ALT

This album seems to be difficult to digest. Firstly, any album that deviates so strongly from whatever is seen as the usual kind of thing a band does will have a hard time with the fans; a songwriter and singer like Peter Hammill doesn't sing and doesn't write his trademark songs, where should this end? And then this is the kind of experimental probably largely improvised instrumental album without conventional melodies and songs that doesn't give most people enough to cling to.

I will give this four stars but the reader should know that I'm quite used to very experimental music defying conventional structures; this certainly isn't for everyone.

But I think that in order to rate this fairly, it has to be assessed against what it sets out to be, rather than what fans would have expected from the band. So I try to approach this as experimental music not taking into account that there is a long back story behind it, and a voice that doesn't sing.

Compared with much experimental and improvised music I know, this is quite heterogeneous. There is a big variety of textures and approaches here, from slow at times dark electronic spaces (Dronus, D"Accord) over noisy outbreaks (Tuesday the Riff), subtle and relaxed atmospheres (Earlybird), something more jazzy (Repeat After Me), the nervous synthesizer riff in Batty Loop, to the warm somewhat cheesy organ in Midnite Or So. There are some calmer songs but the "mainstream of the album" has pretty loud drums in the foreground coupled with rich and versatile keyboard parts between rock organ and more unsettling and atonal stuff (Splendid is fairly typical). A guitar is only very occasionally to be heard.

The heterogeneity and the omnipresence of the mighty drums makes for a very rock band-like approach to experimental music, giving the listener some proper beats and rhythms at least and being somewhat anxious to fill the album with enough ideas. I think if they'd go down the experimental route for longer, they would probably aim at producing something more consistent and stripped to the essentials than this. However, this is not meant as a criticism. The music as it is mostly works very well and manages to occupy a very unique space between avantgarde, improvised and rock music, striking a good balance between rhythm, structure (motifs, moods, patterns) and chaos. Had I not known that it's VDGG, I would probably have thought that this is a charmingly naive and youthful shot at avantgarde music. I'd have thought that such a band perhaps later would want to settle with a more consistent style but for the moment I'm happy enough with the variety that we got here.

The main quality of this album is that it generates some really good atmospheres and moments, and that it's lively and animated all the time. There is really much to explore here. I prefer this to much free experimental music for its richness, but also for the quality of many of the ideas.

The drums may be mixed too far in the foreground (Hammill and VDGG are somewhat prone to strange mixing, and some of these unusual sounds grow with time), and there may be the odd part that is rather forgettable, but overall I take my hat off to the adventurous approach of the band here and think that it is quite a success.