•
Rating: "The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other" is an album that I particularly love within the Generator's discography and, in my opinion, one of their best. The previous "The Aerosol Grey Machine" was actually intended to be Hammill's solo debut even though it remains a great album, undoubtedly the favorite for those who are followers of psychedelia and do not love the excesses of progressive. In The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other, a fundamental figure that would characterize the sound of VDGG for almost their entire career enters, namely David Jackson with his legendary double sax. Needless to say, for many, Van Der Graaf was Hammill and Jackson: the departure of the latter made many fans frown, who claimed that the last incarnation of the Generator is something lopsided and imperfect.
The sound of the group tends very much towards dark and gothic atmospheres, so much so that the music proposed can be defined as a dark variant of the progressive genre: Hammill's lyrics indeed often venture into necrophilic and horrific themes, a legacy of his love for the gothic storytelling of authors such as Poe (to whom he later dedicated the solo album "The Fall of the House of Usher") and Lovecraft. The lyrics are complex, never banal, and mix science with literary references.
The beginning is aggressive right away with "Darkness": a threatening hiss of wind immediately foreshadows what we are going to face, namely a nightmare recited by Hammill's fevered voice supported by Nick Potter's bass, aggressive sax "riffs" and Banton's ghostly organ: we are immersed in an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world atmosphere. The piece would become one of their live warhorses from that period. Especially, to everyone’s surprise, VDGG were very successful in Italy where they were welcomed as real stars and became a cult band with a greater following than in England. Even today, they have no issues admitting that if it hadn't been for Italy, their story would have been different. With "Refugees", we are faced with a timeless classic of theirs, a typically Hammillian and intimate song that reaches great heights.
Then with "White Hammer", the lugubrious sound of the organ suddenly returns and slowly the unwary listener realizes that there is no escape, the lyrics take you back in time to the horrors of the Inquisition, and the atmosphere is more than ever suicidal and barely comforting with a delirious finale supported by Jackson's sax and a black mass organ. We then return to an apparent calm with the magnificent bucolic scene of "Out of my Book" which features the use of acoustic guitar and the more aggressive "Whatever Would Robert Have Said". It closes with "After the Flood", the longest track, as proof that the group was adapting to the duration canons of the era: it is one of the first mini-suites that we will also hear in the subsequent "H to He - Who Am the Only One".
While not their masterpiece (that remains "Pawn Hearts"), this is perhaps the VDGG album I prefer: the gothic and delirious "feeling", alternating with quieter and more intimate moments, has always hypnotized me and made the music of these grooves unforgettable.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Darkness (11/11) (07:27)
Day dawns dark, it now numbers infinity.
Life crawls from the past, watching in wonder
I trace its patterns in me.
Tomorrow's tomorrow is birth again.
Boats burn the bridge in the fens;
the time of the past returns to my life
and uses it.
Don't blame me for the letters that may form in the sand;
don't look in my eyes, you may see all the numbers
that stretch in my sky and colour my hand.
Don't say that I'm wrong in imagining
that the voice of my life cannot sing.
Fate enters and talks in old words:
they amuse it.
Hands shine darkly and white;
only in dark do they appear.
Bless the baby born today,
flying in pitch, flying on fear.
They shine in my eyes and touch my face
where I have seen them placed before;
don't blame me, please, for the fate that falls:
I did not choose it.
I did not, no, no, I did not,
I truly did not choose it.
02 Refugees (06:22)
(Hammill)
North was somewhere years ago and cold:
Ice locked the people's hearts and made them old.
South was birth to pleasant lands, but dry:
I walked the waters' depths and played my mind.
East was dawn, coming alive in the golden sun:
the winds came, gently, several heads became one
in the summertime, though august people sneered;
we were at peace, and we cheered.
We walked alone, sometimes hand in hand,
between the thin lines marking sea and sand;
smiling very peacefully,
we began to notice that we could be free,
and we moved together to the West.
West is where all days will someday end;
where the colours turn from grey to gold,
and you can be with the friends.
And light flakes the golden clouds above all;
West is Mike and Susie,
West is where I love.
There we shall spend our final days of our lives;
tell the same old stories: yeah well, at least we tried.
Into the West, smiles on our faces, we'll go;
oh, yes, and our apologies to those
who'll never really know the way.
We're refugees, walking away from the life
that we've known and loved;
nothing to do or say, nowhere to stay; now we are alone.
We're refugees, carrying all we own
in brown bags, tied up with string;
nothing to think, it doesn't mean a thing,
but we'll be happy on our own.
West is Mike and Susie;
West is where I love,
West is refugees' home.
06 After the Flood (11:28)
Continuing the story, humanity stumbles -
gone is the glory, there's a far distant rumble.
The clouds have gathered and exploded now:
axes shattered, there is no North or South.
Far off, the ice is foundering slowly,
the ice is turning to water,
the ice is turning to water.
The water rushes over all
cities crash in the mighty wave;
the final man is very small,
plunging in for his final bathe.
This is the ending of the beginning,
this is the beginning of the end,
middle of the middle, mid-point, end and start:
the first peak rises, forces the waves apart.
Far off, the ice is now re-forming:
poles are fixed once more,
water's receding, like death-blood.
And when the water falls again,
all is dead and nobody lives.
And then he said:
'Every step appears to be
the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,
and in the end there beckons more and more clearly
total annihilation'
This is the ending of the beginning,
this is the beginning of the end,
And when the water falls again,
all is dead and nobody lives.
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By hobbit1
The Van Der Graaf Generator are one of the most important groups of the progressive rock movement that emerged in the early Seventies, not very famous but with a particular and highly recognizable style.
The whole is once again dominated by Hammill’s exceptional voice with its continuous tone variations, which imprints the true imprint, the VDGG brand, that dramatic, epic, decadent, and melancholic sound.
By Rocky Marciano
"A sinister work, majestic, deeply moving and intense, one of the greatest masterpieces of progressive and music in general."
"Hammill’s compositional style, gothic, poignant, and poetic, reaches a luminous and extraordinary peak in this record."
