GET OUT OF MY FATHER'S CAR!

As pretty much the only 70s shining example of Medieval chamber prog, GRYPHON stunned the world with its self-titled debut release in 1973 which crazily crafted a bizarre mix of English folk music with medieval and Renaissance music spruced up with the energy of rock. After a couple of progressive folk albums the band enjoyed extensive touring opportunities with bands like Yes, Steeleye Span and even the Mahavishnu Orchestra. All that exposure to the more progressive forms of rock rubbed GRYPHON in all the right ways and the band was influenced heavily as heard on the band's most lauded prog folk and rock release "Red Queen To Gryphon Three" but just as soon as the band ascended the ranks so too did it fall after a couple of less magnificent following albums.

After the dismal response of 1977's "Treason" GRYPHON called it a day and was pretty much written off as a flash in the pan from the early 70s but in 2018 the three original members Graeme Taylor (guitars), Brian Guilland (bassoon, crumhorn, sax) and Dave Oberle (drums) stunned the prog world by releasing its first album 41 years later with the critically acclaimed "Reinvention" which served as a summary of the band's five album career that straddled the mid-1970s. While many may have thought this might be a one-off project, GRYPHON returns in 2020 to prove that not only would that be a false assumption but that it didn't require another four decades to gestate another batch of material to unleash on the prog world and much like the legendary mythological creature that was known for guarding treasures and priceless possessions seems to have uncovered a wealth of new inspiration.

Yeah GRYPHON is back but with a different lineup and a completely different style unlike anything they have tackled in the past (well for the most part). This is a much leaner lineup with not only the three original members but the return of Andrew Findon on flute, piccolo, soprano crumhorn, soprano sax and the clarinet. New to the family is Rob Levy on bass and Clare Taylor on violin and keyboards. At first glance of the band's seventh album GET OUT OF MY FATHER'S CAR! one is struck with an abrupt WTF reaction as the album cover deviates from the band's cover art depicting mythological scenarios and instead sports what resembles some kind of poster art that might have been seen during the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Oh no! This is gonna suck! (my first thought). Well, you can never judge a book by its cover so after all is said and done i have to say that it's not as bad as i was fearing however this one is unfortunately a few steps down from "Reinvention" not only in its inconsistency but in its deviation from the crazy prog folk charm of what makes GRYPHON so unique (well, for the most part).

The title track gets off to a funky festive start as it sounds like Earth, Wind and Fire have joined the band for a funk fueled romp that includes some deviations into some extremely proggy territory. Oh yeah, now we're talking! While unlike anything GRYPHON has crafted before, the intricate tradeoff of all the various instruments on board fortified with crazy time signature and even genre skipping is actually quite beautifully done but after a couple of minutes of instrumental wankery, the band adds some funny lyrics which breaks immediately takes the album into a silly nary a care mood. After that rollicking roster of unorthodoxy, the album takes on a more serious mood with the following "A Bit Of Music By Me" which sounds more like classic Gryphon at its peak with beautiful folk motifs laced with the sultry sounds of woodwinds and of course that classic crumhorn!

After another prog folk winner in the form of "Percy the Defective Perspective Detective" the album showcases another stylistic shift with the Celtic folk ballad style of "Christiana's Song" which unfortunately derails the fun made all the more so by several songs of this style punctuating the jocular festivities and prog folk dynamism. "Suite For 68" starts off as an oom-pa-pa polka waltz but finds resolution in a sombre crumhorn fueled folk melody. "The Brief History Of A Bassoon" brings back the humor with Dave Obele providing vocals singing about being a tree! "Krum Dancing" is also mined from GRYPHON's distant past with meideval and Renaissance flavors teased out into prog folk splendor. "Normal Wisdom from the Swamp. (A Sonic Tonic)" follows suit but in the end, there are just too many gosh darned sappy Celtic ballads on this one! The closing "Parting Shot" ends up sounding more like an Irish James Taylor than anything remotely GRYPHON.

Ultimately GET OUT OF MY FATHER'S CAR comes off as a bunch of aging hippies blowing off steam rather than an attempt to craft a serious progressive folk album in the vein of the 70s output or even the lauded comeback "Reinvention." The playful and oft ludicrous humor is actually quite refreshing in a genre that is renowned for taking itself too seriously but the album is bogged down by several earnest tracks that dwell too much on traditional Celtic folk sounds. In the end GRYPHON should've just made a really funny comedy album in the spirit of the title because those are the tracks that work the best here. Tracks like "Christiana's Song," "A Stranger Kiss" and "Forth Sahara" for example just seem like an insipid tribute to Clannad or some other long lost folkies from the late 60s. A good enough album for sure but inconsistent and a step down from the beautiful "Reinvention." Hopefully this was just a fluke and the band has a few zingers left in them.

If ever there were a band who typifies all that is good and right about 70's progressive rock then it must be Gryphon, who managed to confuse the music establishment so much that they once had music played on Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4 all in the same week (which was when Radio 1 was mostly pop and some rock/indie, Radio 2 mostly easy listening and older music, Radio 3 was classical and Radio 4 was highbrow). Between 1973 and 1977 they released five incredibly important albums, and most music lovers were amazed when the band reformed for a new album in 2018, and now they are back with the next. Original members Graeme Taylor (acoustic & electric guitars), Brian Gulland (bassoon, bass crumhorn, baritone saxophone, recorders, piano) and Dave Oberlé (drums, percussion, vocals) have been joined again by Andy Findon (clarinets, saxophones, flutes) while there are two new members in Rob Levy (bass guitar) and Clare Taylor (violin, keyboards). Yes, you read that correctly, they use both crumhorn and bassoon in a rock(ish) band.

Here we have a group who have steadfastly refused to conform to any expectations of them as they mix folk, progressive and classical music in a way which is totally their own. They do not sound like anyone else, and it is difficult to think of many bands to which that applies. Gryphon in 2021 are very similar to Gryphon in the Seventies ? years may have passed, and many musical styles have come and gone, but Gryphon are still Gryphon and long may it continue. There is a light- hearted feeling to this album, from the title through much of the music, with "Suite for '68" a classic dance tune, while "The Brief History Of A Bassoon" tells the story of the instrument from the perspective of the wood from which is made. There are complex instrumentals, and we drop back in time to Baroque and medieval periods, all of which make perfect sense when in the hands of these guys.

This album is a breath of fresh air, light and refreshing with plenty of space and it acts like a time machine as it takes me back to the very first time I heard crumhorns. Is it classical? Is it folk? Is it something else together? Arguably it is progressive music at its very finest, as boundaries just do not exist in their environment and all one can say is that it is music of the very highest order, and an album I enjoyed immensely the very first time I played it and since then it has only got better.

So after listening to and reviewing their masterpiece of an album ReInvention, I was excited to hear their next album. With such a strange name and cover art for the Gryphon band's more medieval and almost fantastical image, having an album cover depicting a pterodactyl with umbrellas for wings chasing after the band's heads while they fall in a colorful car is quite intriguing, to say the least. Clearly, with the instruments that are falling with the heads, I guess that it'd sound very similar to ReInvention with some tweaks to what the album could entail. What I got instead was some of the most varied and bizarre music that the band has created in their whole career.

The album starts with the title track of the album. This is probably the jazziest Gryphon song they have recorded with a lot more emphasis on horns and improvisational music that sparks memories of the more jazzy progressive rock of the 70s, almost as a sort of tribute to that style of music. I think in all due respects, this song is great and still keeps up with the more original and experimented-minded direction the group followed with ReInvention, but to me, it doesn't feel like Gryphon. It is not to do with Raindance or Treason where it sounded like other bands that weren't Gryphon, but here it doesn't give me those Gryphon vibes. That witty charm in their music has been lost in this song and even if this may be a new direction for the band to take, I think they need a bit more time before fully going into the more jazzy rock sounds that act like Gentle Giant or Peter Hammill refined in the 70s.

Though those remedies are taken away with A Bit Of Music By Me. We get back into those classic folk sounds that Gryphon has a knack for, and all that charm they had on me with their records instantly comes back. How it is all played so elegantly lets this song be a really good defining moment in this album. It has this more renaissance feel to it, almost as if the band is making music for a Da Vinci painting. It is as elegant as it is beautiful.

So we have the more jazzy side of Gryphon with the title track, and the folk side of Gryphon with A Bit Of Music By Me. How can the band combine these two attributes? Well Percy the Defective Perspective Detective may answer that. We get a fun little melody with this one, combining the more medieval folk with the jazzy 70s-styled progressive rock that was very popular in those golden years of progressive music. This one-two punch lets this quick song stand out very well in the sea of songs by Gryphon. It is unique, bouncy, and incredibly colorful.

This mix does switch around a bit with the folk and jazz, and sometimes separated starting with the song A Stranger Kiss. One of the more folk-attributed songs on this album, we get a more melancholic vibe within this song than most of the songs here on this album. With that, we get a sense of the much-needed break away from the more rocking-out tracks we have gotten, or the more witty and intellectually potent folk tunes. It is a good dividing line between those two attributes of sound that I wish Gryphon did more of.

Back to the pattern, we have Suite For '68. Man, what a lovely little tune, a lot of pretty uses of a more baroque style of progressive folk just make me very happy. It is unique in how each moment it changes around and becomes something similar, but completely new. That is how I like my suites, to be honest. Now I will say, I think it is too short to be considered a full suite of music. For me, the perfect amount of time a suit should be is 10 minutes and up. Five minutes is simply too short and I think this song should be able to benefit from a long length. It may become the best song off here if it was 10+ minutes, but sadly it isn't. Still a good song though.

The band does have some comedic routes in their music, and The Brief History of a Bassoon explores that in a funny little tune. It is sort of a tongue-in-cheek song about one of the prominent instruments of Gryphon's whole career, that being the bassoon. The joke here is that there is no bassoon present in this song. Believe me, I went through it over and over again, and still no bassoon. I even looked up videos of what a bassoon sounds like to double-check, and yet no bassoon. I find it kinda hilarious. It is like studying for a math test and instead of getting the equations, you get the answers and only the answers. Rather funny how things work out like that. A fun little tune that ties some knots in the album and experience Gryphon brings.

Krum Dancing also plays into the humor of Gryphon, retaining the folk instrumental factors, but also sort of making this song almost a dance track. I can almost certainly see people dancing to this in pubs of some kind. It is almost funny how when Gryphon does things right, they do them right, but when they try humor, they do it with class that doesn't devolve the music.

While in their last album they had a tiny psychedelic edge, Forth Sahara expands on that with a more space edge to the sound and higher use of keyboards than ever before. It certainly reminds me of the greats of Eloy and Nektar without fully becoming them and ripping them off in sound and focus. You can still tell they are still Gryphon by their sound and focus, but with new stuff added on to make them stand out a bit more from their previous efforts. Certainly a fine song.

In a flip of the coin to one of the first few songs of the album, Christina's Song takes some of the same notes A Stranger Kiss did but sadly doesn't do them as well. I do not get a sense of melancholy with this song, and while I do like the song it never strikes my fancy enough for me to fully LOVE it if that makes sense. It is a neat song, but sadly I cannot say it is really special.

One of the weirder and more proggy songs on this album, Normal Wisdom From the Swamp... (A Sonic Tonic), does something similar to Percy The Defective Perspective Detective where they combine the jazzy progressive rock with their folk sound, however this time elongated and done quite better if I may add. This may be the band's most experimental song yet, combining new techniques into their sound that allows them to stretch their legs more, and create something very special. It is a very fun and enjoyable song, and one that I think will be regarded as a modern-day classic with time and patience.

Ending the album off is Parting Shot, and?My god, what a song to end this whole Gryphon journey. I know the band is still going on, but man once I heard this song I knew this would be one of my favorites off here. It is so emotional, so beautiful, and so rewarding. Even after the mixed reception all of Gryphon's albums have brought, I can still see them as being enjoyable to some capacity, even with Treason. To me, Gryphon is a fun type of progressive folk. Hearing and reviewing them has been incredibly enjoyable, and while some of their songs aren't the best, if they may not strike lightning in the bottle all of the time, they still have a place in my heart with a lot of other bands. Their music is one of the best out there, and they need some more recognition. Parting Shot represents all of that, a beautiful song that closes the curtains for now.

A strange, but an incredibly enjoyable album. While it wasn't as profoundly magical as ReInvention, it is still a great album they released in this century. Hailing back to those fun times in the 70s and truly embracing their image in the scene was a great move they pulled with ReInvention, and they still keep it up with this album. It is an album that slowly but surely became one of my favorites from the group, and I do think it should be recognized as a great release from this group.