THE POWER AND THE GLORY

I've got all of Gentle Giant's regular CD releases, and of course the LPs, but this is my first 35th anniversary edition remaster, and my third copy of the album. Having listened to the unremastered CD for about as long as I've had CDs in my collection, I find the sound quality of this one is excellent, in no small part due to Derek Shulman being at the helm.

This was one of the albums primarily responsible for turning me into a progressive music freak. A love of keyboards helped a lot too, and Kerry Minnear does some amazing things here. I love the keyboard parts in Proclamation and Valedictory with the ever escalating tempo, and those impossibly fast synthesizer runs on Cogs In Cogs. The political themes are of particular interest here, applicable to the past, the present in 1973-1974, as well as today, and you can bet the future too.

You get two bonus tracks on this release, a live Proclamation and the unreleased studio track, The Power and the Glory. Good to get that one on a CD, a copy of it was languishing in my cassette collection somewhere. That one should have been released as a single, might have garnered them more of the popular attention they deserved.

I have no hesitation rating this one as essential!