THE LEAST WE CAN DO IS WAVE TO EACH OTHER

I'd like to stress the relativity of my rating before proceeding. This is a Van Der Graaf Generator album whatever happens, but it's still their worst (with the possible exception of The Aerosol Grey Machine, but that's more of a solo album and at least it isn't as offensively substandard as this one is). Anyway, The Least..., like the other pre-Godbluff VDGG albums, is mainly a lot of freak-out psychodrama and, as awesome as that works out for Pawn Hearts, it's immature and kind of silly a lot of the time here.

Actually, Darkness is a fantastic track, no question. It's throbbing bass, ascending vocal leads and explosive sax solo make it something of an iconic VDGG moment. It works much better live, though, because it's really damaged by awful production here. Moving on, Refugees is a bombastic, sentimental ballad which is kind of cute but not great enough to enter either the pantheon of heart-wrenching VDGG anthems or that of tear-jerking PH balladry.

When filtered into his songwriting, Hammill's early fascination with the occult usually made for some surprisingly thrilling tracks like, say, Black Room. White Hammer REALLY isn't one of them. It's a simplistic, quiet/loud groove-based piece with embarrassing lyrics and a derranged but gaudy squealing sax coda. (Of course, later the band would work out how to integrate this into the actual tracks...) Anyway, it's only downhill from here; I can't think of a single notable or interesting thing about the trudge that is Whatever Would Robert Have Said, Out Of My Book is another average ballad and After the Flood is a godawful attempt at an 'epic'. I don't particularly want to go into much depth on this one, but basically, repeating 'all is dead and nobody lives' as a kind of weird glam-rock chorus is much cooler in theory than practice. Anyway, H to He is much better than this, Pawn Hearts is much better than H to He, and the 75-76 albums invalidate most of the stuff on these albums anyway.

In conclusion, while I'd love to be much nicer about the whole thing, this album is by the same band that made Godbluff. The same band that made Godbluff! And it has songs about witches! Unbelievable!