THANK YOU (EDIT)

It amazes me how friendly ratings (without reviews, of course) this single has received here. I recently listened to all the post- Interview albums of GENTLE GIANT, and it's easy to pick Giant for a Day (1978) as their worst album ever. Its biggest problem is that the songs go nowhere, they're ripped bare of progressive characters. A good example is the opening track 'Words from the Wise' that starts sharply sounding more or less like the classic GG with its vocal harmonies, but as the song goes on and on unimaginatively till the end, the listener realizes that the band, once so innovative, original and skillful, had truly lost their touch, as the preceding uneven album The Missing Piece had indicated. I even prefer the last, equally forgettable album Civilian (1980) in which the former prog group and now an average pop group at least managed to update their sound fairly convincingly.

'Thank You' is an extraordinarily boring, forgettable, country-flavoured middle-of-the-road song from Giant for a Day, actually among the poorest tracks of the poor album. Like it's said in the 4-CD set "I Lost My Head - The Chrysalis Years 1975-1980", it could be a harmless little song by an American midwest band called Montana or something like that, without anyone giving a second thought on its strengths or weaknesses. But being a Gentle Giant song, it's like an acclaimed Nobelist writing a technical manual.

Instrumental 'Spooky Boogie', another outtake from the album, is mildly humorous and witty, definitely better and more original (Gentle Giant -ish) than 'Thank You', but still missing the progressive final touch. At least I don't care to listen to it more than a couple of times. Featuring only weak album material and even having a poor cover design, I see no valid reason to give more than one star to this miserable single.