PYRAMID

Looking at the somber color shades in the album gatefold cover (oh, the vinyl days), I can't help the association with the tone that the concept of time passing in an almost unimaginably vast scale imposes to the music through the lyrics.

Days flowing countless like grains of sand, and all that jazz, you know. The decisive point in that sort of narrative is, I think, how infinitesimal human life appears by comparison. It's overwhelming, not for us, progressive rock listeners, but for us, tiny humans dragging our brief lives. The result is elegantly somber, and inapprehensibly distant, like the pyramid scape in the cover.

And I like it, as I like the entire side one, the monumental fixation of the percussion in Voyager, the suggestion of a cyclic tide behind every change in life in What Goes Up, the properly overwehlming part in The Eagle Will Rise Again, which is where the insignificant human implores in vain to the unreachable divinity, the insinuation of infinity necessarily overcoming mortality, in the fantastic ride of One More River (to cross), led by the terrific vocals of Lenny Zakatek, and the final meeting with The Boatman, who is restless while an insipid burocrat tells you that you Can't Take It With You (you knew it, didn't you?, not even your discs).

But not only pyramids we find in the Hipgnosis shot, there is also that guy that seems to be passing a hard time on the ominous background of the desert and, well, yes, our pyramid. Side two seems dominated by him, with his trivial obsessions in Pyramania, and his final loneliness in Shadow Of A Lonely Man. Two instrumental tracks unfold a distant and almost indifferent back courtain, with massive orchestra and choir In The Lap Of The Gods, with purely mechanical minimalism sustained by keyboards Hyper-Gamma Spaces.

Take the ride, if you haven't yet, but in any case don't wait too long, the boatman is getting restless.