THE POWER AND THE GLORY

By 1974, the year GENTLE GIANT wrote & released THE POWER AND THE GLORY, they had a respectable "cult-follow" but still were commercially unsuccessful. The band was partially disappointed to this, but WWA was simply devastated. They demanded the lads to write some singles which would be commercially approachable, and so they did - they wrote three, and as Derek Shulman (one of the multi-instrumentalists of the band) recalls it, "This song's the worst". Indeed, it is.

The Power And The Glory is a highly complex synthpop. That's it. It is a two-minutes long synthpop song twisted on GENTLE GIANT's viewpoint. In a certain way it is MUCH more appaling than the band's dreaded later albums because those were fruits of a thorough, complex process, whereas this aberration was given life on the apex of their paradigmatic creativity. It is an absolute offense to everything GENTLE GIANT represents, and to prog rock as well. It's by no means a bad song, it's just contextually dread. There's Proclamation played live in 1977, which is a really great gig by the way, but that isn't enough to recompose a GENTLE GIANT connoisseur after the atrocity heard.

This review is meaningless as I can suppose no one really gives a damn about this curious little eponymous track. But if you do... well, you can take a look by searching it on YouTube (yes, it's available there). But please, don't buy it. Every time someone buys The Power And The Glory single, a Shulman sibling dies. Stop exterminating the Shulman species. Stop buying bad singles.