OVER

Being a student music therapy I believe music can help people to deal with emotions and cope with the hard times in our lives. Writing and singing about your misary is a good way to gain control over the situation and it releases your pain from the abstract world of the mind. Peter Hammilll must have had a vision in which this information (music therapy was rare in the seventies) was revealed to him. Since his divorce had left him unhappy with the situation he decided to write a lot of material, and I say a lot of material, about his situation. I've rewritten my original review of this album because I recently got kind of addicted to this album. At first I couldn't accept the fact that Peter Hammill is so extremely harsh on himself and the people involved in this situation and he even calls the name of his ex-wife. This is highly unethical in my opinion. When it comes to the music itself I was too quick to jugde. The compositions have grown on me and I sometimes can't wait to hear Peter Hammill cry out in pain, the music is just so intense! From a artistic point of view it's actually quite interesting to write and record an album during a personal crisis (though I still think it's kind of unethical to those involved).

Peter Hammill's composition style is different from that of Van der Graaf Generator, but the intensity (both during quiit and heavy passages) is almost the same. Most tracks on 'Over' are based on guitar-licks (small paterns) of synth chords progressions, but somehow there's enough diversity. Most of tracks are however dead-serious, painfull and confroting. I can now say I really like all the track except the ending track, that's still way to dull for me. The opening track reminds me a bit of early Judas Priest. The symphonic 'This side of the looking-glass' stands out as a beautifull orchestrated track on which Peter Hammill actually sings quite melodic and friendly. 'Time Heals' are particularly bleak, but I love that ending section with the dark spoken words. 'On Tuesday she used to do yoga' has a nice horror-film like sound and a nice guitar-lick.

Conclusion. This album is still hard to rate for me. I personally became really fond of it, but it's not too progressive and I extremely hard to get into if you haven't been exposed to a serious doses of VDGG before. I would recommend this to those who like confronting music and who are not to depressed themselves. Otherwise this album is deadly. Three and a halve stars.