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Gentle Giant - Three Friends CD (album) cover

THREE FRIENDS

Gentle Giant

 

Eclectic Prog

4.13 | 1439 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Hailemon
5 stars "After the fourth one, realisation" sings Derek Shulman in the title track of Interview, Giant's eighth LP. Well, it is true that after Octopus, the fourth album, the band has found its unique angular style and went on to create such classics as In a Glass House or The Power and the Glory, but as far as I'm concerned Three Friends is their best one, the highlight in a discography full of winners and one of my favourite albums ever. Listening to the first three releases you can hear that GG are still looking for their own sound, daringly exploring countless styles and techniques and on this one they struck gold.

Three Friends is a concept album portraying three childhood friends who grow apart as they get older, all because of their different backgrounds and career choices. This is where many people criticise the LP - they tend to find the concept underdeveloped. Well, I think it's a simple but great idea. a concept album doesn't neccesarily have to be a double LP with a fully realised narrative about dragons or whatever.

The absolutely delightful music is completely unpredictable, as is often the case with GG records, and sounds fresh even today. Things kick off with the aptly titled Prologue, which is one of those songs on which the band sounds like a living and breathing Rube Goldberg machine with each member contributing a short repetitive musical phrase, cool! The otherwordly harmony vocals add to the fun. Then it's time for Schooldays, which is probably my favourite Giant composition. I can't even put into words how much I love this song; its greatness is something i cannot really comprehend. It tells about the boys' times at school and is a perfect representation of a childhood memory, at the same time familiar and yet distant and even eerie. Musically it's a very gentle affair, with vocals handled by Kerry Minnear (the band's best singer imo) accompanied by a vibraphone, a piano and a delicate jazzy guitar, with the quiet, yet precise drumming of Malcom Mortimore and some amazing bass work from Ray Shulman. Then we go on to the three songs, each describing one of the three friends as adults; we get the sweaty Working All Day (about the road worker), the wild Peel the Paint (the artist) and the clean-cut Mister Class and Quality (the white collar worker), all of them spectacular, but it's not until the closing title track that the album reaches the dizzy hights of the first two songs. Three Friends is an all too short epilogue with a brief vocal section and an instrumental coda, with a melody that seems to have come to the guys straight from heaven. Absolute bliss. It's one of those songs that you wish would go on and on, but unfortunately it's all over in three short minutes

So there you have it. GG's peak (with Glass House close behind). I'm not a person who readily gives out five stars to every excellent album (it's only my second review here, but I'm talking about principles). For me a five star album has to have that "something", that is so hard to describe, but makes you want to listen to the LP again and again without ever getting tired of it. Three Friends is certainly one of those albums.

Hailemon | 5/5 |

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