better foretold the coming of punk, the music designed to lay waste to capes, smoke machines and 43 minute noodlings. Often derided for the drama of their delivery, theirs has always been an extraordinarily intimate music. Dismissed as awkward, angular, technical, they are driven by what Hammill described as a search for “the potential for soul in music.” And written off as yesterday’s men, they return in 2008 as a slimmed down trio making some of the most vital and absorbing music released thus far this year with “Trisector”.
Faceless in one sense, for the unsuspecting listener, being confronted with Van Der Graaf in full flight for the first time is overwhelming in every sense. Hammill’s delivery verges on the operatic at times, the singer still revelling in the kind of intensity that cool culture would revile. Less a talking head, more a screaming face, Hammill has admitted that his songs are about “airing my grievances and obsessions” and he does so with a fervour and conviction that today’s audiences rarely meet head on.
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But power can be achieved by a whisper as well as a scream and Van Der Graaf are masters of light and shade as they demonstrate on
“Trisector”. The departure of saxophonist David Jackson, whilst viewed as a crippling blow by some of the faithful, has in fact opened up the music in extraordinary fashion. |
Still recognisably Van Der Graaf, much of the music has a beguiling space about it at times that makes it tellingly contemporary. Atmospheres and textures are central to the songs – the end passage of “Only In A Whisper” is a perfect example, so little happening, yet riveting. From there, you’re on to more traditional Van Der Graaf fare, the complex staccato rhythms of “All That Before”, Hugh Banton stabbing sounds from the organ, Guy Evans like a drum machine that’s fused yet still earths everything around it perfectly.
The lyrical preoccupations are of age, of mortality, of loss, understandable in a group that has been around, on and off, for 40 years. Understandable and laudable because too many of their contemporaries prefer to ignore the marching of the years and would rather celebrate their long lost youth instead. But one day, we, the audience, will be 60. I want a map for when I get there, just as in the past I looked to songs to get a feel of what being 30 would be like. “Trisector” is like getting hold of a good atlas.
Not that it’s a record of decline and fall because it stacks up well alongside the canon and the contemporary. The very instrumentation, particularly Banton’s hugely intelligent use of colour, gives it a timeless feel, that organ sound almost a call to evensong, the material often betraying a hymnal quality. It’s not the “Book of Common Prayer” set to music, but there is a spiritual core to these songs, a celebration of life at whichever end of the scale you happen to be. Few bands do dynamics like Van Der Graaf and when a blinding shaft of light suddenly leaps out at you from one of their artfully constructed black holes, as it does midway through “Over The Hill”, it’s hard not to be uplifted and not to feel as if Hammill really is singing for his life.
The search for the “potential for soul”. It’s the only musical journey worth making. |
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