PAWN HEARTS

Pawn Hearts is a very cohesive record, forty-five minutes of music that fits together?although many of its passages, taken separately, don't sound as though they could possibly be a part of anything consistent. Among the homogenizing characteristics is a pervasive, almost calculated oddness. This oddness is borne out in the lyrics, the singing, the instrumentation, and the production.

I use the term "oddness" here because Pawn Hearts isn't, in my mind, avant-garde - - it's progressive, and ultimately Van der Graaf Generator observes as many conventions as other British prog-rock bands of the time (e.g., Caravan, Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull). But chief songwriter/vocalist/guitarist/bandleader Peter Hammill makes less of an attempt than many of his contemporaries to connect directly with the listener. In that respect, Pawn Hearts has more in common with King Crimson or Pink Floyd. But it's still not as unorthodox as, say, Henry Cow.

Pawn Hearts was probably not the first album to contain two long songs on one side and one on the other, but in this respect it prefigured Close to the Edge and Relayer. Similarly, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers," which accounted for Side Two of the original vinyl release of Pawn Hearts, was not the first side-long "progressive epic." In fact, it was closer to a medley, à la Genesis's 23-minute "Supper's Ready," which appeared a year later.

But whereas the progressiveness of "Close to the Edge" is encapsulated in somewhat familiar symphonic forms, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" besieges the listener with aggressive movements interspersed with relatively calm sections. And Hammill apparently resisted the temptation to close "Plague" with an extended, uplifting resolution like that of "Close to the Edge" or "Supper's Ready."

The other two songs on the album seem to be drawn from the same well. "Lemmings (including Cog)" is a strange song, but a fitting one to open Pawn Hearts. At least in its presentation, "Lemmings" seems to be about mental health, or perhaps mental illness. Hammill sings the part of a character who may be both omniscient playwright and hapless actor in a colossal drama.

Not many rock albums open with an eleven-plus-minute track, not even many progressive rock records. By the time "Man-Erg," the second song on Pawn Hearts, begins, Side One is half over. (That's on the original Charisma LP release, and on the 2005 Caroline CD reissue I'm reviewing here.) "Man-Erg" begins calmly enough, but with a lyric which begins "the killer lives inside me." It's actually a relief when the music becomes emphatic, thus assuaging the unnerving mismatch between the music and lyrics. Not knowing much about this band, I wondered whether there was a connection between "Man-Erg" and "Killer," from their previous album, and one of two Van der Graaf Generator songs I'd heard before buying Pawn Hearts. On the other hand, killing and being killed seem to have been common themes for Hammill in the early 1970s. While the UK's official involvement in the Vietnam war was minimal, the individual's role in war may nonetheless have been among his lyrical motivations.

Along these same lines, alienation seems to be a primary, if indirect, theme of Pawn Hearts. Sure, lighthouse keepers are bound to be lonely. But most of the vocal sections of Pawn Hearts seem to be sung by characters who speak to the listener because there's no one else to speak to. Or, in a more chilling possibility, the characters, having no one to converse with, are talking to themselves - - meaning that we, the listeners, are the characters to whom we're listening.

Alienation, or maybe detachment, is also palpable in the arrangements and the production of Pawn Hearts. While truly avant- garde acts actively attempt to alienate the conservative listener, the way Van der Graaf Generator presents its work here implies a lack of awareness of the listener. I get the sense that the band (or maybe just Hammill) are making a recording for cathartic, not commercial purposes - - or even artistic ones.

Pawn Hearts is an excellent work of art, worthy of the claim that it "challenges" its audience. Four stars for an album which succeeded in making me want to here more from this band.