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Rating: In 1970, the Van Der Graaf Generator had just come off their debut album from the previous year, "The Aerosol Grey Machine," a good record but still too raw and searching for a precise stylistic direction. Everything changed within a few months with the addition to the lineup led by the necromancer Peter Hammill of saxophonist David Jackson and bassist Nick Potter, completing the formation alongside Guy Evans (drums) and Hugh Banton (organ and piano) and creating with this work the first jewel of the trilogy of progressive masterpieces that would culminate with the epochal "Pawn Hearts."
A cold breath of wind falls on a desolate and inert landscape, it's "Darkness 11/11" forcefully breaking in with its monolithic bass lines marking the structured, swirling, and powerful rhythms of the drumming, over the backdrop of dark, solemn, and sinister organ sounds. Jackson's delirious sax and Hammill's voice flawlessly support each other, Hammill's voice ranging from suffering and subdued tones to furious screamed peaks, all of this without considering his lyrics, so atypical for the 70's prog scene, dealing in a hermetic and extraordinary way with existential discomfort, fear, anguish, and the occult. "Darkness 11/11" concludes in the chaos created by Jackson's "violated" sax. A sweet sound lightly hovers, and "Refugees" expands slow and wonderful, melancholic and dreamy, Hammill's voice reaches to touch the divine with disarming and extraordinary expressiveness. The entire band surpasses itself in intensity and cohesion, reaching a peak in the choral and celestial finale where the music itself goes to caress the faces of angels.
Solemn and ecclesiastical organ sounds open "White Hammer," dark and insistent, the bass reigning relentlessly, Jackson on winds is something unique, imposing a style that has become a school in progressive rock. Extraordinary instrumental inventions supported by Hammill's at times furious, at times shadowy and visionary voice, in the final part of the track, the sound fades and expands into a black and gloomy abyss, an electric guitar creates a violent and abrasive sound vortex followed by the powerful cadence of the drums and reached by a screaming and threatening sax solo by an inspired Jackson.
The style that characterizes the Van Der Graaf Generator not only forms with this work but remains one of the most brilliant and inspired examples of their entire history. Hammill's compositional style, gothic, poignant, and poetic, reaches a luminous and extraordinary peak in this record. The intense "Whatever Would Robert Have Said?" focused on mood changes and instrumental crescendos once again highlights the neurotic sax and Hammill's voice that effortlessly spans tones of all kinds, all supported as always by a powerful and imaginative rhythm section and touching and intimate lyrics. "Out Of My Book," shorter and less intricate and convoluted than other compositions, is orchestrated on relaxed atmospheres, a sort of calm before the storm. The sepulchral "After The Flood" closes the album, filled with decadent atmospheres describing the fate of a humanity on the brink of the abyss, near its end, the sound rich in full instrumental sections, acoustic passages, and majestic sound crescendos impregnated with an agitated progression having a dramatic impact, just like Hammill's suggestive and extraordinary vocal performance as always.
A sinister work, majestic, deeply moving and intense, one of the greatest masterpieces of progressive and music in general, as well as being one of the major masterpieces of this ingenious English formation.
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