THE QUIET ZONE / THE PLEASURE DOME

The significant departures of David Jackson and his unmistakable saxophone and Hugh Banton and his timeless organ, generated a profound change in the structures of VDGG and forced Peter Hammill to recompose their musical proposal, in what would be the band's eighth album: "The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome". Without extensive pieces and more focused on short melodies, but without resigning the complexity of human existence as a compositional engine, the British present their least conventional work, where Guy Evans' percussion is proposed as the main thread supported by the bass of the reinstated Nic Potter.

The first part of the album delivers the uncertain "Lizard Play" and the resilient "The Habit of the Broken Heart", two themes that develop without major challenges and where the violins of Graham Smith, incorporated for the occasion, decisively assume the role left by Jackson. Both "The Siren Song" (the first minutes of the song remind me of Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut", and the last ones of Roger Waters' "Amused to Death"), and the photographic "The Last Frame" and its hypnotic and forceful instrumental development, are among the best of "The Quiet Dome".

The fast-paced "Cat's Eye / Yellow Fever (Running)", and its sinister and powerful instrumental development crowned by Smith's feverish violin, and the acoustic moments of the psychedelic "Chemical World", are the highlights of "The Pleasure Dome", the second part of the album, beyond the fleeting participation of Jackson's saxophone in the intense "The Sphinx in the Face" and its colophon "The Sphinx Returns".

From the remastered edition of 2005 it is worth rescuing the interesting "Door", discarded from the original album, and the guitar riff of "Ship of Fools".

Without the epicness they knew how to sustain during the first half of the 70's, "The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome" is the final point of one of the most resplendent and at the same time somber manifestations of progressive rock of all times. VDGG would keep since then a long silence, interrupted 28 years later by "Present" in 2005.

3 stars