlier on their In the Hot Seat album. Who would have ever thought that this decent-but-not-especially-notable track from a decent-but-not-especially-notable late-80s Bob Dylan album would become the Dylan cover of choice for aging progsters? To be honest, I actually kinda prefer the ELP version; this one is just fine, but it's pretty conventional, whereas the ELP version had a little more variety in the sound (for better or worse) and a growling repeated riff that made it stand out.
Finally (or initially, I suppose, since these tracks are all near the beginning of the album), there's the "eccentric Hackett music" stretch. The opening "A Dark Night in Toyland" has some great guitar parts tucked underneath that betray it as Hackett, but as I said earlier, I feel like this should have been a Bowie song, maybe on Heathen; there's just something about the combination of the music box in the beginning, the up-tempo orchestration, the deep vocals and the slightly dark lyrics (with the great repeated line, "If you can't find heaven I'll show you a ghost train to hell") that instinctively makes me want to file it as a Bowie song. "Waters of the Wild" is another nice example of Steve's occasional fascination with Eastern-tinged music, featuring a fun set of sitar lines (or maybe an imitation, whatever) over a decidedly non-Western beat, and maintaining a solid intensity that keeps it interesting for its full five-and-a-half minutes.
And finally, there's "Down Street," yet another one of Steve's ventures into a track that features a spoken downward-pitched vocal. Fortunately, this is much closer to "The Devil is an Englishman" than the two Darktown instances of this, and the music is a lot of fun, moving from something vaguely Tom Waits-ish into (as mentioned) something driven by Gilmour-ish "Another Brick in the Wall 2" lines, eventually bringing in some great harmonica lines to make the whole thing seem about 20% less dorky than it is, and then going in various directions that could be expected on a Hackett album. The vocals are hard to shake, but truth be told they do disappear for a large chunk of the song, so I can listen to the track without feeling like they really ruin much.
For me, the bottom line is that this is another very good late-period Hackett album, but it's also one that I think would be a pretty bad introduction to this period of his career, and I definitely don't think somebody should hear it before hearing at least one of the "regular" albums that bookend it (To Watch the Storms and Out of the Tunnel's Mouth). There's some tremendous material that every Hackett fan should eventually, hear, though, so don't put off getting it indefinitely. And hey, if you're somehow the kind of person who thinks of Please Don't Touch as one of Steve's career peaks, then maybe this kind of messiness will appeal to you more than it does to me.
Best song: Fire On The Moon or Nomads
The first two songs on here have to be numbered among the best songs Hackett ever did, and oddly enough they're also the two where Yes bassist Chris Squire makes a contribution (he doesn't make his presence obvious, but there's a lot of power in the bass playing on these tracks). "Fire on the Moon" is a distillation of everything great about this era in Hackett's career; the verse melody is quiet but intense, growing out of a quiet music box melody (he used a similar trick to start off Wild Orchids, but it's more effective here), the "chorus" is huge and anthemic with wordless harmonies, and the two extended instrumental passages are led by monumental guitar passages that each have their own distinct personality and vibe. "Nomads," then, is Steve revisiting his fondness for middle-Eastern music, and it really comes across as the kind of song that "The Gulf" could have been if it hadn't gotten too stuck on its typically 80s synths. Much like with "Moon," the melody is a big ball of tension, reaching points of near ecstasy every time the "It's a cry from the heart, it's a crying soul" line pops up, and the climactic instrumental passage, growing out of a frantic acoustic part into a searing electric part, is sheer bliss to my ears. The final repetition of "It's a cry from the heart" might be somewhat predictable, but it's soooo necessary and satisfying.
Naturally, the album can't quite hold onto this level of enjoyment and intensity throughout, but it holds a pretty decent level nonetheless. "Emerald and Ash" really shouldn't be nine minutes long; the ballad portion (the "Emerald," I suppose) and the noisy rocker portion (the "Ash," I suppose) don't fit well together, certainly not as well as "The Fundamentals of Brainwashing" and "Howl" did. Still, I quite like the "Emerald" portion, which is awfully dark and moody for a track whose first lyric is "Sugarplum fairies on parade." The following instrumental "Tubehead" is basically just a noisy shredfest (with pounding up-tempo bass pushing it forward), and I kinda feel like its effect is muted a bit by coming right after the "Ash" portion, but it's definitely a lot of fun.
As far as multi-part epics go, "Sleepers" is much more impressive than "Emerald and Ash." The lengthy acoustic introduction gives way to an unsettlingly calm (and surprisingly memorable) verse melody, which in turn gives way to an intense darker melody (featuring a great lyric in one stanza: "Surveillance camera in the sky/Big big brother telling you why/Too many saviours on my cross/Might as well worship the Wizard of Oz"), which in turn gives way to an anthemic climax, culminating in the "All the sleepers send you their dreams" repeated line. If this track isn't in the top tier of Hackett tracks, then it's knocking on the door.
The album finishes quite strong as well. "Ghost in the Glass" makes the transition from moody acoustic instrumental to moody electric instrumental impeccably; "Still Waters" is a great pounding mid-tempo jazzy-gospel rocker that reminds me a lot of the little I've heard of Spiritualized; and the closing "Last Train to Istanbul," as tempting as it might be to call it an inferior little brother of "Nomads," does pseudo-ethnic music proud, from the great percussion to the flow of strings into flute and saxophone, and it's a great way to close things off.
If there's anything significantly to the album's detriment, aside from the "Emerald and Ash" and "Tubehead" pairing (both tracks are plenty enjoyable, but in a more hollow way than I prefer), it's that the album, for all of the interesting things that happen on it, doesn't really show much in the way of Steve stretching himself; even the best ideas feel mostly like a refinement of ideas that had come on earlier albums. Still, that's a relatively minor ding, and it's one that I don't really think about when I'm listening to it. If you like rock music that's at all artsy (not just Hackett) you need to hear this album.
PS: The 2010 2-CD special edition is worth mentioning, even if the additional material doesn't factor into the rating. Around this time, Steve started to re-embrace his past in his live performances, and this disc features live performances of "Blood on the Rooftops" (!!), "A Tower Struck Down," "Firth of Fifth" and "Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974" (the Genesis tracks feature drummer Gary O'Toole on vocals). The three Genesis tracks would later appear on Live Rails and will be mentioned there, but it's still a lot of fun to have additional versions of these. The disc also contains what's essentially a remix mash-up of "Sleepers" and "Still Waters" called "Every Star in the Night Sky," and it's a nice treat for people who enjoy those two tracks.
Best song: Blood On The Rooftops
It's a really good one, though. Initially, I actually listened to the versions of Tunnel tracks on this album far more than I did to the studio versions, and while I eventually came to prefer the originals on the whole, I still have a strong fondness for how the tracks are done on here. "Sleepers" and "Still Waters," in particular, breathe in a way that they didn't in studio, and they absolutely sound like classics in this context. As far as the older solo material goes, there aren't really surprises (I guess "Slogans" is pretty surprising, though), but the material is all done well and feels very at home with this lineup (which says something given that it was tailored to accommodate the Tunnel material more than the older material).
Oh yeah, there's also Genesis material. The inclusion of "Los Endos" near the end isn't really a surprise, and it's done pretty closely to how he'd started playing it during the Genesis Revisited era (aside from the new inclusion of the "Myopia" introduction), but the other performances deserve special notice. "Blood on the Rooftops," if you'll recall, was never performed live by Genesis, and it was only after the Genesis reunion (without Steve) had come and gone that Steve apparently decided it needed to make it onto the stage. Well, I'm glad it did. The drummer, Gary O'Toole, is nowhere near as good of a singer as Phil from a technical standpoint (even Phil on Wind, where I feel he's not that great), but the deeper, rougher, more clearly British voice helps a lot, and he throws a lot of passion into his part. The use of saxophone in some of the spots that had previously been keyboards is a nice touch, too. Elsewhere, "Firth of Fifth" is done pretty closely to the original, albeit with sax replacing flute, and people who didn't like the Revisited version will be plenty happy here. And finally, they do the "Fly on the Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974" medley (starting from just after the vocal part in the original "Fly"), and it sounds great, with just a little more primal power in the drums and a little more bite in the guitar (which was fine enough in the original), and O'Toole does a great job on vocals in the "Broadway Melody" part as well.
Quite honestly, I probably listen to this more than any other Hackett album, and while somebody who isn't predisposed to enjoying live albums might find this a bit high of a rating, I find that there are sufficient amounts of surprises and reinventions (mostly mild, but sometimes not) of older material that a rating like this is justified. And besides, while it may not quite work as a Tunnel replacement (I just couldn't go without "Nomads") it does make for a nice set of alternate versions.
Steve Welte (10/13/13)
Good album overall, although I'm kinda surprised that it's so top-heavy with Tunnel material. I like that album quite a bit, but
given that Hackett seems to have lost the rights to the Live Archive/Somewhere in South America/Hungarian Horizons albums issued in
2001-2006 (presumably with his divorce from Kim Poor), and that Time Lapse and There Are Many Sides to the Night are either out of
print or have suffered the same fate as the others, then Tokyo Tapes is (almost) his only other live album currently available. You
would think that he would try to include more material from across his career on the album; certainly he changed up some of the
material played on this tour. Nevertheless, energetic performances of the new stuff (with slight rearrangements here and there to
permit live performance, or as the muse took them), with some cracking Genesis and older cuts as well. I'm especially fond of Ace
of Wands(with a brief keyboard/guitar/woodwinds jam in
the middle), and this performance of Every Day takes on life far beyond the original '79 studio performance.
Hackett also issued a live DVD/CD of a single concert on this tour at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, called Fire and Ice. I
prefer this recording of the tour to Live Rails, if only because it sounds better acoustically to me while presenting the entire
concert without edits (so far as I can tell), including Hackett's quietly cheerful audience banter and between-song conversations,
and throwing in a few live guests and change-ups in material played. Ghost in the Glass, Pollution C, The Steppes, Slogans,
Serpentine Song,Spectral Mornings, and Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974 are all dropped in favor of Valley of the Kings,
The Golden Age of Steam, Watcher of the Skies, Carpet Crawlers (both with Gary O'Toole on vocals), Shadow of the Hierophant (with
Amanda Lehmann on vocals and Steven Wilson guesting on third guitar), Sierra Quemada, The Darkness in Mens' Hearts(a solo piece by
Nick Beggs, performed on Chapman Stick), All Along the
Watchtower (with John Wetton guesting on vocals and acoustic guitar), and Prairie Angel (leading directly into the Los
Endos medley). Wetton's vocals are rather weak on Watchtower, but most of the other performances are superb - Hierophant and Every
Day roar with energy and precision, Carpet Crawlersfinally gets the choral vocals it's always deserved, Quemada takes the low-key slot
in place of Ghost quite well, Golden Age gains a great deal from the excellent acoustics of the venue, Prairie Angel feels right at
home as a minimalistic yet cathartic intro to Los Endos, Clocks.....still ends with an annoying thumpety-thump drum solo from Gary
O'Toole, who is otherwise phenomenal at his job. All in all, quite a good concert film/album, and I'd recommend it over Live
Rails pretty much any day. I intend to compile my own live album with the tracks unique to this and Rails, which should make for
some interesting listening.
Best song: 'Til These Eyes or Prairie Angel/A Place Called Freedom
To be honest, for as much as I like this album, I don't really love how it begins. The first couple of minutes of "Loch Lomond," after the great guitar and keyboard sounds that kick it off, are built around a stiff and leaden old-man hard rock riff, and if the entire track had been built around this things might have been problematic. Fortunately, this riff eventually takes its place as a mere supporting element of the track, popping out intermittently from a Scottish-tinged acoustic ballad, full of nice melody and arrangement twists. Following this mixed bag of an opener, we enter an extended stretch that has to rank up there with Hackett's best. "The Phoenix Flown" is a two-minute instrumental with Hackett doing his minimalist-yet-fluid electric guitar thing as well as ever, "Wanderlust" is a nice 45-second acoustic interlude, and then we come to the main attractions of the album. "'Til These Eyes" is an AMAZING acoustic ballad; the build from the verses into the "'Til these eyes have seen enough" parts, ending with "'Til these eyes have seen love," strikes me as pop perfection. I don't like to break out "if you don't like such-and-such track then I can't understand you and your musical taste" comments very often, but if you don't like "'Til These Eyes" then I can't understand you and your musical taste.
"Prairie Angel" (which features writing credits from Steve Howe and old GTR drummer Jonathan Mover) and "A Place Called Freedom" are indexed as separate tracks, but they're really two parts of the same piece, and I can't imagine listening to one without the other. "Prairie Angel" starts with a nearly perfect (to my ears) set of slowly unfolding and rising guitar lines, before bursting into an AWESOME set of bluesy guitar riffs (eventually featuring Steve on harmonica), which in turn segue into "A Place Called Freedom." I don't especially care for the chorus/title (I've always had a weird instinctual allergy to tracks with the word "freedom" in the title, with some exceptions), though it makes for a nice climax every time it pops up, but the rest of track is amazing. The way the track effortlessly moves between the folksy/country-ish acoustic-guitar-driven verses, the breaks after the chorus (with a slow guitar line over an underpinning acoustic guitar part that brings to mind "Carpet Crawlers" in a good way), and the main ideas of "Prairie Angel" leaves me wanting to hear the track (and its predecessor) over and over, and the extended outro only makes this urge stronger. It's a shame such a great pair of tracks ended up on an album so (relatively) few people will ever hear; I guarantee that if U2 had done this track (which wouldn't be fully out of the realm of possibility) it would be universally beloved.
Anything after this stretch can't help but be a small letdown, but it's only a small one. "Between the Sunset and the Coconut Palms" is a nice atmospheric acoustic ballad about taking a boat into the horizon, and it's an effective low-key respite from the overpowering beauty of "Prairie Angel"/"A Place Called Freedom." "Waking to Life" is another of Steve's incorporations of ambiguously foreign music into his core style, and the combination of the catchy-as-hell verses (culminating in the great "and I've never seen your face before") hook and all of the frenetic instrumental parts a la "Last Train to Istanbul" make it every bit as fun as, say, "Last Train" or "A Doll That's Made in Japan." "Two Faces of Cairo" is an instrumental that Steve wrote while visiting the Sphinx, and while it's definitely a little directionless and primarily geared towards atmosphere, it's fine enough atmosphere for me.
"Looking for Fantasy" is another instance (see: "Camino Royale") of Steve writing a song where part of the song came from a dream (this time a dream where he heard Jimi Hendrix singing this melody), and it's yet another of Steve's nice atmospheric ballads, about looking for meaning in things that aren't really grounded in reality (best line: "In an open top car the Kennedys passed by/To this day she swears that Jack gave her the eye"). "Summer's Breath" is another nice acoustic snippet (probably no better than the average track on Bay of Kings or Momentum, but as I've always said, it's better to have these tracks surrounded by tracks of other styles), "Catwalk" is decent pounding mid-tempo blues (with Chris Squire on bass), and finally we come to the conclusion, "Turn This Island Earth." At first it seems like it's going to be something irritatingly faux-majestic in a queasy "Valley of the Kings" sort of way, which doesn't seem promising for a 12-minute track, but these parts turn out just to be an extended introduction, and for a while the rest of the track is decent enough. An atmospheric distorted vocal slowly fades in, the song takes shape, there's a synth part playing what had been the bluesy riff from "Prairie Angel" (interestingly, this track also has a Steve Howe/Jonathan Mover credit, so I have to assume the bluesy riff is the GTR leftover that prompted the credit), and eventually the bluesy riff becomes the center of an extended instrumental bit, before the song then basically becomes a dumping ground for various ideas (such as a snippet that could have been the center of a nice McCartney-ish ballad). Truth be told, on first listen I was almost ready to call this my favorite track, but now I consider it a relatively weak point, and enough to keep me from giving the album an even higher grade.
In addition to the standard release, there was also a 2-CD special edition version, and that's the one I have, so I'll briefly mention the contents. It's only about half an hour, and it's clearly not an essential addition to the album, but I like the disc for the most part. The first four tracks are part of an instrumental suite called "Four Winds," with the four parts naturally called "North," "South," "East" and "West," and while none of the parts show Hackett at his very best, they're nice for somebody who generally enjoys this era of his career. "Pieds En L'Air" is an odd inclusion, in that it's a strings-only cover of a song by an old Welsh composer who went by the pseudonym Peter Warlock; it's weird to have a track on a Steve Hackett album that doesn't involve Hackett at all, but I have to assume that the piece meant a lot to Steve, so I don't begrudge him throwing it on. "She Said Maybe" isn't an amazing guitar-driven instrumental, but it's a decent one; I wouldn't have minded having it on the main album. "Enter the Night" is a reworking of "Depth Charge"/"Riding the Colossus" to finally give it vocals, and honestly the track finally sounds finished; it was always a good instrumental, but here it feels like it finally reached its full low-key 80s-arena rock (if such a genre can be low-key) potential. "Eruption: Tommy" is an instrumental snippet from an old Focus (one of the lesser-known 70s prog bands) that depicted, sure enough, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and it fits in well with Steve's gifts as a guitarist. And finally, "The Reconditioned Nightmare" is slight reworking, in a live context, of "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare" (from Cured, remember that one?), and it's every bit as much goofy fun here as it was before.
So ok, it's not as polished as Spectral Mornings is, and while there was a brief time where I thought it might be my favorite Hackett album, that time has passed and won't return (the decline in my feelings towards "Turn This Island Earth" is the biggest reason). If that's the extent of criticism I can give, though, then I can't help but have a lot of good feelings towards this album. If you're somebody who only has Voyage and/or Acolyte, and you're looking for a place to start getting into Steve's later studio albums, this or Tunnel is the place to start.
Best song: Stormchaser
This basically sounds like a Hackett solo album, with a good dose of Squire's vocals (both in lead and in harmonies) and Squire's rumbling bass (which is prominent in the same way it had been since The Ladder or so), as well as some bits of recognizable non-Buggles elements from Fly From Here. It's definitely a clear step down from Out of the Tunnel's Mouth and Beyond the Shrouded Horizon, but it's also a notch above Fly From Here, and somebody coming into this album with appropriate expectations should find plenty to enjoy. Squire's voice (which had been starting to show visible cracks on stage in recent years) is mostly in good form, and while I'm sure he got some "help" from the various production efforts in all parts where he sings, the only glaringly (and embarrassingly) obvious use of Auto-tune comes in "Can't Stop the Rain," an otherwise playful and lovely ballad Squire had written a few years previously. Steve's voice continues to sound fine (in its own low-key way), creating some nice harmonies with Chris in spots, and while his guitar playing doesn't really show much that hasn't been heard in other albums, it still produces some typically interesting stretches.
That said, while I'm quite fond of the album as a whole, I still don't really love the first few tracks, which, in my first couple of listens, really gave me the sense of a couple of old farts trying a little too hard. The opening title track, in particular, strikes me as having some nice moments (especially the first prominent guitar line) stuck in a rather flawed framework. The track is basically a "Kashmir" knockoff (In 2012? Really?), but it also has some ugly guitar tones and an instrumental passage that's seemingly only there because they decided it would be a waste to have a whole album with Squire and Hackett without having any fast "woo prog" passages. I like the vocals and the more majestic moments, but the opening track doesn't really do the album justice.
The next two tracks are better, but each has a feature that makes me raise an eyebrow. "Tall Ships" may have a nice bass riff driving it forward, but the music in the verses is still basically a kind of quasi-funk (with Chris on lead vocals) that sounds silly coming from an old white guy. Everything else about the track, though, is just fine, especially in the parts with the majestic rising "Tall ships, bright stars ..." chorus. "Divided Self" is a fine pop song based around cheery guitar lines, with well-placed vocal effects and a good build into each iteration of the chorus, but it ends in an awfully awkward manner, dissolving the main melody into a discordant of itself surrounding by ugly sounds. I guess that this matches with the "division" of the title, but it doesn't seem at all like a logical conclusion to what had come before it, and I always wish the track was a minute shorter.
This should seem like a lot of complaining for an album that gets this high of a grade, but the good news is that the rest of the album, aside from the distracting Auto-tune in "Can't Stop the Rain," is full of songs that leave a positive impression without any negative residue. "Aliens" was originally a Yes song (with the full name "Aliens (Are Only Us From The Future)"), played during the early stages of the 2008 In The Present tour, and when it didn't make the cut for Fly From Here I was disappointed that this rather pleasant song (a slow ballad with goofy lyrics and some great subtle bits of guitar for texture) that I'd enjoyed hearing would never re-enter my life. Well, it sounds much more at home here than it would have on Fly From Here, and I'm glad Chris was able to persuade Steve to let it be part of the album.
"Sea of Smiles" is a delightfully varied number, centered around a mantra-like chorus (which gets stuck in my head all the time), but which splits itself carefully between a moody "Take These Pearls"-like melody and more upbeat and anthemic parts without there being clear seams between the two contrasting ideas. "The Summer Backwards" sounds like pure solo Hackett, a gentle guitar-based ballad (with great slow winding guitar bits near the end) that can't help but make me think of lying on the side of a green hill on a pleasant summer's day. "Stormchaser," then, is the album's best number, a slow pounding bass-heavy rocker with great processed vocals in the verses, a great atmosphere the title is sung, and great instrumental breaks that make much better use of the combined talents of Hackett and Squire than the title track does. And finally, after "Can't Stop the Rain," the album concludes with "Perfect Love Song," which is a gazillion times more atmospheric and interesting than a song with this title should be.
This isn't an important or great album by any means, but it is a delightful one, and it's a solid inclusion to the roll that Hackett had been on for over a dozen years by this point. If you don't have an aversion to old-fart dinosaur semi-prog, and don't mind a couple of oddly bad ideas here and there, you'll enjoy it.
Best song: The Lamia or Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers ... / ... In That Quiet Earth / Afterglow
As I'm sure was the case with most people who had previously heard Genesis Revisited, the announcement that Hackett was putting together a second compilation of Genesis material filled me with a little dread. I mean, I got used to GR and even learned to really like some of Hackett's reinventions, but there was some really awful material on that album that I just never came around to enjoying. Well, I shouldn't have worried, because Genesis Revisited II is a completely different kind of album. Genesis Revisited was largely about taking classic (and sometimes not classic) Genesis tracks, dismembering them, and using some of the pieces to rebuild the tracks in often borderline unrecognizable manners. In contrast, the general philosophy behind making this album seemed to be that the original versions, for the most part, were essentially just fine the way they were, but maybe could use a little tweaking and polishing and filling out in some spots (in other words, instead of trying to create "alternate" versions, he decided to try and create "definitive" versions). There isn't really any attempt to replicate the vocals of the originals, in either the Gabriel or Collins tracks, but on the instrumental side, the cores of the tracks are very much recognizable, and that alone makes this more palatable for old Genesis fans (who, let's face it, would be the primary market for this album) than Genesis Revisited ever could be.
The first disc, aside from closing with a spirited "Please Don't Touch" (better than the original, largely thanks to better production and some well-place strings), draws entirely from the Gabriel era, and the choices are quite interesting. Nursery Cryme is represented on this disc by "The Musical Box" ("The Return of the Giant Hogweed" is on the second disc), Foxtrot is represented by "Horizons" (basically identical to the original), "Supper's Ready" and "Can-Utility and the Coastliners," England is represented by "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight" (there's no "I Know What I Like" or "Firth of Fifth" here because those were on the first volume) and Lamb is represented by "The Chamber of 32 Doors," "The Lamia" and "Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974." Rather than cover all of the attributes of the songs (which greatly overlap with the originals), I'll mention some stand-out details concerning how they are presented on this disc.
Regarding "Supper's Ready," I really admire how (a) Steve avoided the potential cliche of having this end the set, instead sticking it third and treating it as just another great song, and (b) how Steve solves the impossible "the singer simply cannot live up to Gabriel's vocals" problem by having different vocalists in each of the sections (which lends some nice variety). I also really like how, without disturbing the framework of any sections of the piece, Steve makes the guitar significantly more prominent here than in the original; this provides great benefits in the "Ikhnaton and Itsacon," "Apocalypse in 9/8" and "As Sure As Eggs is Eggs" sections. No, this version of "Supper's Ready" is most definitely not better than the original, but parts of it are, and that's an amazing sentence for me to write.
Regarding "The Lamia," this one impressed me enough to be one of my two favorites on the album, which involves some stiff competition. The vocal performance by Nik Kershaw (his only vocal of the album) on this piece is absolutely beautiful, the great atmosphere of the original is fully preserved and even enhanced, and Hackett's guitar part at the end just kills.
Regarding "Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974," this one is performed in a manner similar to how it was done on the Live Rails album, with drummer Gary O'Toole on vocals, though this time there are vocals in both the "Fly" and "Broadway" sections. One addition I really like is how, when Gary sings the line, "There's a smell of peach blossom and bitter almond," the word "bitter" gets repeated and slowly faded out as Gary continues singing the rest of the track.
Regarding "Can-Utility and the Coastliners," I never really liked this song that much on Foxtrot, but I like it so much here that I'd stick it as my 3rd favorite track on this set. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree fame (and Making Old Prog Albums Sound Awesome In Remasters fame) contributes a way better vocal for this song than Peter did (Peter's a better vocalist, obviously, but this might have been a song where Collins should have been on vocals in the original), and despite all of the instrumental parts being basically the same as before, the production makes them sound way better here than on Foxtrot. Keyboard parts that sounded tacky to me before sound beautiful here, the guitar tone sounds better, the guitar part in the final main instrumental passage actually sounds finished, and overall this is clearly the definitive version.
The second disc, aside from the aforementioned "Hogweed" (which is basically like the original, just with the guitar a little more prominent), comes from the Collins years, before rounding out with three old Hackett solo numbers for good measure. Some selected thoughts are as follows:
Regarding "Blood on the Rooftops," Hackett prefaces this with a lengthy classical guitar bit on top of the bit that was already there, and while this might be overkill, I don't really mind it. Gary O'Toole once again provides a nice vocal, and I like the fact that his voice cracks a bit at the end and they decided to leave it in. Sterile perfection is overrated.
Regarding "Eleventh Earl of Mar," this is basically the same track as the one that opened Wind, and yet it sounds better in every way, from the better and clearer vocal performance (Nad Sylvan basically sounds like young Collins but improved), to the cleaner balance between guitars and keyboards (which are still plenty prominent, mind you), to the overall greater liveliness of Steve's guitar (there's an up-and-down-the-fretboard whoosh just before the final "Daddy!" that gives a great rush of energy). A naysayer might complain that this version, by removing some of the murk of the Wind sound, removes some of the mystery and atmosphere of the piece, but I think the music sounds plenty mysterious and atmospheric here while also sounding clearer.
Regarding "Ripples," Amanda Lehmann puts in a great vocal performance, and the mid-song instrumental section, after I've spent so much time lamenting the off-kilter balance between the guitar and the keys in the original, gets the balance exactly where I would want to be. There had been plenty of good live versions of "Ripples" (some from legitimate recordings, others not) through the years from Genesis, with a good balance between the guitars and the keys, but all of them had featured Steurmer on guitar, and it's absolutely cathartic for me to have what feels like a finished version with Steve on guitar.
Regarding "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers ...," "...In That Quiet Earth" and "Afterglow," these tracks are, in my opinion, the main reason to get this album. On Wind, these three tracks never quite worked for me the way I know they do for other people; I ended up fully appreciating "Afterglow" only after I started thinking of it as the capstone to the "In the Cage" medley (and this appreciation only somewhat extended to the studio version), and the instrumental tracks in this sequence, at best, struck me as having interesting ideas scattered about but not pulling them all together in an interesting enough manner. Well, this album creates a medley that destroys the original. "Unquiet" is essentially the same as before, but parts are made louder and stronger that need to be louder and stronger, and while some may once again complain about the loss of some murk, I find that a little more clarity actually enhances the atmosphere of this track. "In That Quiet Earth" ROARS in a way the original didn't, and while it follows the basic script of the original, all of the parts have more power, and the presence of some saxophone near the end breaks up some of the monotony in the arrangement that hurt the original. As for "Afterglow," I've always felt that Collins did a poor job on this song (as on most songs on Wind, excluding "Blood on the Rooftops"), but it's still a little shocking to me that a 60+ John Wetton would sound so much better suited for this song than the young Collins did (Collins, to his credit, got a lot better with it in live performance). Wetton gives an oomph to the song that the original just didn't have, and I find myself singing along to Banks' "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" knock-off (don't laugh, Banks has admitted this himself) freely, whereas I always felt silly singing with it in the original version.
Regarding "A Tower Struck Down," people won't pay too much attention to this (it's included because Rutherford and Collins played on the original), but this is the best version of the track available. Other versions tended to sound a little wimpier and goofier than they should have given the guitar riffs, but this version puts special emphasis on the hard rock aspects of the piece, hardening up the guitar tone and laying down a strong beat, and the song sounds better for it.
Regarding "Camino Royale," Steve's rationale for putting this on the collection is a little silly (it has no Genesis connection except for its genesis in a dream where Steve heard Genesis singing the chorus), but it's better than the original studio version, so I don't mind it. The main improvement is in Steve's singing, which sounded very unconvincing when singing the chorus originally but now sounds smooth and in control, and the jazzy instrumental break is fun too. The Time Lapse version is the definitive version to me, but I like this one a lot.
Regarding the closing "Shadow of the Hierophant," I really like the choice to make this the closer. It's done very much the same as in the original, and the only major difference is that there's a bit of sax in the extended coda, but the steamroller effect of the coda is still in full force, and I'd rate this as the equal of the great original.
Now, I didn't mention everything, and not everything I didn't mention is super, and even with all of the nice things I've said about these tracks and all of the definitive versions, the amount of creativity that went into the various tweaks and new features is ultimately dwarfed by the creativity that went into creating the originals. For my inner prog fan, though, being able to rediscover so many old favorites through this album is pure joy, and a high rating must necessarily follow. Any fan of 70s Genesis should buy this, and if the few solo tracks bring you into the world of solo Hackett, so much the better.
Steve Welte (10/13/13)
Saw the Hacketeer and company doing the Genesis Revisited II tour up in Albany, NY at the Egg at the end of September. Excellent performance of material from this and the first Revisited album - I disliked Sylvan's vocals on the album, but he did quite a good job live with the material (although Gary O'Toole took lead on a few things, such as Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974and Blood on the Rooftops, and everyone except Roger King (keyboards) contributed backing vocals). The current touring lineup is quite a treat to see, as they bring a lot of enthusiasm and energy to either the Genesis or Steve's own material; I've seen them do both (although they had the eccentric Nick Beggs on bass/bass pedals/backing vocals instead of Lee Pomeroy when I saw them on the Out of the Tunnel's Mouth tour in 2010), and enjoyed the performances immensely both times. The forthcoming Live at the Hammersmith Apollo film/album, taken from a U.K. performance on
this tour, should be well worth watching/listening.
Regarding the album: I like this one much more than the first, although I was disappointed with it when I first listened to it. I initially thought that it adhered far too closely to the original recordings, without providing enough significant deviations from them to justify its existence. My beef with the first was that it did deviate, but that the deviations largely reeked to the heavens of bad taste. After giving this material more listens, I've shifted my stance more towards yours; not essential, but very well performed and produced, with such deviations that do exist working well, and some excellent performances from many of the guests. As you stated, sometimes the improvements in arrangements and production make the recordings all worthwhile, even if not (mostly) surpassing the originals. I still think Hackett should've chosen some different vocalists for some of the material; besides Sylvan, I loathe Amanda Lehmann's lead vocal on Ripples- the
arrangement forces her to sing in far too low a key for her voice in the verses; and the chorus, instead of soaring, falls flat. I also thought the guitar was mixed a little too far back there. On the other hand, I loved the new recording of Hierophant, with an excellent performance from Lehmann, and an excellent boost of energy from all of the instrumentalists; and most of the songs fall more towards the latter than the former in terms of how much I enjoy them.
Good album overall. Pity they couldn't have gotten even a few more starring guests as vocalists or instrumentalists - Annie Haslam, Steve Howe, or Jon Anderson would've been cool. Heck, drag Peter Gabriel out of his interminable I/Omixing sessions, and get him to sing Ripples- I've always thought his more hoarse voice would've worked better for that song than Phil's (although Phil did do a good job of it on the 1980 tour). The album stands quite well as is, though.
lyra99rs.gmail.com (04/13/15)
Holy crap, this is WAY better than I thought it would be!
As much as I love the music of Genesis (they're one of my favourite bands of all time), my biggest problem with it is that it always
seems too quiet, no matter how you turn up the volume. And this, with the very modern professional production, just about wipes out that
issue entirely.
Steve Hackett is in absolute top form here, I think he sounds better than ever. The guitar work on almost every track is an improvement.
The rest of the band is solid, except for the vocalists occasionally. Some are wise and some otherwise, if you know what I'm getting
at.
My favourites on this album are Supper's Ready, The Lamia, Entangled, Ripples (though the vocalist is way too hoarse), and Shadow of
the Hierophant.
Best song: uh...
As a live album, though, there are different standards to apply, and thus there are some nits to pick that I could overlook
with the DVD. I feel like somewhat of an ingrate to note such a thing, but these are the third live renditions in six years
(courtesy of the second disc of Out of the Tunnel's Mouth and Live Rails) of "Blood on the Rooftops," "Fly on
the Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974" and "Firth of Fifth," and while I enjoy them plenty they're done pretty much
identically to before (except that Sylan sings "Firth of Fifth" here whereas O'Toole had sung it previously). This is also
the second rendition of "Los Endos" in four years (Live Rails again), and it's done pretty much identically to
before, aside from the way that the "Moonlit Knight" excerpt from before is swapped out (it's unnecessary given that a full
version of that song occurs earlier in the show) for an excerpt from "Slogans" (I do take some enjoyment at the fact that
Hackett made sure to include a little bit of his non-Genesis solo material in his show, even though much of his audience had
probably never heard a lick of it). That said, there is a really nice touch near the end of having Sylvan come back to sing the "Supper's Ready" reprise from the end of the original studio version. The material that appeared on GRII is essentially done here in a manner identical
to how it was done on that album, and the one substantial change (using a single lead vocalist on "Supper's Ready" rather
than the lineup used on the GRII version) doesn't strike me as an improvement (I like Sylvan plenty, but being the
sole vocalist on a version of "Supper's Ready" is a terrific responsibility, and I'm not sure he totally lives up to it). It
was a nice touch to open with "Watcher of the Skies," yes, and including "I Know What I Like" and "Dance on a Volcano"
(again, close to the original versions, not the novelty versions of GR) helps to fill out the show well, but they don't
feel like the most adventurous of choices.
For all of this, though, I feel like I'm somewhat missing the forest for the trees, and the forest is: "Holy cow, it's a
Steve Hackett live album with all of this awesome Genesis stuff in 2013!!!" I mean, who would have thought that I'd be so
happy to hear half of Wind and Wuthering done in a live setting at this late a date? Who would have thought that
"Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" or "The Lamia" or "Shadow of the Hierophant" or "Supper's Ready" would come back to the
stage at this point with a prominent member of Genesis involved? And besides, Hackett tears it up; he'd always been skilled
at adding little improvements to this material back when he'd been with Genesis, and this skill had only improved through
time.
Overall, I enjoy this album a great deal when I listen to it, but I feel like I would value it more if GRII didn't
already exist. A good comparison for this album, in my mind, is the Roger Waters live album In the Flesh that he put
out in 2000, which documented a tour where he played a number of old Pink Floyd songs plus a sampling of his solo work (and
which I would love if it weren't for the final song, which I dislike a great deal). Here's the thing, though: Waters hadn't
just put out a corresponding album where he'd re-recorded a bunch of old Pink Floyd songs with his touring band, and thus
the new renditions had a strong feeling of being necessary on some level. The renditions here are necessary in a way, yes,
but with a big asterisk, and that's the main reason I can't rate this higher, even if part of me loves this album.
Regardless, if you liked GRII, you'll almost certainly like this, and it's worth getting (especially since, again,
the DVD of the same show comes with it).
Best song: Ripples
The other performances are great, of course, even if I find myself missing a bunch of the stuff from Hammersmith that was dropped to make room for the "new" stuff here (it's weird to imagine a world in which "Blood on the Rooftops" somehow became overplayed, but I guess it finally happened to Hackett and O'Toole). Every official recording of "Supper's Ready," especially at this late of a date, is a treasure in its own way (Hackett's ending solo goes a little over the top of a little over the top, but I don't mind), and everything here is worth coming back to once in a while even if somebody already has a copy of Hammersmith. And yet, the slight inescapable sense that Hackett had overplayed his hand with the GR tour occupies the album nearly from start to finish, and while that's not a crippling blow, it's enough to make me like this one a smidge less than Hammersmith (which caught this tour in ascent as opposed to its inevitable plateau and decline). If you liked Hammersmith, you may as well get this one too, but you'll probably give it a listen or two and then forget about it.
Best song: Dust And Dreams / Heart Song or Midnight Sun
In terms of how this album actually sounds, it's still basically in the same vein as most typical late-period Hackett, but it also gives me the sense that Hackett listened to Voyage of the Acolyte a lot of times while making this and felt it necessary in some way to get back to his "pure" prog roots a bit more (another good comparison would be the long instrumental breaks in "Emerald and Ash"). The tracks that are meant to be medium-length "epics" tend to take pretty solid core material and pad them out with LOTS of long and complicated instrumental breaks that generally sound great for a little while but end up striking me as completely excessive, even though I'm generally partial to such things. "Wolflight" starts off with some great Mid-Eastern-tinged guitar flourishes (and then bits that sound like they're out of the soundtrack to a Tim Burton movie) before going into a nice anthem/ballad cross that sounds like typical solid late-period Hackett (lots of acoustic guitar, lots of orchestra-ish synths), but the guitar-driven passages, as entertaining as they might be at any given individual moment, are just too much of a good thing. The 9-minute "Love Song to a Vampire" is damned beautiful and atmospheric and decadent in the main song portion, but again, there's too much song and too many instrumental breaks that are too similar in overall effect to hold my attention for the whole length. "Corycian Fire" starts off quiet and mystic, but then it turns into something pretty close to "A Life Within a Day" in terms of trying to milk the vibe of "Kashmir" pretty hard, and while I like the speedy licks that underpin the final passage, I find the bombastic choir pretty ridiculous.
Not all of the longer tracks make me feel this uneasy, fortunately. "The Wheel's Turning" starts off with a goofy dark dose of circus music like something off of To Watch the Storms or Wild Orchids, and it morphs into a surprisingly memorable and cheery song, but instead of trying to wreck the rest of the song, the instrumental passages are varied enough in a fun way (complete with a great and all-too-brief harmonica break) to make me enjoy it a lot. "Black Thunder" alternates between quiet and graceful passages, on the one hand, and pounding hard rock licks (with a really fascinating guitar sound in its best moments), on the other, and while it probably shouldn't last more than seven minutes, it's still a lot of fun. And the closing combination of "Dust and Dreams" and "Heart Song" makes for a rousing conclusion; "Dust and Dreams" is one of Steve's best dalliances with Middle Eastern music, as he creates an intoxicating instrumental that often reminds me of the dance of a coiled cobra before a snake charmer, and the way it so seamlessly connects with the love balladry of "Heart Song" serves as a great example as to why I find his solo work so enjoyable at times.
Of course, as often happens with Hackett solo albums, I find myself drawn most to the material that was probably not front and center in Steve's mind as he was putting together the album. "Earthshine" is a delightful acoustic instrumental on an album that badly needs one of Hackett's delightful acoustic instrumentals, as is the bonus track "Pneuma," which is basically in the same vein but a little more subdued in mood. "Loving Sea" comes within a hair of sounding exactly like Simon and Garfunkel, and it's so cheery and memorable and so unexpected that it perks me up and makes me happy every time I hear it. And finally, the remaining bonus track, "Midnight Sun," might just well be the best track on the entire disc, a song full of terrific intensity that always feels like it's not being fully unleashed, and with Hackett providing light decorative texture in the background until it's unleashed just enough for about 30 seconds in the middle.
In the end, I do like this album, but I ended up having to try a little harder than I've become accustomed to with assimilating late-period Hackett in order to get to that point. For all of its better aspects, this is his weakest "regular" album since Darktown, and the first of his albums in the 21st century that I wouldn't necessarily consider a must listen for anybody who generally likes Hackett. Also, the cover kinda sucks.
Best song: The Cinema Show
After perhaps overdoing a good thing with well over 2 years of touring the Genesis Revisited album, this tour saw Steve make a return to functioning as a touring solo artist, with a brand new album of fresh material to promote while bringing out some old chestnuts to make people happy. The tour was promoted as a career-spanning one, with just a small amount of Genesis material, but in both cases the advertising fibbed a bit. The show (with a typical setlist for the tour) has a roughly 50/50 split between solo material and Genesis material, as opposed to the 75/25 split (in favor of solo material) that had appeared on Live Rails (where the presence of Genesis material was surprisingly high relative to previous tours), and this decision limited just how deeply Steve could dive into his back catalogue for this show. Indeed, in the solo portion, aside from 5 songs (plus an excerpt of a 6th, "Corycian Fire," in the introduction) from Wolflight ("Out of the Body," "Wolflight," "Love Song to a Vampire," "The Wheel's Turning," and "Loving Sea," all of which work better in concert than on the original album), all of the solo material here comes from the first four albums. The biggest emphasis among the older material is on Voyage of the Acolyte, which gets 4 tracks ("Star of Sirius," "Ace of Wands," "A Tower Struck Down" and "Shadow of the Hierophant," done in full even though most of the tour only did the final instrumental passage) that are tackled with great verve. Otherwise, there's one Please Don't Touch track ("Icarus Ascending," which gets a passionate vocal workout from Nad Sylvan, who also sings on "Star of Sirius" in addition to all of the Genesis material in the second half of the set), three Spectral Mornings tracks (the typical ones: the title track, "Every Day," and "Clocks" as the encore), and one from Defector ("Jacuzzi," done as a duet between Steve on acoustic guitar and his brother John on what appears to be a bass flute). Overall, the solo performances are done with great enthusiasm (even after they'd been toured for a few months at this point), as if Steve and the band were happy to be mixing things up again, and if anything I might be upset that there isn't more of it were the Genesis performances not such a blast.
Indeed, the Genesis portion might not have exactly been what people who had missed the Genesis Revisited tours might have expected, but it's an incredibly entertaining stretch, and the presence of so many fresh inclusions is part of what makes me rate this live album pretty highly. Aside from "The Musical Box" (which closes the main set) and "Firth of Fifth" (the second and final encore), which the band included because there might have been a riot if they didn't, the band goes the route of including tracks that hadn't made the cut in any interation of the Genesis Revisited shows (and that says something, as they hadn't left many obvious stones unturned over the course of two years). "Get 'Em Out By Friday" is a delight, with different band members taking on the vocal roles of different characters (Sylvan takes on the main parts, O'Toole sings parts that belong to The Winkler, and Hackett delivers the song's crucial height-limiting announcement), and the band winds its way through the various complexities with aplomb. "Can-Utility and the Coastliners" then makes an appearance and continues its amazing journey of proving my ass wrong about not really liking it at first (I still stubbornly consider the original studio version the worst version of it I've heard, but every other version I've heard of it, whether Hackett solo, or in old Genesis bootlegs, has been great, so I feel kinda silly at this point); the keyboard swells in the middle over the rhythm work are amazing here. Then there's a surprise; "After the Ordeal" (which Steve had always loved but other people in Genesis hated, especially Tony Banks, so it was never played live) makes an appearance here, and it culminates in a lengthy slow guitar back-and-forth between Hackett and Roine Stolt (of Flower Kings fame), who plays bass and second guitar on this live album (quite honestly, he's pretty over-matched by Hackett, but he manages to get by in his guitar parts).
Up next is "The Cinema Show," which culminates in "Aisle of Plenty" (!!!) and then segues into "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," and it all comes to about 17 minutes of total bliss for me. The way the band tackles the lengthy instrumental passage that caps off the song fascinates me; remember, in live performances during the 70s, Hackett would leave the stage during these parts (it became a Collins/Banks/Rutherford trio, with Bruford/Thompson later getting integrated in), and while I didn't expect to see something analogous here (a non-stop Roger King solo for 7 minutes would be amusing but somewhat awkward), I wasn't really sure how they would adapt. The solution was obvious, and after the fact I felt silly for not thinking of it either; King is definitely the star, but the second featured player of this section is Rob Townsend (the band's resident woodwind player), and the alternation between his soprano sax parts and King's keyboard parts (Hackett himself merely limits himself to the rhythm parts that Rutherford would have played) is enough to turn me into a puddle. And hey! "Aisle of Plenty" is still a perfect way to cap the song off, and "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" sounds about as great with Sylvan singing and King playing as it would with Collins singing and Banks playing (Gabriel singing and Banks playing is still the ideal, of course).
I wouldn't want Hackett to start releasing live albums after every major solo tour going forward, of course, but as a way to document that he and his band still could bring the heat when not playing the Genesis standards every night, I find this album pretty essential. Any Hackett fan should get this.
Best song: Other Side Of The Wall maybe
I want to be cautious in my criticism; I wouldn't quite classify any of the tracks on here as bad, and I certainly wouldn't mind coming back to individual tracks on here from time to time, even the ones that most aggressively contribute to the overall sense of boredom that I get from the whole. It's just that the tracks that are clearly meant to be the most important ones are ones where I inevitably end up rolling my eyes a bit; a good example is the opening "Behind the Smoke," where Steve goes back to the Mid-Eastern well again but with diminishing returns, and while in a sense I admire the craft that went into constructing the elaborate instrumental passages in the middle, I just can't help but think it sounds a bit ridiculous. "Fifty Miles From the North Pole" has an appropriately frosty vibe to it (and I really like the guitar sound that keeps popping up), with nice subtle guitar and keyboard work in the main portions of the song, but it inevitably overreaches. "El Nino" features active drumming over the overly-dramatic synths, and Steve's guitar is always fun to listen to when he's crafting aggressively minimalist passages, but I feel like I would have gotten more out of this track on a different album. "Inca Terra" is a lovely bit of atmospheric balladry in the song portions, and I kinda like the instrumental middle for a while, but once again, it becomes a jam that doesn't seem to know when it should be done. "In the Skeleton Gallery" gets kinda fun during the ridiculous martial mid-section, but I wish the rest of it wasn't so plodding.
Fortunately, the rest of the album, at worst, at least somewhat falls under the umbrella of what I would hope for from a 2017 Hackett album. "Martian Sea" is a fun up-tempo jaunt, this time with a mid-song instrumental passage (with overly dramatic synths) that at least doesn't overstay its welcome too much. "Other Side of the Wall" is a somewhat directionless atmospheric ballad (sweet at first, then very tense) that I wish this album had more of, somewhat in the vein of "Set Your Compass" but definitely not a clone. "Anything But Love" is style-mashing Hackett at his best, going from flamenco-like acoustic strumming to something that vaguely resembles a Fleetwood Mac imitation with a fun harmonica break, and while it inevitably goes into a guitar-heavy passage that doesn't fit, the effect is fun instead of tedious. "In Another Life" is a fun venture into Celtic music (heavily crossed with Hackett's typical style), "West to East" is a good piece of quiet balladry lifted up by a FANTASTIC anthemic chorus with a simple rising guitar line a la "Afterglow" that almost makes it my favorite on the album, and the closing "The Gift" is a gentle way to send off the album, featuring a slow winding Hackett line over the omnipresent synths.
Sadly, a few good songs don't fix my general impression of the album, which is that too much of it focuses on making big statements and too little on making sure that the statements fit and are interesting. Too much of this album centers on prominent synths that are too loud and too boring, too much of the album is slow pounding drums that don't set a solid beat but sound like they're a call to bow down, and too much of the album sounds like Hackett and his supporting cast crammed every jam they could onto the final album (that they apparently significantly edited down a lot of these jams is terrifying in and of itself). With all that, I can't quite go all the way towards calling it a clearly mediocre album, but it's definitely my least favorite effort from him in some time. Hackett really needs to go do an acoustic album or bluegrass or country or something for six months to clear his head.
Best song: Rise Again or Inside And Out
Ultimately, though, the main focus of the show was on Genesis material, and in particular (as one might guess from the album title) on Wind and Wuthering, which turned 40 during the year when this was recorded. This isn't quite as stunning a development as it might initially seem; much of what had made the Genesis Revisited tours of the previous few years such a treat had been the way he'd brought new life to that material, and while the performances of "Eleventh Earl of Mar," "Blood on the Rooftops," and "In That Quiet Earth / Afterglow" are great, they're also great in the same way that they'd been a few years previous. Where this album ultimately earns its keep (I mean, as great as the versions of "Dance on a Volcano," "Firth of Fifth," "The Musical Box" and "Los Endos" on here sound, they're not different from any corresponding versions from previous recent live albums), then, is in two tracks from the Wind and Wuthering era that had most definitely not made it onto any other Steve Hackett solo live releases. The first of these is "One for the Vine," and I'll be damned if this isn't the absolute best version of the track I've ever heard. It still has some of the same flaws deep in its marrow that the original version and various Genesis live versions through 1980 have, such as requiring some parts to be sung in falsetto that sound pretty ridiculous whether Phil Collins was singing it or Nad Sylvan is singing it here. And yet, two main features stand out that make me enjoy this a great deal: first, Steve's guitar is much more prominent in the overall mix than in any other version of the song that I've heard, and second, Nad actually sounds like he genuinely enjoys singing this, whereas I have never once been able to shake the feeling, in every version of the song that I've heard with Phil on vocals, that Phil deeply disliked the song (this is probably not true at all yet I end up believing it completely). I will never consider the song a classic, even in this performance, but I genuinely enjoy this version.
Even better, though, is "Inside and Out," which had been recorded during the W&W sessions and had been performed regularly on the ensuing tour but ultimately hadn't made the cut for the album. Maybe Nad doesn't do quite as stellar of a job in the majestic chorus as Phil did, but he does well enough, and both the main song (which I finally realized is about a guy having his life ruined after a false imprisonment for rape) and the closing jam are done admirably.
All in all, this live album feels somewhat redundant on the whole, even with the small number of surprises, yet it is still a great deal of fun in the moment, and it shows that Steve and his band could deliver well even in their ever-advancing years. Steve probably has too many live albums at this point, but live Steve Hackett is always a lot of fun, and fans of this era shouldn't be too disappointed (at least, as long as they don't mind the ever-shrinking share of Steve Hackett solo material).
Best song: come on
I essentially enjoy this album of course, because I'm me and this album is basically catnip for me, but I have some questions about its necessity even beyond the general necessity questions in what has now become a daunting pile of late-period live albums. I very much like the idea of live performances with an orchestra, but I also recognize that there are varying degrees of success in integrating an orchestra, and this performance is on the low end of success in that regard. For much of this set, I genuinely forget the orchestra is even there: there are certainly some times when they do a lot (the celebratory fanfares in the final section of "Supper's Ready," or the coda to "Shadow of the Hierophant," as examples), but more often the orchestra feels redundant to me. In terms of successfully integrating the orchestra into the arrangements, this performance doesn't come close to what Yes accomplished almost 20 years earlier (my gold standard in this regard) or Moody Blues concerts from the 90s (Red Rocks and Royal Albert Hall aren't flawless representations of this but they did really well), or even what Deep Purple pulled off back in 2011. It feels very much like the product of some half-baked spit-balling along the lines of "hey wouldn't it be neat if we got an orchestra to help play 'Firth of Fifth' or 'Supper's Ready'" but nothing more concrete than that, and I have to wonder if this thought crossed anybody's mind but the process was too far along to call it off.
In a certain sense, every officially recorded live performance from Hackett at this point is a gift (and I should mention that this is the final live album to feature Gary O'Toole on drums and occasional vocals), but for an album that should have such a strong selling point, it also feels weirdly forgettable to me. I like that exists, but I don't see myself seeking it out again any time soon.
Best song: Hungry Years
And yet, with all of this album's ten tracks, if I had to decide if I liked the track or not, I'd almost certainly have to say yes in every case. My favorite of the bunch was probably meant as one of the album's lesser inclusions, but "Hungry Years" is interesting in the general way that attracted me to late-period Hackett; it starts off as an upbeat pop ballad with a chipper guitar line, but then at about the 3-minute mark it turns into a darkly majestic anthem with great Hackett soloing, and if any song from this album could have easily slotted into any of Hackett's late-period peaks it would have been this one.
Among the other nine tracks, three of them are instrumentals, and they're all good but somewhat unremarkable. The opening "Fallen Walls and Pedestals" serves a function similar to "Out of the Body" from Wolflight, creating a mood of dark majesty laced with Hackett doing his typical workouts on guitar while drums pound loudly, and my feelings on it are pretty neutral but tipped slightly towards enjoying it just because I'm a sucker for typical Hackett guitar workouts. Near the end of the album, "Descent" is an adaptation of the "Mars" rhythm that I'd probably be more excited to hear if Hackett hadn't already done such a good job of adapting that rhythm on Metamorpheus, but maybe Hackett and King decided that everybody had forgotten that album existed so it was worth doing this anyway. I like it fine, but it will never be one of my favorite Hackett instrumentals. And after "Descent" comes "Conflict," which I guess serves as a sort of bookends piece to the album opener, and while I think it's nice in its own right, I always find my mind drifting by the time we get to this point of the album.
This leaves the six tracks with vocals, and while I like them all I definitely don't view them as the rousing experiences that Hackett and crew clearly intended. "Beasts in Our Time" starts off as an absolutely lovely acoustic ballad augmented by serious keyboards and woodwind flourishes, but then it goes in all sorts of directions that don't fit together (such as another passage that sounds like something from a Danny Elfman score) and inevitably turns into another guitar jam (not at all remarkable by Hackett standards) that was no doubt edited down from longer passages into something vaguely resembling coherency but not getting there. "Under the Eye of the Sun" starts off as a pop-rocker with some very memorable guitar lines (that brief line that opens the song might be my favorite moment on the album), then eventually meanders into a quieter section that doesn't really fit the song before returning to passages built around the great pop-rocker that started the whole thing; at 5 minutes this might have been my favorite song on the album, but 7 minutes is too much. "Underground Railroad" is a great idea for a late-period Hackett song, a gospel song turned into a fine dark acoustic song with bits of Hackett on harmonica that eventually turns into an anthemic coda, but I kinda wish he'd been able to fight the urge to then graft so much in the way of overly ornate instrumental passages to it; I can easily envision a trimmed down version of this that would have fit cleanly on Wild Orchids, but here there's just a bit too much stuff in the song.
Speaking of too much stuff, "Those Golden Wings" is over 11 minutes, and "Shadow of the Hierophant" it is not. It has some parts that are absolutely beautiful, especially that chorus melody in the first couple of minutes (which appears again later), and I generally like all of the individual parts of the song as they appear, but my brain ends up treating the majority of this as something like one of the more bloated songs on Wolflight ("Corycian Fire" comes to mind most for me, not in terms of melody similarity but in terms of stuffing too many things into the song for it to hold), and I inevitably find myself checking the timestamp of the song a few times whenever I play this.
As for the other two, "Shadow and Flame" is an exercise in creating an Indian-tinged pop song with big bombastic drums and a fun sitar part that I probably would have enjoyed more on another album and with slightly less overbearing production, and the closing "Peace" starts off as a quiet piano ballad (with a choir popping in to coax it into considering becoming more) that turns into a slow majestic anthem with a slow winding guitar line thrown in for good measure. And unfortunately, as much as I wish as I could come up with more to say about each of these songs, this album is a case where the combination of these songs together with these production choices (I'd be curious to see if there are any clues to this in the .wav forms, but I find this album somewhat oppressive in a way that I didn't find his albums through 2012) ends up dulling my reactions to the individual songs considerably. As of 2019, I have no idea if this will end up as his last studio album, and while he could certainly do worse than to go out on "Peace" if it should come to that, I find myself bummed that the Hackett of the late 10s took on a form like this, one that is nowhere near as intriguing to me as was the Hackett of the 00s.
Best song: uh
So should I give this a lower grade than I do? Hell no! It's great performances of material from albums that I love, plus burn-the-house-down renditions of "Dance on a Volcano" and "Los Endos" at the end (finally seeing a rendition of "Los Endos" in person was an experience I'll never forget, and this version reflects the lived experience well), plus good enough performances of contemporary solo material to temper it at least a little bit as a cash-in, so that's good enough for me. Yes, on a certain level, this album is kinda pointless, but hell, nobody's forcing me to buy it or enjoy it.
Best song: Casa Del Fauno maybe
Something that largely differentiates this from previous acoustic efforts is that, as had mostly been the case going back into the late 90s, this album consists mostly of collaborations with Roger King, not solo Hackett compositions per se, and while Steve exclusively sticks to various forms of non-electric guitar (the guitar credits are nylon guitar, steel guitar, 12-string guitar, and Iraqi oud), the keyboards are in line with what King uses on most Hackett albums in this era. Along these lines, the opening "Mdina (The Walled City)" initially put me a bit off from the album, in that I feared for a bit that this would end up solely as a bunch of "regular" Hackett/King compositions (just instrumental), but fortunately, I was wrong (and for what it's worth I came to like the opener quite a bit, even if I don't think it necessarily should be 9 minutes long). King is certainly present on this album, but on the whole he recedes into the background much more than typically happens, and instead the focus is primarily Hackett's guitar and various string and woodwind (including a tar and a duduk) parts. Furthermore, as suggested by the title of the album, this album does indeed center around the Mediterranean, and Steve makes sure that his focus doesn't stick exclusively to the European side of the Mediterranean. The various tracks here aren't exactly programmatic depictions of various regions and prominent locations (even though I would observe that the liner notes for this album provide a brief look at Steve's mindset and inspiration for each track), but they each effectively capture a mood and a sense of place that is particular to the inspirational region in each track. If I had to pick a favorite on the album, I'd probably go with "Casa del Fauno," which features contributions from both John Hackett and Rob Townshend on flute, but I'd also have to give some serious consideration to "Dervish and the Djin" which immediately follows it (if you listen to the track you'll quickly get a sense of why he gave it the title he did).
As with Hackett's other acoustic albums, this one isn't exactly one where I'm inclined to try and produce track-by-track thoughts, but it is one that certainly makes me feel happy every time I hear something from it, and that means something. In a certain sense, it might not make sense to rate this higher than Bay of Kings or Momentum, but then again, the fact that this is less of a "pure" classical guitar album than those two means that Steve has found a way to blend his acoustic guitar love into his eclectic tendencies, and that makes me very happy. I'm still not much of a fan of Steve's final stretch of studio albums on the whole, but if he incorporated more material like this, I'd feel more warmly towards it.
Best song: ehn
Things start of fairly promising, with "Natalia" building a fortress of keyboard sounds around a touching song about a Russian woman who suffers an unfortunate fate, and while there are stretches of menacing instrumental passages that are of a variety that I've gotten kinda bored with from Steve, the track is certainly much better than not. Following it, though, is "Relaxation Music for Sharks," which I would basically summarize as a collection of 30 second instrumental passages that I would enjoy individually but that just leave me feeling baffled when put together. Then comes "Wingbeats," which briefly features a simple but beautiful guitar line of the kind that's a hallmark of so much of his best material, but which comes in the context of what I'm sure was a well-intended foray into world music but instead sounds in parts to me like a leftover from the Lion King soundtrack, and it's ... ok I guess. And so it goes from there, with my attention only sporadically roused by something like "Oh hey Nad Sylvan is actually on this album" ("The Devil's Cathedral") or "boy this bit really sounds like a rewarmed bit from 'The Sleepers'" ("Held in the Shadows") or "boy I really wish they had found a way to not use blatant Autotune here" ("Fox's Tango"). I will say that "Scorched Earth" (the penultimate track) has a melancholy lilt to it that I enjoy immensely, with an overall arrangement approach that's kept sparse enough for the song to not get run over, and I definitely wish there had been more material like this on here.
The funny thing about all of this, though, is that if I put this on but don't actually pay attention to it in any detail, my overall feeling towards the album significantly goes up. As I said before, the individual ingredients for this album are by absolutely no means bad ones, and when this album is treated less as a collection of individual, meticulously created tracks, and more as an odd splash of different colors thrown onto a sonic canvas, it almost works for me. Unfortunately, even the least bit of effort from me as a listener makes it clear to me that this album was 100% created from the angle of laboriously crafting individual tracks, and it's largely because of this that the album falls flat for me. I give this as high of a grade as I do because in no way do I hate it, but at the same time, if the over/under on the number of additional times I'll listen to this album again in my life was set at 1.5, I'd pound the under like it owed me money.
Voyage Of The Acolyte - 1975 Charisma
C
(Very Good / Great)
Please Don't Touch - 1978 Charisma
8
(Good / Mediocre)
*Spectral Mornings - 1979 Charisma*
D
(Great / Very Good)
Defector - 1980 Charisma
A
(Very Good / Good)
Cured - 1981 Charisma
6
(Mediocre)
Highly Strung - 1982 Charisma
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Bay Of Kings - 1983 Lamborghini Records
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Till We Have Faces - 1984 Lamborghini Records
9
(Good)
GTR (GTR) - 1986 Arista
4
(Bad / Mediocre)
Feedback 86 - 2000 Camino
5
(Mediocre / Bad)
Momentum - 1988 Start
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Time Lapse - 1992 Camino
A
(Very Good / Good)
Guitar Noir - 1993 Camino
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Blues With A Feeling - 1994 Camino
9
(Good)
There Are Many Sides To The Night - 1995 Camino
A
(Very Good / Good)
Watcher Of The Skies: Genesis Revisited - 1996 Guardian
7
(Mediocre / Good)
The Tokyo Tapes - 1998 Camino
9
(Good)
A Midsummer Night's Dream - 1997 EMI
9
(Good)
Dark Town - 1999 Camino
8
(Good / Mediocre)
To Watch The Storms - 2003 Camino
A
(Very Good / Good)
Metamorpheus - 2005 Camino
9
(Good)
Wild Orchids - 2006 Camino
A
(Very Good / Good)
Out Of The Tunnel's Mouth - 2009 InsideOut
C
(Very Good / Great)
Live Rails - 2011 InsideOut
B
(Very Good)
Beyond The Shrouded Horizon - 2011 InsideOut
C
(Very Good / Great)
A Life Within A Day (Squackett) - 2012 Esoteric Antenna
A
(Very Good / Good)
Genesis Revisited II - 2012 Inside Out Music
B
(Very Good)
Genesis Revisited: Live At Hammersmith - 2013 Inside Out Music
A
(Very Good / Good)
Genesis Revisited: Live At The Royal Albert Hall - 2014 Inside Out Music
9
(Good)
Wolflight - 2015 Century Media
9
(Good)
The Total Experience: Live In Liverpool - 2016 Inside Out
A
(Very Good / Good)
The Night Siren - 2017 Inside Out
7
(Mediocre / Good)
Wuthering Nights: Live In Birmingham - 2018 Inside Out
9
(Good)
Genesis Revisited Band & Orchestra: Live At The Royal Festival Hall - 2019 Inside Out
8
(Good / Mediocre)
At The Edge Of Light - 2019 Inside Out
8
(Good / Mediocre)
Selling England By The Pound & Spectral Mornings: Live At Hammersmith - 2020 Inside Out
A
(Very Good / Good)
Under A Mediterranean Sky - 2021 Inside Out
9
(Good)
Surrender Of Silence - 2021 Inside Out
7
(Mediocre / Good)