INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW is one of the weirder albums in the Gentle Giant canon because the fans seem to disagree on what it is. There are arguments made for INTERVIEW being seen among the classic quality as the first seven albums gave us, and there are counterpoints crying that the band took a step too far in selling out and derailed their credibility for good.

I lean on the fence with INTERVIEW. I find it neither the beginning of the end nor the end of the beginning. That may be due to that I was never enamoured by the preceding FREE HAND, finding it average instead of great. INTERVIEW falls in the same ring as FREE HAND, but there are some differences.

Notable is ''Give It Back'' where we see Gentle Giant iron reggae onto their own classic sound resulting in an off pop song only GG can pull off well. Also, the closing ''I Lost My Head'' captures the classic Giant sound in seven minutes going from a delicate beginning to a crashing climax, never losing tension once.

Everything else seems to suffer the same problems as songs on FREE HAND. Gentle Giant seems to have found a system of writing songs which works for them and repeat them ad infinitum. ''Design'' has the vocal intricacies they've been postering since ''Knots'', only less successful. ''Timing'' might as well be ''Killing Time, Part 2'', and you could compare ''Another Show'' to ''Cogs in Cogs'', etc. Gentle Giant are master instrumentalists and composers, but the group really hasn't launched a great album (chronologically speaking) since GLASS HOUSE.

Fun for the fans not familiar with Gentle Giant, but I'm a bit weary of hearing the same ideas pandered across different albums.