GIANT FOR A DAY

It's really no surprise why Giant For a Day gets a harsh ride from critics and fans. Whilst I personally quite enjoy it, I think its biggest flaw is that it was released as a Gentle Giant album. Had it been the debut album for a new successor project, perhaps it would not have been weighed down by the baggage of the preceding 10 albums (including Playing the Fool).

As it stands, however, the reasons for its commercial and critical failure are painfully clear. Nobody who'd fallen in love with Gentle Giant's distinctive, original style of prog could fail to find this album jarring compared to the group's earlier work (though those who paid close attention to the first side of The Missing Piece would at least have had warnings that things might develop in this direction).

Equally, it was deeply unlikely that anyone who'd already disliked Gentle Giant would have given them a second chance. (Why would they expect the band's 10th studio album to sound all that different to the preceding 8 years' worth of work?) And anyone new to the band and curious about them would surely have been steered by word of mouth from fans to more widely-celebrated albums by the band, and probably correctly so.

Putting the Gentle Giant name aside, though, and assessing this album based purely on the music, this isn't actually that bad. Yes, the vocal harmonies owe more to Kansas than to the Gentle Giant of old, but the band turn out to be not too shabby at turning out quirky pop with a progressive sheen to it - the sort of material which many of their peers would resort to in the early 1980s in order to adapt to changing times. In this way, you could argue that Gentle Giant were actually as ahead of the times here as they were for much of the rest of their career - it's just that the times they were foreseeing would prove to be a difficult era indeed to be a prog band.

I rather like Giant For a Day - in particular, it feels to me like a more consistent album than The Missing Piece, which was split between attempts at poppier works on its first side and more classically prog-sounding songs on its second side, with the result that whilst, yes, the prog pieces do make it more palatable for fans of Gentle Giant's classic sound, but as an overall album it comes across as somewhat disjointed. Here, at least, the band seem to have settled on a direction and have a specific music statement to make with the album.

Unfortunately, it's not something anyone wanted to hear at the time of release; nor will it scratch the itch if you are in a particular mood for a Gentle Giant album which sounds, well, anything like Gentle Giant. On the other hand, if you're in the mood for quirky late-1970s pop rock with a few progressive tricks up its sleeves, it's a fun little listen... just pretend you didn't see the band name on the cover and you'll probably enjoy it better.