TWO SLAMS AGAINST 1980

 Two hot-take record reviews from the 1980s. I admit that I hadn't listened to either Mahagonny Rush or Gentle Giant in depth , the reason being that at the time I was at the end of my Hendrix worship and given up the quest to find someone who could carry on in the style Jimi invented after his too-early death in 1967. And second, I was never a great fan of progressive rock no matter how superb the musicianship , mostly for reasons that remained the same from Yes to Jethro Tull to Emerson Lake and Palmer to Kansas: solid composition and dazzling arrangements abounded hither and yon for all these bands, but the albums they made were an overcooked meal , a structural mess, a tinker toy cacophony of odd time signatures and gratingly naive and even idiotic lyrics. Some bands get a pass , mainly Zappa, King Crimson and the more proggy aspects of  Return to Forever and Dixie Dregs. But Gentle Giant just pushed me into the ground with their big, grandiose thumb, and despite all one can point as to their superb chops , they were just the thing to dampen a healthy sex drive.

Legend has it—a story so straightforwardly American it practically begs for a Norman Rockwell illustration—that a young Frank Marino ( a fine Canadian fretster actually), felled by too much LSD, was given a guitar by benevolent doctors who must have believed in the curative powers of a well-strummed G chord. Miraculously, Marino, who previously had never so much as toyed with a guitar, rose from his psychedelic ashes playing as if the late Jimi Hendrix himself had taken up residence in his fingertips. Interviews abound in which Marino, with all the sincerity of a Method actor, admits to being possessed by Hendrix’s wandering spirit; the prodigy self-anointed, baptized in the holy distortion of the electric guitar. This is the narrative—admittedly charming, undeniably absurd, and, let’s face it, comfort food for fans who relish a good yarn with their riffs. Accept the fable or not; the fact is unavoidable: Marino sounds uncannily like Hendrix, but only if by “sounds like” we mean an enthusiast’s copy—saturated in retro adulation and resistant to the winds of creative change. Rather than pushing the music forward, our protagonist remains firmly anchored in the late 1960s, serving up a stew of rage, reverb, and echo, but somehow missing the subtlety and elegance that occasionally graced Hendrix’s own take on the blues. The problem with Marino and his band, Mahogany Rush, is simple: they can’t, for all their technical fireworks, stitch together a truly memorable song. What we get instead is an endless parade of solos—the musical equivalent of drowning a delicate soufflé in ketchup, offending both taste and decorum. Marino’s technical flair, while impressive, wears thin with repetition; what starts as style soon surrenders to sameness. What’s Next, their latest effort, feels custom-built for the crowd that treats Hendrix like a household god and flinches at the idea that better guitarists might have come along since. One suspects Marino imagines himself as the fretboard’s messiah, the Second Coming of Stratocaster—a fantasy as American as a slice of pie at a state fair.

On to Gentle Giant’s release Civilian, then. There was a time when dabbling with classical motifs in rock identified you as a pop intellectual; Gentle Giant, to their credit, maintained a rare sense of structure and discipline. Now, as trends shift, they appear to be courting mainstream approval, watering down their complexity in a bid for broader appeal. The result is a pale shadow of their earlier work, teetering dangerously close to parody. The compositions tread cautiously within the lines of mediocrity, giving innovation a wide berth. Aside from a few pleasant group interludes, the music plods along, lacking verve. Derek Shulman’s vocals—a plaintive, diluted cry—never soared, and the lyrics, steeped in existential angst, are less soul-searching than mere poetic brooding. Such lines inspire not empathy, but the urge to offer a brisk, corrective nudge—not necessarily below the belt, but somewhere more likely to wake the spirit.