THREE FRIENDS

Each Gentle Giant album shows an evolution over the previous album. On Three Friends, GG take the blusier-rockin' approach from Acquiring the Taste and add choral effects and soft medieval sections. The result is innovative and produced some great music, but like other GG albums, can come across as a bit pretentious at time. On this album, the concept is about three friends who come from very different (English) backgrounds, and the pretension here (for me) is in some of the lyrics. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they feel forced. This is particularly true on the fifth track "Mister Class and Quality", but also "Working all Day". I also happen to think these are two of the weaker tracks on the album, too, and so I rarely ever listen to these any more (along with "Schooldays" which I don't find as musical). This leaves three excellent tracks (out of the six): the excellent "Prologue" which sets out the basic concept with some great overlapping choral work, innovative organ riffs, and an interesting popcorn-like organ theme; "Peel the Paint" which for me is the most musical track on the album, with an excellent repeated strings section and a great bluesy-riff section about three minutes in with gutsy guitar solo and some real improvisations (which reminds one of Acquiring the Taste); and the closing title track "Three Friends" which contains highly memorable melodies and a really great repeated theme on outro. Given this album is mixed, with three great tracks and three just-ok, I give this album 7.3 out of 10 on my 10-point scale, which translates to (upper) 3 PA stars.

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