that I hated passionately on first listen, only to change my tune considerably upon revisiting them, next to anything Return to Forever and the Santana/John McLaughlin Coltrane/Mormon/Hindu/Scientology album.*
The opening is especially worthwhile, with Hammill in weirdly subdued ASMR half-whisper mode and the band for once actually living up to that review of theirs I read someone over a decade ago that claimed that they "floated." It's obvious that the main thing that the band has gained in their hiatus is subtlety - these songs have valleys and peaks and Hammill is as hammy as ever in places, but there's a whole lot less emphasis on bashing you over the head with emotion and bombast - put one way, the band has learned how to be dramatic without being (too) melodramatic. That leads to an album that works far better as a cohesive whole than anything they'd yet put their name to, even if the songs themselves are less distinct as individual entities (I haven't acertained exactly where "The Undercover Man" ends and "Scorches Earth" begins and I think the band may want it that way.)
A positive that might have to do with the loosening of a certain ego's grip on the proceedings, or simple mixing desk choices, but which makes the whole experience far more enjoyable, is that for the first time on a Van De Graaf album, it is entirely possible, for at least the first three songs, to listen without picking up more than a handful of the words PH is putting down: on the previous three albums, and especially Pawn Hearts, the listener was made all too aware of the individual words Hammy was using, and maybe even gleaned a general idea of the concepts he was trying to put forward - for worse, always for worse. I'm on my second listen of the past hour to Godbluff and I still haven't the foggiest what our man Pete is blathering on about on "The Undercover Man" (dice?) or "Arrow" (uh...archery?) and the production and arrangements facilitate such blissful ignorance.
The main thing that separates Godbluff from its predecessors is a slight but fortuitous bump in the level of intricacy of the compositions and arrangements - prog and jazz-rock have a bad habi - for all their solos and key changes and polyrhythms - of "just keep playing that while I solo over it"-ism. It's a laziness that seems endemic to virtually all but the most self-consciously avant-prog and mathy of rock-based musics - otherwise exemplary bands from Yes to the Soft Machine to idk Banco del Mutuo Succorso have moments on even their best albums where half of the band just hits the snooze button and lapses into endless repetitive riffing like they suddenly really want to show everyone their La Monte Young influence (think the second half of "Siberian Khatru" - but the whole song shows just how goddamn - YES, I'm going there! - pretentious even the Probable Greatest Symphonic Prog Album is compared to Actual Classical and Jazz Music, which riffs and repeats but should never be static, of any substance whatsoever - bah! I don't know why I like this stuff. Guess I'm just a pretentious person.) Anyway, there's a lot more intricate little... bumpy-textured bits and asides and dual-grooves and such on Blodguff than even Porn Farts - it's close to being micromanaged in places, like a good beatmaker who remembers to throw background details behind and on top of the loops.. It's a good look for them.
*I also abruptly changed my rating from a 1 to a 3.5 for Discipline, but that's a pretentious 80s prog album whose biggest sin is a second-hand appropriation - blatantly stealing Talking Heads' blatant appropriation of... um... not Fela... just kind of the abstract concept of African music? (oh and their guitarist.)
