For my money, my problem with prog is that it misses out on colour and variation -- it's all well and good having twenty-minute songs, but if it's effectively five songs shunted together, or one idea drilled into the ground, it's just pish. Not the case with ANTA -- they do move around a lot, but keep harmonic and melodic continuity; there's plenty of time signature-hopping, but it's complementary rather than discontinuous (which very quickly sounds like smart-arsery in my book).
Daily Archives: 06/06/2024
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With PJ Harvey as executive producer and Mike Patton namechecked on the cover, he clearly has some heavy hitting friends, but this is a solo tour de force; a labour of love that finds him playing ukelin, organ, piano, pedal steel, various guitars and basses, with just his friend Mike Kenney helping out on fiddle for two of the nine tracks.
What the book does superbly is positioning the group as a product of their time period, whilst avoiding the great swathes of cliché that have swamped narratives of this era. It clarifies that, as much as punk opened the doors for bedroom Beefheart and Stockhausen obsessives, most of the groups that had any kind of commercial success were still largely in thrall to the glam tentpoles of Bowie and Roxy Music, as well as the tougher end of pub rock. It posits all this whilst articulating clearly how these influences percolated in the surrounding culture of the era, and how this created music that sounded so distant from its core initial influences.