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Topic Closed4th Round Classics: Palepoli v. Pawn Hearts

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Direct Link To This Post Topic: 4th Round Classics: Palepoli v. Pawn Hearts
    Posted: August 29 2015 at 07:44
Next up... a battle of two greats! In previous rounds we did song samples, great PA's reviews, with this round I wanted to do something a different. So I went outside PA's..  what do people outside of this site say about these albums.

First up..

Osanna - Palepoli


'Palepoli' Is Not An Album - It's An Event!
Christopher A. Morgan | Arcade, NY | 04/23/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have just received this CD via amazon.com the other day and I am immensly impressed with this album. It is no understatement to call Osanna's "Palepoli" a masterpiece, and deserves 10 stars out of 5. Though this CD is a little pricy, it is no different than purchasing vintage Italian wine. The music never lets up and doesn't sit still long enough to invite boredom. Movement after movement, the band relentlessly dazzles the listener with virtuosity, and those heaven-sent melodies that can only be found in Italian Prog.

"Oro Caldo" opens up with a bass drum, acoustic guitar & flute before turning into a festival. The band fades in and sounds like there ready to take the world by storm. What amazes me about this song are the varying degrees of fidelity in it. As the bands parties on, they sound like they're playing outdoors at a festival. It really starts the album off with a BANG - very positive vibe. This song, and the rest of the album just moves effortlessly from one idea to the next, rarely returning to earlier themes. It's almost like a stream-of-consciousness method to composition (although I think it's called "through-composed").

The second song is untitled and has the same opening as "Oro Caldo", but includes the backwards samples from the previous album Calibro 9. This is a nice break in the action before the atonal onslaught of "Animale Senza Respiro" enters to shake your foundations. This tune is EPIC in every sense and highly entertaining. There are so many incredible moments in this song that it still blows me away as I write in silence. There is an incredible mellotron passage in the middle that just sends a massive rush through every fiber of my nervous system (my hair is still standing on end). Other passages just simply rock with total abandon. I really couldn't say enough about this song let alone the entire world that is "Palepoli".

As I have said, the mellotron work is downright superb. This album reminds me alot of King Crimson's "Lizard" album as far as the angular baritone sax riffs, insane swells of mellotron & the overall fidelity that bears such a mystical quality. The 12-string passages remind me of Genesis' "Trespass" LP as well. These comparisons, however, are totally irrelevant because Osanna have a truly authentic sound and "Palepoli" is a truly authentic & unique experience (yes, this album is an 'experience').

The money I spent on this Japanese reissue was well worth it. I also enjoyed the mini-LP layout (the inner fold-out is really mind-bending!!), though I don't understand a lick of any of the liner notes, both in Italian & Japanese. Either way, this did nothing to diminish the enjoyment I got from this CD. So, if you got some spare change and are a hardcore amazon.connoiseur, then I couldn't recommend "Palepoli" high enough. Truly awe-inspiring!!"

and against the mighty Palepoli..

Van Der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts.

Pawn Hearts - 1971 Charisma
7
(Mediocre / Good)

Best song: Parts (I repeat, PARTS) of A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers

They blew it. They made their major artistic breakthrough with H to He, got greedy, went for the universalist jugular, and absolutely blew it. There are three songs, none of which are even as good as "The Emperor in His War Room." The production has gone back to suck - it's not the same suck as on Least, but Peter's magnificent voice is once more relegated to a supporting role instead of receiving the starring role it deserves. None of the riffs are anywhere as magnificent as those in "Killer" or "Pioneers," none of the vocal parts are as beautiful as those in "Lost" or "House with no Door," almost none of the instrumental parts approach the brilliance of those in "Killer" ... what a disappointment.

That said, I do not want to give the impression that the album is worthless, because that's simply not what I think. You see, each of these three tracks has something I like a lot, and to be perfectly honest, on some days I like this album slightly more than I do Least (even if it gets a lower grade here). It's just that built around these ideas is a whole ton of material that simply irritates the hell out of me. Many repeated listens (I've definitely listened to this album more times than I have any other album with a comparable or worse grade) have brought the positive features clearly to the forefront of my mind, and I've always liked a few parts of the suite that makes up side two, but certain parts have only gotten worse and worse for me as the number of listens I've given this has gone up.

At first, track number one, entitled "Lemmings," actually gets the album off to a fairly promising start. The "soft" vocal melody that Peter sings is quite cute, and I particularly enjoy it because the little spike up in the middle of each repetition easily brings to mind the image of little lemmings jumping up off a cliff and then tumbling to their dooms. The harder riff, with a vocal melody sung in unison, is also intriguing - I'm bugged by the echo on Peter's voice, but the riff is very interesting, and Peter really sounds majestic as he sings lines like "We have looked upon the high kings." Of course, every time he breaks the vocal melody from mirroring the riff, he starts to fall back into declamation instead of a singing mode, but still, it's tolerable. Unfortunately, while the track works until about 3:20, the remaining eight minutes of the piece make it very difficult for me to stay focused, and don't forget, I can keep my mind laser focused while listening to Yes' "The Remembering." The noodling just keeps going and going, Peter occasionally reprises the beginning vocal melodies but mostly just mirrors the jamming, and basically the sound loses all of its apocalyptic tension by making itself so freakin' low key and boring (well, except for a fairly brief passage where the band goes into an extremely angry-sounding bit). I mean, I really don't see how I can keep myself from falling asleep during the last minute of quiet sax/keyboard noodling.

Up next is "Man-Erg," which starts out as a piano-ballad in the vein of "House with No Door," but while the atmosphere is quite nice, Peter has trouble here matching the majestic approach of his singing with an equally resonant and memorable vocal melody, and that hurts quite a bit. The sound is nice, but it's getting mushy again, which I'd hoped they fixed once and for all with H to He. The "I'm just a man ..." section, reprised several times, has some strong emotional power, and would have worked well as an actual climax, but it feels rushed to me, without enough buildup to make it work as any kind of real climax. Anyway, the song also features a fairly cool mid-section with some fierce sax/organ jamming, along with some solid Fripp guitar lines. Peter's singing sounds especially dumb during this part, but while the instrumental parts kinda veer towards the pointlessness that bugged me so on Least, they're also very fast in parts, so whatever. Of course, Peter comes back and starts singing another soft part, this time using cliches like "acolytes of doom," and it doesn't do much to raise my opinion of the track too much. Concluding with the initial melody, along with the mid-section popping up amidst it from time to time, does give the track a nice epic sweep, but when the individual parts don't impress me that much, it shouldn't be difficult to guess that I'm not totally thrilled.

And then there's "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers," which those who hate the band often use as Exhibit 1 of why they hate it so. Strangely enough, though, I've actually come to enjoy several parts of it, though I doubt I'll ever go sufficiently loony to consider it the peak of VDGG, like many fans do. The general gist of the piece, best as I can tell, is that it's about a lighthouse keeper going nuts from a combination of loneliness and all of the ghosts, real and imagined, that are are inherent to the mythology of sea travel. He goes batty, jumps into the sea to kill himself and escape the madness, and muses over various philosophical things. Fine, decent concept, whatever. What does matter to me, though, is that there a few parts that I enjoy a great deal, even though I consider the suite as a whole to be a moderate failure. I actually think the opening "Eyewitness" section is incredible, combining decent lyrics with an eerie vocal melody and a gloomy atmosphere that sets the lighthouse backdrop well. Furthermore, the lyrics also do a fine job of establishing the gradual paranoia of the protagonist - I particularly like the line, "When you see the skeletons of sailing-ship spars sinking low You'll begin to wonder if the points of all the ancient myths are solemnly directed straight at you..." I don't even mind the occasional dissonant backing harmonies as Peter sings the melody - they do a good job of depicting the various ghosts fluttering around.

So that's part one. Alas, the next couple of minutes, entitled "Pictures/Lighthouse," are devoted to a bunch of "atmospheric" blaring sax noises over blaring keyboard noises, followed by some atmospheric organ chords. Enough said. Part three is a reprise of part one melodywise (and thus is also called Eyewitness), and depicts the protagonist reaching the very edge of his sanity. Just as it seems things are starting to get obnoxiously repetitive, we enter section four, "S.H.M.," where images of sea spectres start assailing the protagonist's mind. I actually find the lyrics here quite image-laden, despite the nonsense that appears at first glance when one glosses over a line like, "'Unreal, unreal!' ghost helmsmen scream and fall in through the sky, not breaking through my seagull shrieks ... no breaks until I die: the spectres scratch on window-slits - hollowed faces, mindless grins only intent on destroying what they've lost." Call me nuts, but it's not difficult at all for me to imagine a nightmare to go with this passage; a bunch of translucent ghosts whirling all around me, screaming seeming nonsense, set upon my destruction solely because they themselves have been destroyed. So anyway, as the lyrics go on, the protagonist is leaning on the wall to support his wilting self, looking out upon the sea and seeing ghosts of ships long gone, crashed upon the rocks. Not bad so far.

Unfortunately, in part five, divided into "The Presence of the Night" and "Kosmos Tours," the suite starts to come unraveled. The first part works nicely, a quiet reprise of the S.H.M melody with appropriately epilogue-ish lyrics, and the later sorta-jazzy melody that comes up after some noodling is amusing (though the hooks aren't very sharp), but then the rest of the part goes into a bit of self-parody. Hammill's screams go with a melody that really strikes me as jerky discord for its own sake, a bit of a vocal freakout for no good reason other than having a bit of a vocal freakout. It ends with the hero jumping out of the lighthouse, presumably into the sea, but while I might have cared for his fate before, the detachment presented immediately before this managed to preemptively undo any resonance I might have had from this. And what's with that random dissonant keyboard-layers part that pops up after that cold melody has finished? This sucks, Beavis.

The next section, "Custard's Last Stand," tries to be one of the band's cathartic anthemic ballads, but the melody is so flaccid that it doesn't warm or inspire me at all. Just Pete's voice with lots of echo and not approaching the grandeur of "House with no Door." Then we have "The Clot Thickens," where everything just goes nuts - it's actually fairly amusing, since it's insane and twisted and weird beyond recall, but given that it uses an "ANNHILATION"-like trick when Peter sings "..one more haggard DROWNED MAN," it's not about to get a total free pass from me. Whatever.

At least the piece ends on a nice note. "Land's End" and "We Go Now" actually base their majesty around a lovely piano chord sequence instead of seemingly random organ splurts, and despite the amount of crud I've just waded through to get here, I actually feel a twinge of catharsis listening to this. Plus, let's be fair, the majestic guitar parts coming through the layered vocal and keyboard harmonies (as well as all the sputtering radio static, which works well as a symbol of the protagonist slowly slipping out of his life conciousness), had they come with a better overall piece, would be recognized as near the same level (though in a different way, since this is Robert Fripp and not Steve Hackett) of the brilliant instrumental passages at the tail-end of Genesis' "Supper's Ready." Go Robert!

So there you go - a loooooooong review given that this is only gets a 7 from me. It's just as I said in the band's introduction - even the songs that are dreadfully flawed overall still have chunks of solid quality, and it takes a lot of effort and explanation to separate those chunks from the overall chaff. In any case, Hammill apparently decided he couldn't do anything else with the band at that time, so they broke up for a few years. It's just as well - I shudder to imagine how a 1972 followup would sound.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 07:50
Will eventually go PH. Palepoli doesn't do as much for me as other RPI albums from that time.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 08:04
To add a little balance in those reviews. I think John McFerrin, while an excellent reviewer, has this tendency to chunk everything up into smaller sections, which is not really an approach that serves Pawn Hearts. That piece is a totality, not a gentle chunkable series of pop movements that are all of equal value when you split them up.

Originally posted by Julian Cope Julian Cope wrote:

The Stone Things are Broken!

But enough, let’s get back to the Album of the Month action. After all, the decision was made to shine the spotlight on this sucker. So just what is it that makes PAWN HEARTS so amazing? Well listen and see what you think. For a start, it’s the beginning of Peter Hammill’s bizarre but successful artistic co-habitation with himself. He’s not singing about anyone else but himself, yet the duets he does with himself actually sound like there’s a bunch of other singers in there too. When Hammill talks about waiting for his saviour, he seems to mean the castrated Attis as much as Jesus the Pastor. His Goddess seems to be both Cybele AND the Virgin. He’s like a newly Christianised Saxon: still willing to invoke Woden when he has to make the journey but content with the shiny guy for 90% of the daytime. Hammill’s a river traveller and a pastoralist, a bringer and a revealer, a giant and a flea AND the most misunderstood man in rock’n’roll – a Kim Fowleyan Loki bound by his accent and an inability rather than a refusal to change it. Look at the gatefold sleeve and that about sums it up. Four make-shift fascistic footballers in black shirts and white ties, in a post-psychedelic super-realist Narnia (Give C.S. a kick from me while you’re there, Pete, will ya?)

“Lemmings” opens the LP drifting in on sweet-voiced acoustics and Mellotron 400 flutes, before a sarcastic Utnapishtim saxophone tells you it’s the f**king Epic of Gilgamesh, and those f**king stone things are BROKEN!!! Ararat is submerged and the last temples of Urartu will never see another fire ritual. The difference between this LP and their previous ‘effort’ is the difference between THE WORLD OF DAVID BOWIE and ZIGGY STARDUST, without any of the graduations in between. In one fell swoop, Hammill has leap-frogged several stages of humanity and clawed, nay bestrode his way up on to Jahve’s own volcano and dumped his own hand-scribed tablets of demands down the God’s own smoke stack. 

Also remember when you hear this stuff that Peter Hammill is, on this recording, only about 24 years old though getting decades older by the hour. “Man-erg” was probably the first example of Hammill’s soon-coming tendency to appropriate religious themes to his own ends, paganise them, and send them back-at-ya with such Victorian mawkishness that U-Cannot-fail to blart your head off. Then, the Hammill formula deems thou must cop as un-R&B a saxophone lick as never did roam this planet and play it strident and bavarian with a small ‘b’. Soon, Hammill’s clanking his clavinet as VDGG summon up some o’ that old thyme Brechtian soul from the Nederland Plain. Now, he’s John Hurt as John Merrick screaming “I’m just a man”. I think not, Peter. Where’s the evidence, even amongst your contemporaries, for your being ‘Just A Man’? Yooz a hooligan cleric, a tonsured Viking, a Daft Vader with the voice of Todd Rundgren, David Bowie, Hall & Oates, John Inman, Quatermass and Pet Shop Boy all rolled into one. 

Remember the first time you heard “The Soft Parade” title track and wondered when it was all gonna kick in, only it never did? Well, here, instead of berating your earhole sergeant-major-like all the way through (as Hammill is well wont to do), “A Plague of Lighthouse keepers” drifts in and out of control for 23-minutes of standing-on-the-verge-of-getting-it-on-ness, occasionally unleashing ridiculous stentorian extremes, then backing right off into passages of near meditational drift. It should also be noted that this lot use Mellotrons 400 and Mark 2 like they SHOULD be used. Sound FX, train choogles, stampeding elephants, bain’t nowt too gimmicky for our boys. If it was guaranteed to invoke the ancient Gods, then they’d even steep the ARP synthesizer in tea. 

PAWN HEARTS is a masterpiece in the old-fashioned sense of the word, that is: it is a musical blueprint on which to build in the future and has as sensibly structured an anti-structure as you could wish for. It is in turns beautiful, ridiculous, foul, overwhelming, irritating, mutating and magnificent. So don’t use this LP to irritate the w**ker neighbours when you go out or you may return to find them clad in saffron robes, on a mission both to befriend you and to help you co-host evenings of Mellotron 400-based Pan-Eurasian re-constituted fire festivities. Be forewarned!


I'm likely to go for Palepoli eventually but I want an excuse to relisten to both of these masterpieces together.

Edited by TGM: Orb - August 29 2015 at 08:05
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 08:13
Not much separating these two for me. Pawn Hearts gets the nod, for familiarity reasons mostly.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 09:47
2nd easiest vote of the day...
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 11:30
Palepoli
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 17:04
Palepoli, if it had been Godbluff or Still Life or The Least We Can do.... I would have voted against it though.
Spending more than I should on Prog since 2005

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 17:36
I can't vote holding both these in vey high esteem. Especially as they're currently neck and neck on 10 votes each!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 18:34
vdggggg
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 18:38
Pawn Hearts. My all time TOP 10 prog album.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 19:42
These 2 are so close in quality it pains me to choose one over the other. I've had Pawn Hearts since 1989 and only acquired Palepoli in the last few years. Going with the ole faithful here.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 19:53
Rossana - Galipoli
....even if I love that Van Damme album to bits.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2015 at 22:44
Pawn Hearts easily for me. It isn't perfect, but when I heard Palepoli I was really disapointed. It had such great reviews, but I couldn't really enjoy it. Perhaps I should have persisted, but I feel if that one had been structured as several shorter songs instead of two epics (and one shorter song), it might have worked better for me. There were a few sections within those two epics that I sort of enjoyed, but they get lost within the mess that the bigger songs are.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 01:09
Pawn Hearts
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 01:40
Pal
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 01:48
Impossible choice.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 03:18
The one with the crappy John McFerrin review.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 05:59
Easily Osanna


Edited by Meltdowner - August 30 2015 at 05:59
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 09:02
I hate everyone here.

I would understand a vote to vote competition, but this massacre!?

Cmon...

FUJE A CHISTU PAESE!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 30 2015 at 10:00
LOL disappointing for sure.. but hardly unexpected.
The Pedro and Micky Experience - When one no longer requires psychotropics to trip
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