THE INCONSOLABLE SECRET

American Glass Hammer was never a group that captured my imagination. I tried two or three albums and I just gave up. Too derivative material and too weak songwriting. Small wonder they never made the major league even if they were excellent musicians themselves. I guess I wouldn´t even bother to hear this one if it was not for my dear PA colleague and friend Progrules who defied me to hear their Knight of The North song. I ended up getting the Inconsolable Secret and I must say I was quite surprised by it. It is by far the best thing I ever heard of them so far.

This is a double CD and the first one has only two tracks, 15+ minute The Maker Of Crowns and the aforementioned The Knight Of the North (23:39 of duration). Both are excellent prog epics with a very retro sound: a kind of Genesis meets Yes meets Keith Emerson, plus a few Gentle Giant-like passages on the way. Still derivative? Definitly (the Roger Dean cover tells it all, doesn´t it?), but good stuff anyway. Lots of variety, shifting moods, changing time signatures, long Hammond runs, mini moog solos, Chris Squire-like bass parts and so on. Not perfect (some parts are more well structured than others), but really good keyboard driven prog rock that I love to hear. I wish they could play a little more guitar and the vocals were stronger, but those are minor details. Overall CD 1 is very strong and well craft, specially if you like 70´s bombastic symphonic prog.

Second CD starts very well, but begins losing steam halfway through. Some heavy orchestrated, instrumental tracks get in the way and they really don´t add anything to the other much more powerful tracks. The final epic, Having Caught A Glimpse is a little too long and bit corny too. However, the first three tunes are really good and the others non-orchestrated tunes aren´t bad at all either. The alternating male and female vocals are a good idea and were more well explored on disc 2 (meaning the female singer does a better job here). Production is very good.

In the end the sensation is that if Glass Hammer had trimmed this record to a single CD they´d have a killer one in their hands, even at, say, 78 minutes of music (they could have easily ditched some 15 least). As it is my rating keeps shifting from 3.5 to 4 stars. I decided to round up to four since most of the songs are really good and this is surely their best so far in terms of songwriting. I´ll probably try to hear more of their CDs since they finally proved they could come up with some really strong and daring songs this time.