THE POWER AND THE GLORY

After their excellent "In a Glass House" without Phil Shelman, Gentle Giant returned with "The Power and the Glory" (1974), their sixth album. A conceptual work that reflects, without taking sides on any political banner, with irony and crudeness, on the enormous difficulties of human beings to handle power without being seduced by its darker side and falling into its toxic clutches. And just as in "Three Friends", "The Power and the Glory" maintains a temporal sequence song after song, accompanying it with an elaborate musical structure that makes use of the usual baroque, classical, jazz and rock resources largely dominated by the affable big guy.

The din of a crowd roused by the motivational message of a new leader kicks off the plot with the rhythmic and convoluted poly-rhythmic "Proclamation" guided by Kerry Minnear's very seventies electric piano, the complex experimentation of jazzy strings and Minnear's bewildering cello sustain the political discourse of 'sincerity' in the Crimsonian "So Sincere", the serene beauty and harmony of "Aspirations" keeps the people's hopeful dreams alive, the intense layering of vibratos, marimbas and an excellent Hammond solo find the character in full exercise of power in the also jazzy "Playing the Game", the doubts that begin to show in the very progressive "Cogs in Cogs" full of the genre's sonorities with John Weathers shining on percussion, and the growing disillusionment in the partly acoustic, medieval-scented setting of "No God's a Man".

The final stretch of the story is none other than the free fall of the failed leader caught in the tentacles of power, with Ray Shulman's raging violins in defiant counterpoint to Gary Green's pyromaniac guitar solo on the enlightening "The Face", and the heavy atmosphere of the concluding "Valedictory" recycles sonic phrases from the opening track, suggesting a pernicious perpetual vicious cycle.

"The Power and the Glory" is a new demonstration of the enormous capacity of the English multi-instrumentalists to develop proposals of great musical richness with the addition of one of the most interesting themes of their career, excellently reflected in The King of Swords that illustrates the album's cover, at a time when the planet was immersed in several political scandals and regional leadership conflicts.

4/4.5 stars