FREE HAND

I always found it difficult to conceptualise Gentle Giant. The totality of their musicianship was unique, they could mix hard rock themes with Elizabethan undertones and chants. They could introduce passages of avant garde, which they very successfully blended into the opening track of the album. They were tight, complex, and sometimes you get the feeling a set of instructions should be provided to follow their music. Of their many releases before their end 70s demise, Free Hand is the best. It is an album of contrasts from the melodic, unsophisticated 'On Reflection' to jazz-rock ('Free Hand') with many other refreshingly different moods which probably need several listens-to- to fully appreciate.