FREE HAND

Moving to the ranks of a major label like 'Chrysalis Records' after their 1974 concept album "The Power and the Glory", meant for Gentle Giant an effort to expand the reach of their talented music towards new audiences, and whose first collaborative result was 'Free Hand' (1975), the band's seventh album.

This renewed stage brought with it a greater fluidity in the English band's musical approach, at the cost of partially ceding a bit of originality and spontaneity, and it seemed at times to be unclear which direction to take, repeating themselves and configuring a scenario halfway between one thing and the other, reflected in songs that combine the most accessible funky vibes with jazz elements, as in the energetic "Just the Same" (excellent keyboard solo by Kerry Minnear) or in the demanding "Free Hand", or as in the also lively tune "Mobile" complemented with rock and Celtic overtones and the protagonist presence of Ray Shulman's wandering violins.

Despite more digestible sonic additions, the experimental streak is deeply embedded in the band's DNA, and it is then that the songs feature those shimmering passages deployed in convoluted and shifting structures, as in the eclecticism of the intricate "Time to Kill" and its American rhythm and blues feel, in the polyphonic choral arrangements of the baroque "On Reflection", in the beautiful medieval and jazzy atmosphere of "His Last Voyage" marked by Gary Green's acoustic arpeggios, Minnear's keyboards and crowned with an agonising guitar solo, and finally in the short instrumental "Talybont", which Minnear's harpsichords and clavinets also set the scene in the Middle Ages.

"Free Hand", with its ups and downs, is a very good album, one of the most commercially successful of Gentle Giant's career, and also one of their last great works.

3.5/4 stars