REJOICE! I'M DEAD

In his final years, Daevid Allen sought to secure the future of Gong by putting together a new lineup, primarily focusing on younger musicians who could carry the torch into the future. I See You saw this new grouping given a test run, with Allen still very much unboard; this album, finds the lineup of Dave Sturt, Kavus Torabi, Fabio Golfetti, Ian East, and Cheb Nettles face the truly major test which is "Can we make something authentically Gong-like away from Daevid's supervision?"

The answer is an emphatic "yes". Allen is not wholly absent here - some vocals are used on Beatrix, some lyrics of his make it in - but these contributions are thin scraps, Allen passing through as a ghost at the gig rather than being a full participant in the album's creation. The end result is very much the product of the current lineup.

The obvious question is "Does the classic Gong sense of humour survive?" and the answer is "Not really, but that might be for the best." The fact of the matter is that the humourous side of Gong was very much an expression of Allen's personality; in pretty much every Gong lineup and off-shoot that hasn't involved Allen, it's not been present. That isn't to say that all such projects are po-faced and humourless - Steve Hillage's solo work certainly has its lighter moments - but it is the case that Daevid was such a unique and characterful presence in any of the Gong incarnations he was involved in that once he's gone, it just ain't the same.

That being the case, a forced attempt to mimic Allen's comic-mystic persona would be doomed to failure - it would be wrong for Sturt and company to try and do that, just as it would have been wrong for Gong in the 1970s to do it when they were making Shamal, the first Dave-less Gong effort. Instead of trying to do a limp impersonation of Allen's humour, the current Gong concentrate on being worthy successors to the Gong musical heritage - and that means jazzy, psychedelic Canterbury prog, cut through with some of the more modern post-punk influences also found in Torabi's other projects such as Guapo or Cardiacs. (This, too, is appropriate - what were Planet Gong or New York Gong if not Allen's bid to embrace a somewhat more punkish/new wave ethos back in the day?)

If you're the sort of Gong listener who politely sat through Daevid's whimsy for the sake of getting to the proggy musical workouts, you'll probably love this; if you're the sort of Gong listener for whom without Daevid's humour the band has nothing to offer you, you probably won't like this, though you were probably expecting that what with him being too dead to take a full part in the recording process. If you're the sort of listener who digs both sides of Gong's music, you'll probably realise that things have shifted here - but you probably also have broad enough tastes to realise why that's a good thing.