H TO HE, WHO AM THE ONLY ONE

Only four months after The Least We Can Do was released, the band began recording their next album. Bassist Nic Potter quit the band partway through recording, and after a few attempts to replace him, organist Hugh Banton volunteered to play bass parts in the studio and to utilize the bass pedals of a Hammond organ in live settings. 

The result of these sessions was H to He, Who Am the Only One. The H to He part of the title refers to the fusion of hydrogen to helium, and such scientific themes would be visited repeatedly on this album. 

The first song, though, is about a shark. "Killer", lyrically, is awfully straightforward for a Van der Graaf Generator composition; there's not much metaphor here. In fact, this song was the result of the band taking bits of other songs and sticking them together to try to make something commercially successful. (The Least We Can Do received generally favorable reviews and cracked the UK's Top 50, but major success always eluded the band, at least in the Anglosphere.) 

The main riff of "Killer" is built equally around keys and sax, and Peter Hammill's impassioned vocals lend a lot of weight to what could (potentially) be a pretty dumb song. Across the piece's eight-plus minutes, the mood remains nervous and sinister, though one will notice the occasional flash of major-key brightness.

In contrast, the following "House with No Door" is a simple composition. A piano-based ballad, it was the last song recorded for this album, which makes the closing bass solo feel like something of a weird middle finger to Nic Potter. I don't know if it was intended as such, but that's how it feels to me. 

"The Emperor in His War Room" is a fantastic song that mixes the band's capacities for both understated anxiety and snarling bombast. Jackson's flute is both delicate and piercing in turn, and the rest of the band also matches this oscillation. The blistering guitar solo in this song's midsection is played by Robert Fripp of King Crimson. VdGG's producer knew Fripp, and they wanted him to be the one to perform the solo.

Following the political drama of the preceding cut, "Lost", thematically, is much smaller in scale. It's a fairly simple song of lost love, but it's a simple love song wrapped in a multi-layered, jazz-infused prog opus. Jittering jazzy flute and organ triplets kick things off, and Hammill's plaintive tones add dramatic weight. Speedy instrumental moments which directly presage the modern micro-genre of brutal prog punctuate the spaces between the slow, melancholic verses. The climax is a swirling maelstrom of Hammill's voice, heavily percussive piano chords, and rumbling saxophone.

H to He ends on its strangest song. "Pioneers over c" is a song about astronauts going through a black hole and experiencing time dilation. Rush explored this theme in "Cygnus X-1" in 1977, and Queen touched on it as well in "'39" off 1975's A Night at the Opera, but Van der Graaf Generator beat them both to the punch.

A woozy, airy organ and a quiet, pitter-pattering tom pattern open this song on a hypnotic note. After some tense, swelling organ chords, a jagged sax-and-bass-forward riff crops up, only to be supplanted by a lonely acoustic guitar. There are a lot of ideas in this song, and it was stitched together in the studio from many, many recordings, making it difficult to perform live. This wealth of ideas works in its favor at times, but it can also come off as disjointed and unfocused in other moments.

When H to He was reissued on CD in 2005, a pair of bonus tracks were included. One was an early demo of "The Emperor in His War Room", but the other is a complete reworking of "Octopus" off their debut. Recorded during the sessions for their next album, this is a massive improvement over the song's first iteration. It had been honed and developed in live settings, and now it was a 15-minute monster called "Squid 1/Squid 2/Octopus". This is probably my favorite VdGG song, and it's a pity it never got a proper release back in the day.

Acoustic guitar leads with a sense of yearning in the first minute of this piece. The relative warmth and hope of this section is soon ripped away as the band launches into a dark groove. Guy Evans's drumming holds everything together as Banton's organ and Jackson's saxes battle it out against each other. After about five minutes of jamming, the band comes back together for the second verse. Hammill's voice is more impassioned here, and there's a growing sense of anxiety. The second instrumental passage is darker and more doom-laden than the first. Banton's organ sounds like a hellish demon, and the saxophones squeal and twist, aided by various audio effects. As the song reaches its climax in the third verse, Hammill sounds demented, and the closing minute is downright apocalyptic.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2023/07/10/deep-dive-van-der-graaf-generator/