GIANT FOR A DAY

Contrary to The Missing Piece which still made some unsuccessful overtures to Gentle Giant's prog fans, Giant For A Day! is an unashamed, self-assured pop album. You might think this would be an improvement: after all, it's better to go in a single direction with conviction than to go for an unsuccessful middle-of-the-road approach between two genres that you're not able to fuse all that well. All the same, I must admit to really not liking this album. Most of it has an extremely generic late 70s soft rock taste to it, a bit like Fleetwood Mac except watered down to a soggy mush, and only alternated by some obnoxiously overblown power pop trash ("Words From The Wise", "It's Only Goodbye"), a pointless instrumental ("Spooky Boogie") and a simple short folk ditty of John Weathers singing and strumming on his acoustic guitar without accompaniment ("Friends"). The fact that I probably have to count the latter as my favourite song on the album should tell you all you need to know, really.