Van der Graaf Generator
Vital

Eighth year of the seventh decade of the 20th century.

Progressive is now on its last legs: the King has completely abdicated, retreating into his dark court, the romantic Genesis (deprived of the Archangel and its silent and mustached minstrel) is about to disappear and get lost adrift on the waves of the pop chaos, the well-known English Agronomist has long since laid down his best flute in the drawer, the Light Machine has completely exhausted its fuel a while ago, and the Anglo-Saxon Affirmative Particle has become a negation.

Among all the mythological protagonists who characterized that strange and futuristic world called art rock, only one stands more majestic than all and still seems to condense for the last time within itself that great electrostatic charge that has always distinguished it from all other characters: we are talking about the Generator. The latter, aware of losing all its cations, anions, and electrons, leaves us as a testament one last great scientific monument and concentrates all its electric and howling madness into a billion-volt double: something dynamic, energetic, efficient, “vital”.

Although over time our electric contraption has lost some fundamental gear that was an important piece for its mad and restless energy (and here the references to the gothic keyboardist Hugh Banton are evident), its pulsing heart and its fundamental atomic core in this last album seem to regenerate entirely and get smeared with black pitch, helped by the presence of two new devices that adapt to its nuclear core: on bass, the never too lamented Nic Potter, who had already played on the group's second album, and on violin (an unusual instrument for the band) Graham Smith; unfortunately, the nevertheless important presence of the Van Gogh of the saxophone, Mr. David Jackson, is limited to a few tracks. The real electrostatic control center, however, is always him, the king of the vocal cords Peter Hammill, who here manages to reach an interpretative and vocal aggressiveness that would unsettle even the most ardent listener: his voice screams, shouts, rumbles, yells, whispers, rises threateningly. The sound is completely smeared with dirty slime, muddied with dark substances, and covered by a gloomy imaginary. This is evidenced by some pieces from the old repertoire, like a cacophonically scary “Pioneers Over C” that almost reaches twenty minutes in duration, a violent version of “Still Life” (which replaces the organ with the violin), or the interlude “Urban/Killer/Urban”, which touches the highest peaks instrumentally. But let's not limit ourselves to these three pieces; the content is vast: just think of the destructive beginning of “Ship of Fools”, the exhilarating noise of “Door”, or the old and magical “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers”, here in medley with “The Sleepwalkers”.

We might speak of Progressive, but it's not at all: the musicality is too furious and angry to be so. For this reason, we can identify “Vital” as a magical and anomalous episode in the history of Van Der Graaf Generator: if on one hand it rejects the movement in which it is usually framed, on the other it extends a hand to some genres that were emerging in those years, such as Punk and New Wave. As we well know, with the release of this album, the band will dissolve only to reunite much later. Yet the last atomic and electrostatic echo of the seventies-labeled Generator still reverberates and screams years later, releasing in everyone's memory its final black and biting electromagnetic waves.

Well, maybe there is a genre in which the live performance can be framed: Progressive-Punk or Progressive-Wave. We can therefore venture the definition of “Pronk,” which perhaps here is used for the first time not in its playful connotation to which we are usually accustomed.