THE MISSING PIECE

Gentle Giant's "The Missing Piece" is a transitional album made during 1977 as disco was beginning to be king and punk was alive and spitting. The album I have came with the dismal followup "Giant For a Day" and in comparison to that, this album is very good. However, gone are the technical coimplexities of the Giant only to be replaced with very simple three chord wonder melodic rock. I like the way it starts with its raucous and rather catchy 'Two Weeks in Spain', the Shulman brothers sound great and this one is infectious with some weird musicianship. It then goes steadily downhill with 'I'm Turning Around', a failed attempt at a ballad single, that did not trouble the top of the charts either side of the Atlantic. 'Betcha Thought we couldn't do it' is mediocre quasi-punk as is 'Who do you think you are?' and the nauseating hicksville of 'Mountain Time'. It picks up a bit with a more progressive approach with 'Memories of Old Days' that has a longer running time and even effects of children thrown in. The album even ends on something proggy with 'For Nobody' but this is rather a lacklustre album.

The liner notes attempt to explain or justify this mediocrity from a band we have come to admire over the years for their virtuoso complexity in prog. Ray Shulman explains; "it was a funny period of time; we were suddenly searching for an identity, what we ought to be, where we were going to fit in. There was a degree of pressure to make a more commercial album, and to be honest I can't even remember whether it was self-generated or from the outside; in any case, we'd always tried to avoid repeating ourselves, we were always looking for something new to do." The result is this rather poor effort and it certainly was the beginning of disaster for the group that would continue to decline on the ensuing GG catalogue.

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