FLAT BAROQUE AND BERSERK

That's the best way I can describe Flat Baroque and Berserk to someone that's never heard it. There's little folk prog on this album and nothing terribly complicated, but that was the point. FBaB was Harper claiming a solid stake in the folk music world before it's appeal was forever lost to time. Unlike his British contemporaries who took acoustic folk into the world of jazz, blues, middle eastern, Indian, Moroccan and pseudo Elizabethan influences, traditional English folk, along with a 1001 alternate guitar tunings, Harper wears his American folk influences on his sleeve and owes more to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan in both song structure and lyrical styles at times.

The lead off track Don't You Grieve is a goof on the lyrics to the Guthrie folk tune Sally Don't You Grieve, but with Roy consoling good old Judas Iscariot, as it was he that had to do the dirty work in order to achieve salvation for mankind. I'm sure that this song is a nod to Nikos Kazantzakis too.

I Hate The White Man is Harper at his socially political best as he lambasts the effects of past white colonization on much of the under developed world and also to Harper's long standing grudge with the apartheid policies that were in place at that time in South Africa. The tune is catchy, but it's over the top in a way that the late Phil Ochs would hit injustices square on the head with very little nuance, but it sounds as sincere as anything ever written and sung by Ochs.

Feeling All the Saturday and Good Bye are poems from Harper's head placed into air with catchy acoustic strums and a vocal delivery that now sounds assured and steady as Harper has dropped the near falsetto that marred sections of Folkjokeopus, the fantastic sprawling epic that was released just one year earlier.

Where we get to the highlights of this album starts with the sublime and ethereal Another Day, which has more gentle acoustic strumming by Roy, but with a magnificent string score by David Bedford that places the listener squarely in the reminiscing and extremely moving frame of mind of Harper, as he recants an old flame that has come to him with the regret that she never had one of his children. Another Day is nothing less than a standard barer for the nascent 'singer songwriter' genre that would soon emerge with the likes for James Taylor and Cat Stevens. Both of whom would shorty go on to produce songs to match Another Day in emotional content, but never bettering it. It is simply one of Harper's finest recorded achievements.

East Of the Sun and Tom Tiddler's Ground both owe a heavy debt to Dylan lyrically as they are both suggestive and metaphorical, but with great accompaniment by harmonica and recorder, respectively, and are also album highlights.

Song Of The Ages sounds just like what it's title implies. It's a beautiful ballad with a harp accompaniment that's played in unison to Roy's gentle guitar lead notes and arpeggios. As with all songs on the album, Harper's vocals are another instrument that accompanies the songs.

The brief Francesca is a thank you from Harper to a free loving woman who has left him, and the subtext of love free of entanglement and guilt is prevalent in many of the songs on Flat Baroque and Berserk, as it seems that the English people were still trying to shake off the well engrained decades old Victorian morals that permeated that era.

Just incase the average rock listener has had an overdose of folk, Harper teams up with The Nice and performs a seven minute bombastic ode to living by one's own rules inside of society on album closer Hell's Angels. Partly filler, the song does rock out with Harper even playing some very good electric guitar in an enthusiastic take that must have been as fun as it sounds. Clappy's to Keith Emerson and company for not disappointing and helping to end the album with a great prog tune.

Flat Baroque and Berserk, if not a high watermark for Harper, is certainly the anchor where his former recorded work led to and where all his future efforts were launched from, including the heralded Stromcock album which followed one year later. While not technically a progressive rock album, I give FBaB the highest possible score that can be awarded to a non prog album, 4 stars.

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