IF

Finally They have come back to their original roots, in their classic prog line-up!! In fact It seems another long-standing epic number, instead it has been just produced under a new brand ensemble (fortunately)- and issued on 2010. Moreover it's a pure symphonic progressive rock album, without compromises!! If you like "Lex Rex" for instance, for sure you will appreciate the present "If" as well!! A lot of Mellotrons - Hammond and Pipe Organs, enriched by means of some interesting solos and of course the Moogs...I can't say it's a complete step beyond, for example in comparison to their previous album entitled "Inconsolable Secret", cause naturally (as I've told you above) this is the return to their roots, according to a kind of "gift" to the seventies I mean..otherwise They often were in the habit to be pleased by means of this 70's prog-oriented music, as it happened in their past...Jon Davison is a good singer and also the jazz guitarist Alna Shikoh is clever, together being a couple of important "new entries". Perhaps the best album track is the suite "If The Sun", twenty-four minute long, thanks to the contribution of these two new musicians; while along with the other five tracks, the whole album is sixty-six minutes long, being composed by quite complex and all aligned tunes anyway, but it's not particularly prolix. As for all these reasons and also by considering precisely such a complete alignement from the beginning to its conclusion, I can't evaluate the present work (anyway good) higher than a three star evaluation; even though it's well played and introduced by a pretty album cover after all (regardless of a fine computer graphic definition and its design, which is epic indeedl!!...).

At the end this is a typical album by G.H., which you can love or hate (no half measures)- and if you're completely into their style you can add one star in the final score...regarding of a die-hard fan naturally!!

I am something of a fan of the early period when they were a more melodic ,perhaps 'traditional' symph prog band. It appears though that GH's main ambition was always to morph into Yes as was made clear when they employed Jon Anderson for vocal duties on Culture Of Ascent.Now its Jon Anderson sound-a -like Jon Davison and a style of symphonic prog that is like swimming through treacle. I'm not keen on this at all. Just seems very studied and is basically too lack lustre for my taste. Sadly there are no longer those hooks in their music that used to exist and even the compositional side seems to be lacking as well.

EDIT 4/11/2012 I recently acquired Cor Cordium. Much to my surprise I enjoy that album very much so I have gone back to this to give it another listen without the apparent wax in my ears! I do have my reservations about the Yes comparison and I do prefer Glass Hammer music to be a little more 'loose' but this does have much to enjoy nevertheless. I think the band were trying something a little different here and it takes time to develop a new approach. Jon Davison is the star on this album.So emmotive he carries this all the way and the band get behind that. I have decided to upgrade my rating to 4 stars from 2 stars. My next edit in 2 years time will probably make it 5 stars!

I like this album. In fact, I like it a lot! This is my first real introduction to the music of Glass Hammer. I mean, this is first time I've heard an album by them in its entirety. Well produced and a great vocalist. The obvious vocal influence is Jon Anderson of Yes, but I'm also reminded of the first vocalist in the Quebecois band Hamadryad - Jocelyn Beaulieu and a bit of Benoit David(new vocalist of Yes). So, the vocalist does have a range that is not a carbon copy of Jon Anderson. If there is criticism of Jon Anderson- cloning; it's unwarranted. The first track _Beyond Within_ is standard modern prog. in the vein of Spock's Beard and Big Big Train. Very good. The album really takes off with _Behold, The Ziddle_. Wonderful keyboard work. _If The Stars_ is the big highlight here with some asian influences. Almost sounds like it could've been a highlight on the Yes album Going For The One. Some keyboard sounds a la Anglagard- style pop up here and there. The dreamy conclusion with the 24 minute _If The Sun_, and I really mean dreamy. Keyboards have a Kerry Minnear-like tone to them and maybe a little Kansas. One of the few long players from a modern prog.band that held my attention the entire time. Great epic, and I don't say that often about the new ones. Recommended release for 2010. Fans of Yes's Keys To Ascension, Talk, The Ladder and Magnification; as well as bands such as Hamadryad, Big Big Train and Canadian band Mystery would really enjoy this.

(Only) If...

I'm confused; it feels like an Abbott and Costello film. I my memory, Glass Hammer had a style on it's own (yeah right!): they had their Lord of the Rings period, their Jesus Christ period, their Romantic/ Chamber Music Period, their Pop Period and so on...Never I witnessed such a difficulty to stick to a crew and to find a definite niche.

I'm sorry, it's true! They like Yes. They really, really, really like Yes. So much that I officially never heard something so close to a lost Yes album (Relayer\ Close to the Edge period). Oh my, the prodigious vocals! Jon Davison wins the award for best supporting Actor in the progressive rock category. Have you ever heard such a great impersonnation? Even with Yezda Urfa or the great Starcastle in comparison, Glass Hammer dethrones the king.

And this is where it fails. I love Yes, and I love Glass Hammer. But not today.

You guys (Babb and Schendel) have a God given talent: both of you make excellent, no, superior material. But you chose to use it to impersonnate something you idolise. You have a God given talent, but you keep making Relayer all over again....It's your choice. Feels like the guy who loves him mom so bad that his girlfriend is a lot like her. It's been seen many times, and it's a sad painting.

For the Yes fans out there who cannot get enough of the legendary band, this album will drive you bananas. It's a feast of Yes, a complete banquet of pure Yes, with scrumptious vocals and lushious keyboards.

For those who hoped a return to the basics, well duhh.

Hence the teennage schoolgirl yelling: ''Hey, if you like Yes so much, why don't you marry them?''

Glass Hammer's If is to Yes what Citizen Cain's Somewhere But Yesterday was to Gabriel's Genesis: so dangerously close that many will too quickly dismiss it as just a clone, but so good that I don't care. Same as with CC's masterpiece album, the clone feeling comes mainly from the vocal department, but if you overcome the prejudices of the vocals first impression and listen carefully and for enough spins, you realise that the music itself is different and personal enough to deserve full credit in its own right.

The addition of vocalist Jon Davison is a double-edge sword for the band, he shares with the Yes classic frontman not only the name similarity but also his vocal timbre is a carbon copy (coming from Yes tribute bands Roundabout and YesStory), causing this dangerous risk for the guys of being tagged as a clone band and not appreciated for the great music they make. On the other hand he sings wonderfully and if the great vocal melodies are in any part his own contribution, the choice for Jon is more than welcome.

The music is pure symphonic, certainly inspired in the 70's but with a modern twist in the vein of Neal Morse, Spock's Beard, Simon Says etc, and when it resembles Yes it does so mainly in their modern era like Magnification or the best material from The Ladder, and only occasionally to earlier periods. Very strong melodies throughout the whole album, but with more than enough twists and turns, time signature changes etc to delight any classic symphonic lover.

The musical weight falls mainly on the outstanding keyboard work of Fred Schendel with Steve Babb providing strong support as usual, but guitarist Alan Shikoh and guest drummer Randall Williams shine as well. The work on backing vocals is also thorough and adorns the overall sound with a deep richness, and the production is simply excellent.

Difficult to pick best tracks as they are all brilliant and similar in style, but my favourites are the three around-10-min tracks Beyond, Within, Behold The Ziddle and If The Stars plus the 24- min epic If The Sun. The relative lack of originality and the lack of diversity may be considered as a weak point for those seeking for these attributes in their prog quest, but for me they are not, after many spins I can still listen to this album from beginning to end without a single moment of boredom.

Nice artwork too by the way. Highly recommended to symphonic fans, 4 to 4,5 stars.

It appears that when Glass Hammer was in the studio in 2007 recording "Culture Of Ascent", and Yes' frontman Jon Anderson was adding some tracks as a guest artist, Fred Schendel and Steve Babb had the foresight to gather up some of the spittle from the microphone, whisk it away and extract the DNA and begin the cloning process. "Jon Davison" indeed. We can see through your ruse.

Seriously, it's no surprise that when Yes needed a singer on short notice they came to Davison, who's vocal range, timbre, and phrasing all sound like the second coming of Anderson. Add that to Babb's Chris Sqire-like bass lines, Schendel's Sort-of-Wakeman-but-more-like-Kaye keyboards, and introduce Alan Shikoh, who along with Schendel's steel guitar do a fair Steve Howe, you have a band that sounds as much like Yes as Fish-era Marillion sounded like early Genesis.

Compositionally, each song sounds to me like Roine Stolt wrote some songs, and gave them to Yes to record. But each piece has moments where if I wasn't paying attention, I could easily mistake this for a lost Yes album.

But you know what? It works. It's actually very good Yes music. And sing at that point Yes hadn't been creating new music for a while (and their more recent effort was disappointingly un-Yeslike), I'll be glad that someone is carrying on the tradition.

Over the years the duo of Steve Babb and Fred Schendel have had a somewhat rotating door policy to musicians and styles, but here they have gone back to what nay fans are going to love, namely classic progressive rock in the style of Yes. Now, it is in the style of as opposed to going out and copying what has gone before ? and surely they have been paid the ultimate accolade by that band, as not only has Jon Anderson appeared on a previous album but the vocalist on this 2010 release is Jon Davidson ? who is currently the newest member of Yes, replacing Benoit David for the 2012 Australasian tour. Now, as I was lucky enough to see Yes in Auckland recently I know just how good Jon D is in a live environment, so it is of course no surprise to hear him to be more than up to the task in the studio.

They may not have a Roger Dean cover, but in Tom Kuhn they have someone who again has prepared something in the style of as opposed to just rehashing something that came out thirty or more years ago. I read one review where a comparison is made between Glass Hammer and Citizen Cain and that makes quite a bit of sense ? when CC was releasing albums in the early Nineties there was quite a lot of flak as it was stated that they were just doing what Gabriel had done with Genesis, but it has to be remembered that Peter had long left the band and the Genesis of 1992 wasn't anything like CC. Now, I really like 'Fly From Here' but this probably has more in common with the traditional Yes sound than that ? and after 20 years GH still has the same two people at it's heart yet it took far less time than that for Chris Squire to go through two drummers, three keyboard players, two singers and three guitarists.

Anyone playing this or writing about this is going to compare Glass Hammer to Yes, but that isn't a bad thing. The question is not why does that have to take place, but more why on earth isn't this band better known and spoken about with the same reverence? This is a great album, whatever name is on the cover ? if you like Yes then this is five stars and essential, if you don't then don't bother, but it is your loss.

Amazon.com has this lovely feature. It's a widget (isn't that what you call 'em?) that runs near the bottom of the screen that advertises albums purchased by people who bought the same album you are presently checking out. I have checked out a number of bands clicking down there and one night Glass Hammer's Cor Cordium cropped up. I gave a quick sample listen to a couple of songs and thought, "This sounds awesome. I'll get Glass Hammer too." But Cor Cordium was quite a bit more expensive than If and since the albums covers looked similar (love the little flying creature) I bought If.

Allow me to insert here a quick history of my interest in prog. For most of my music life I have been interested in groups that approached music with a more serious intent towards composition and song writing. Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Iron Maiden, Queensryche and lighter weights like Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues and Alan Parsons Project were already in my collection. But it was only near the end of 2010 that I understood that these artists were progressive in their music and what that all meant. I had just become a rabid Rush fan and by June 2011 I was seriously hooked on Yes.

Back to Glass Hammer's If. This sub-genre of symphonic prog really appeals to me, and so what I heard from Glass Hammer seemed like it would be right up my alley. I was looking forward to hearing If, expecting to hear something in the vein of Yes's classic years. But I didn't expect that I would hear something almost exactly like Yes! As the first song Beyond and Before... er, sorry... that's Beyond, Within played, I started thinking of all kinds of things to write. "It's as if the Topographic Oceans crew was transported to 2010 and made a new album!" "No, it's like after making the studio tracks for Keys to Ascension, the band jumped ahead to 2010." "No, it's like after the last tour with Rick Wakeman in the early 2000's and the band decided to take a break and do other things individually, a tribute band said, 'We'd like to pick up where you left off and continue producing Yes music.'" At first I could even see how similar Jon Davison sounded like Jon Anderson. But after a few more listens I felt I was able to begin to distinguish the differences.

It's not easy to review this album without citing how utterly similar the music and vocals here are to Yes and it would be easy to fall into the argument of music that attempts to imitate something that has already been done is not progressive in the true sense of the word, unless while imitating the previously established form something new is added. I can't say there's anything outstandingly new here. However, I also thought that it might be better to avoid this argument all together and just decide whether or not I liked the music.

So, at last, my opinion is that - in the manner of Yes's best music - Glass Hammer's If manages to capture all those interesting and exciting elements. There are epics and a super epic, all of which feature the expected odd time signatures, the abrupt changes in style and pace, acoustic guitar bits, Steve Howe-like rock guitar bits, lots of keyboards including Moog synthesizer solos that sound a lot like Rick Wakeman's from The Revealing Science of God and Mind Drive, Chris Squire-like bass sound, and some cool drumming that fits right in without being overzealous. The track If the Stars has a guitar part that's almost straight from Onward and the song ends with a snippet of guitar from The Revealing Science... The longest track If the Sun sure will take several listens to digest in whole, and Grace the Sky has some suspiciously Christian-sounding lyrics but overall I rather like the song and the music. Perhaps, to my ears anyway, the song that sounds the least like Yes is Behold, the Ziddle. It's a little darker at times and the lyrics are bizarre. This is the one track where I feel Jon Davison's vocals are weak in places and where I am sure Jon Anderson would have handled the vocal duties more skillfully.

It's not all Yes, however. I picked out a Steve Morse-like guitar solo and at times the music seems to carry the symphonic prog Yes banner with more zeal than Yes did. There's a strong musical theme throughout the album that seems consciously adhered to, unlike Yes albums that were more about creating and expanding this "new" approach to music way back when. If I have anything truly negative to say about If, it's that by the time the final, super epic track If the Sun begins, the uniform sound of the album begins to sound over stretched. For all that the music has to offer, there's no respite from the continuously reinforced onslaught of symphonic prog in modern style. Perhaps if the album were 10 minutes shorter or offered something different either heavier or lighter?

I am still having mixed feelings about how good I actually think the album is. I recently also purchased Wobbler's Rites at Dawn and I am finding that one more enjoyable because I think it's a step and a half further away from Yes than this album. I also think Jon Davison's vocals are not as strong as Jon Anderson's. They have the timbre of Jon Anderson but not that slight bit of edge that Anderson has. I expect I might find some of Glass Hammer's older albums more interesting maybe. Still, all things considered, as a symphonic prog album, or maybe it would be better to just call it a symphonic rock album, it has most of what I like to hear. The compositions are musically strong if not overindulgent at times. There is no question of talent or purpose. This might be an album that will grow on me more as I explore progressive music further.

Glass Hammer's "If" is more far removed from their previous albums than anything they had approached since their conception. The addition of Jon Anderson? I mean Jon Davison (the resemblance in vocal style is unmistakeable) is an inspired move. The influences of Yes are too obvious to labour on but it is still wonderful music, and at least Davison can sing. I missed Susie Bogdanowicz though, but it is great that the keyboard wizardry of Fred Schendel remains, the one constant of the band that has a revolving door membership as compelling as King Crimson's morphing lineups and indeed the revolving policy of Hawkwind.

It begins with glorious Mellotron, Hammond and ambient atmosphere on 'Beyond, Within' (11:44) and Davison certainly sings beautifully in his high register. It is little wonder he joined Yes in 2012 on their tour, of which I was privileged to see in Melbourne. I like his vocals so I had no problem with his voice on any of these tracks. The lyrics have the searching for God symbolism, "And who does dwell within me, And who does my song call out to, Who looks into my dreaming and makes my visions whole, In infinite creation, So many small infinities, Each singing out their own song, Each one a soul to rise up and take flight".

'Behold The Ziddle' is similar in style with lots of tempo shifts, keyboard dominations and Davison crooning sweetly. The lyrics are poetic with darker meanings, "Through a wintry scene I flee, A murky hollow looms ahead of me, Down I slip and tumble, Torn and bruised I lay humble, Am I lost forevermore in this dark world, Now I only walk the lonely way, Where all is sadness, How dearly I'd love to pray, Yet all is madness".

'Grace The Sky' is a very smooth tranquil track, Davison again peaceful and relaxed, the keys and tempos remaining subdued and organic. The lyrics are as usual replete with Christian symbology, "In sleepwalking society, A youth questions his role to be a pillar, puppet a parasite, Get your head on right, As your heart takes flight, If the bird is free to fly, Then why my soul should I deny, If the bird is free to fly, Then why the wings of my soul should I deny, Oh bird of paradise, Let your colors grace the skies and with courage on your wing rejoice freedom's blessing."

'At Last We Are' is replete with synth, medieval sounding guitars and a steady tempo. Davison sings, "Sing to me a star, Set it in yonder sky, Shining, and guiding me, For I've lost my way before, There in the mist on eastern hill, For I would climb to the sun and then beyond to hear what you might sing, Such was the power of your voice, Oh, that I might hear more." Then it moves to a new time sig and finally ends on a bright tempo and Anderson flawless on passionate vocals, with an even higher vocal, almost sounding like the 5 octave vocals of Annie Haslam.

'If The Stars' is a lengthy piece at 10:25, that opens with a steady percussion, chimes, and grand swirling synths. It builds steadily and features scintillating lead guitars, soft vocals and meandering Mellotron. The lyrics have intriguing imagery based on the Bible; Phillip or James, "If the stars should then appear, One night in a thousand years, How would man believe and adore, If the light of the city of God was shown there, Would they believe?, If the stars should then appear, One night in a thousand years."

'If The Sun' is a mammoth epic clocking 24 minutes, in the traditional prog epic length. Since I only have the version without this I can't comment. However, this is one of the greater Glass Hammer albums with some of their best vocals. The lyrics, the musicianship and the overall atmosphere are symphonic prog bliss.