H TO HE, WHO AM THE ONLY ONE

This album is about loneliness, as one can see from its name. At the time of listening to this record, I felt lonely, but music did not touch me deep enough, to feel it as positive experience. I will start with the first track, "Killer", which is good song, and as always with intelligent poetic lyrics, but singing here is not so good to me. First of all, it sounds like Hammil narrated (spoke) lyrics, and did not sing them. And instruments are neither much complicated nor interesting to me. There are only few strings of acoustic guitar playing here, with Saxophones and keyboards making me feel boring. Only interesting moments come with Hammil changing his vocal melody somewhere in the middle of song, and after that, screaming Saxophone gets interesting, too. It brings many emotions of showing loneliness and pain connected to loneliness. Anyway, this is good song, but the next one, "House with No Door" is the one that I would skip rather than listen. Again, I heard almost speaking vocals, boring piano, uninteresting bass, with no soul. Always makes me sleepy too much. "Emperor on his War-Room" is also good song, but not breathtaking from me. Here we have guitar master Robert Fripp, playing electric guitar as a guest. He plays nice, but only for less than half minute, and does not fit the best in the song. Nice choir stands at the end of this track, which made me enjoying for the first time on album. Song called "Lost" is really lost, even musically. This is where even drummer started to irritate me. This is more chaotic, than composed track. All the time the band tries to play something complicated, but somehow, that just does not do anything to my ears. Songs are long, and more long than interesting to me. Pioneers over C. is again confusing track, not melodically too much, very hard to appreciate. I knew that this album gets high ratings over all prog community, so I wondered how it can be that I do not understand this record. I listened to it three times, or even more, but I did not feel many musically bright lights. This is one of the hardest albums to me, for sure. It is done well, but this is only for fans of the band, in my opinion. Production is characteristic to band of seventies, not above the average; I could compare it to production of Deep Purple. Fans of guitar will not be very happy with this album, and I was not satisfied, not only because of almost no guitars, I was bored with style of Hammil's singing, with rhythm keyboards, with lack of musical action and melody. Maybe I am just not fan of the band, and it might be only my problem, anyway.

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