Hobbit Prog: Swords and Suckery

I don’t know why it is that I hate fantasy novels and hobbits to the extent that I do. I’m not talking Italo Calvino and Borges fanstasy, I’m talking those terrible Robert Jordan novels you see pony-tailed comic book clerks reading when they can pull themselves away from their thousandth re-read of The Watchmen, or on those rare and blessed occasions when they emerge from their basement hovels like albino veal claves, milky, soft, sick from drinking Faygo pop all night and carrying that peculiarly sweet stench the human body exhudes after about a week of 18-hour-a-day gaming sessions. While I identify with the need to recuse oneself from humanity and hunker down with total nerd obsessions and geekdom, I guess I just don’t get the attraction of living in a pre-industrial society rife with orcs and dragons and mighty wizards who can turn me into a toad on their curmudgeonly whim. I guess I essentially just regard as rubbish any cultural past-time that is not one I partake in. This is because I am an elitist snob. Or so I’ve been told recently.


Well, for whatever reason, I don’t like Hobbits any more than I like any other dwarves, and I freely admit that I have one prejudice that I have no intention of becoming “enlightened” about, and that is my fear and hatred of any man under 4’10 inches tall. Who knows what they’re planning and plotting down there? How can you trust someone who has to stand on a soap-box to piss? Demon-seed shriveled and twisted like a bonzai elm, given pitiful animation, dressed in clothes that never quite fit and carrying the hate in their hearts that only a freak could muster, dwarves are disturbing enough to The Curator – but give them pointy ears, a Phrygian cap and a mission to save some large-busted maiden and you have all the ingredients to make me get up and leave a movie theater, and not even bother to demand my money back. I like my heroes frankly more “heroic”, and not the kind of “special people” you see carting books at the Goodwill or holding court at a Waffle House outside of Louisville, Kentucky at 4 a.m. regaling all of society’s other losers with tales about what an asshole Chevy Chase was on the set of Under the Rainbow. So I’m not especially predisposed to remark favorably about an entire genre of Prog where the main characters are like extras from a Tod Browning film and the whole silly mess is scored by those ridiculous zap-gun synthesizers that were all the rage in the early 70’s. This could be a particularly piquant essay rife with nasty gibes and slanders, so all ye denizens faire of orcs and maidens, be ye warned nowe.


It all started with the grandfather of pretentious synth-based Worlds of Warcraft Prog, the great man himself, Mr. Richard Wakeman. Others will no doubt take issue with this selection – there were other LOTR-themed albums before 1974’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Uriah Heep had put out two very annoying Wizard-themed albums early in their career, and there was even a (very bad) pop act called The Hobbits bandying about lame psychedelica in the late 60’s. Hell, there’s not even a Hobbit or orc to be found in Journey – but there are all kinds of Jules Verne inspired critters that appear in the music, and the overall scope of the work implies a problematic and bookish childhood for Mr. Wakeman filled with parental neglect and numerous beatings on the cricket green delivered by the always-dastardly upper class lads who never picked up a book unless it was to swat their Paki houseboy for serving the tea too beastly hot. It’s a hard knock life, yes ‘tis; and this is why those who are knocked about so deftly by this merciless world retreat to lands of dragons, fascist overlords and natural-forces-warping Wizards, law-by-the-sword and mass slaughter, a world where “nasty, solitary, bruitsh and short” is an accolade and comely maidens swarm in a profusion of bountiful-bodices and who when they kiss you don’t have stale YooHoo on their breath – like in the real world of Geek Love. Escapism sometimes has another name – schizophrenia. And too many dragons in the belfry leads to rabid Python-quoting excesses and eventual diabetes thanks to the inhaling of Ho Ho’s and Red Hot Cheetohs that is the root nourishment of every D&D foraging expedition to the Heart of Darkness that is suburban alienation. Every hero in every proper fantasy ever written is the reader himself. And that kind of chowder-chest navel gazing is futile and deeply sad.


But back to Rick Wakeman. Journey gets the nod in my book for “starting” the “Wizardry” fad (which led inexorably like a galloping unicorn to the Hobbits, unfortunately) because the album is both bloated and boring, in astonishingly just proportions. With an entire orchestra behind him and the game narrative talents of David Hemmings – who is trying desperately to take all of this seriously, like a good English actor should – there’s just enough bloat that you might think a fairly grand time could be had listening to the excesses of nothingness Wakeman pumped out from those keyboards in his career’s heydey like a Grand Vizier doling out the dates and figs to the harem’s ever-vigilant eunuchs. “There’s more where that came from, you sackless-bastards!” screams a contemptuous voice – and this could be both the Mufti speaking to the mutilated harlot-guards or Wakeman to his producer and record label, who obviously had neither the balls nor the common sense to put a stop to all of this bombast before it started putting people out of jobs.


But while Wakeman is the apex of this perversity, hordes of epigones came a-traipsing in the long turgid shadows he cast, many paying tribute to orc-friendly platters spun before. I’ve included in the pictures above not only Wakeman in his ridiculous get-up, but an arguably more absurd looking fellow, Chris Wilson, who moved to Greenwich Village, got an apartment on 8th Street and started calling himself “Gandalf the Grey”. The cover is mind-blowing, and a visceral reminder of everything about hippies that I despise; unfortunately, for the purposes of this article, the album itself is really not that bad. The production is shoddy, and it seems like the drummer was just some guy in the walk-up who they gave some reefer to and told to bang on a snare every fourth beat, but there’s nothing remarkable here, save a few boring moments, and an interesting little hippie-epic (almost seven minutes long!) “Here on Eighth Street” that is eminently enjoyable for anybody who ever dug on the Byrds. But I had to include this relic here, for the album art is surely something Mr. Wilson wishes he could have a do-over on.


Less sanguine are my opinions on forerunners of Hobbit Prog Jan Dukes De Grey (Sorcerers, 1970) and Bo Hannson’s 1971 snooze-fest Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings. Jan Dukes are particularly annoying, more just re-tread psychedelica than anything truly Middle Earth-y, and Hannson may have been “inspired” but this is another one of The Curator’s burdensome listening experiences that led to a torpor severe enough to warrant three hours of Led Zeppelin as antidote following this aural soporific. Man, there is just whole chunks of this fucking album where absolutely nothing happens – NOTHING! Big swooping major-chord empties, indulgences of atmospheric verisimilitude that go on like a bad Stephen King novel, dolorous shifts in structural emphasis that linger like a flatulent mongrel dog, and other stingless-beauties that are meant to be profound and are actually just the nesting roots of the cancerours weed that would someday be called “New Age” – yes, here is inchoate Tesh and nascent Yanni, and a true sign of a Bad Prog album in all its enervating glory. When you are listening to a song that takes five minutes to create an identifiable hook, you know you dwell in the pitiful penumbra that is Tolkien Street in Shit Music Town.


No list of shitty Sci-Fi or Fantasy Prog would be complete, of course, without multiple inclusions of the Yes family of terminally self-indulgent musicians. Wakeman is my favorite Blockhead Merlin, of course, but Jon Anderson can’t be ignored for his appalling 1976 opus Olias of Sunhillow, allegedly based on a series of books that sound suspiciously like Stanislaw Lem – or even the Kobaian cycle of Zeuhl Prog/fascist cult legends Magma. No matter the source material, this is an especially heroic effort of nauseating boredom, even for a shrill little nothing like Jon Anderson. Not only ruining the proceedings with his always waterboard-quality vocalizing, Anderson also decided to play most of the instruments on the record, which goes about as well as the guy who empties the shit bucket at a hospital deciding he’s seen enough to try some brain surgerin’ of his own. Oddly, the results are not dissimilar, as both the amateurly-lobotomized and listeners of Mr. Anderson will find themselves drooling, stupid and permanently damaged to the root of the old medulla oblongata.


By the time Belgian Proggers Machiavel were making albums like Jester (1977) the occult-fad was beginning to die out as a purely symphonic rock exploration. Another one of my obsessive hatreds, jesters and other jocular court fools are presented in most popular culture in a way completely removed from the melancholy and misanthropic carping they – and they alone – were allowed to provide in the courts of kings. Lear’s Fool – probably the best minor Shakespeare character who isn’t plotting to suborn murder or take back the castle in the name of his slain father – is a perfect study in what the Jester really was supposed to be. And it wasn’t what Machiavel had in mind – or the even more superfluous Marrillion, who “brought back” Prog a few years later with Script for a Jester’s Tear (1982), an album that is incredibly interesting to people who have no idea that a man named Peter Gabriel used to front a band called Genesis. One of the more explicit rip-offs and second-rate forgeries of the Prog era, Marrilion was inexplicably huge for many years in Europe and even sold records to Progged-out American audiences still recovering from the fifty or sixty Todd Rundgren projects that had clogged the airwaves during the latter 70’s. And while Marrilion is derivative, Machiavel is just bad – my cohort here DJ Micah is particularly keen on belittling these guys and thought I would enjoy hating their spurious creative output. As is usual on all things Prog, Micah knew precisely what would chafe my chassy and make the cream on the canoli go rancid with bile; Jester is a seriously lame record, the music incredibly boring and the only thing elevating it to alternative classic status being the horrific vocal maulings of Mario Guccio. Still mewing out in his own distinctively shrill fashion some of the most shallow lyrics of the Prog era, 30 years later and Signor Guccio stands to have his own wing at the PRHOI, with masterful rapings of poor Terpsichore both his crime and entree to these virtual halls where justice at last shall be done to bands as bad as his. Not even recommended for shits and giggles, Machiavel is just a big fat nothing and as frustrating to listen to as jacking off while on Prozac.


While the Seventies were indeed a time of orotund effusion and pointless orc-gasms, the end of the Hobbit Prog experiment roughly coincided with the demise of “classic” Prog itself. When one of the original and arguably greatest Prog bands – King Crimson – re-emerged in 1980 with a completely different line-up and jazz-influenced fusion sound, the great era of wretched excess ended and even Yes decided to make a “pop” record – hiring a guitarist 20 years younger than the rest of the band and stinking up FM radio for the bulk of 1982 with 90125. With this ending, a new flourishing was hoped for by fans who had seen the music become bloated and boring, albums suppurating with the pus of ego and the cancer of hubris. Perhaps, when Prog inevitably re-emerged from its hiatus in a few years, the music could get back to its original arty roots without all of the bombast that had wrecked the whole party from the moment Keith Emerson’s grand piano was lifted off the stage and spun around over the audiences head – with Mr. Emerson still playing the thing, of course. That hope was decidedly dashed by the skull-fuck-of-doom emergence that was Neo-Prog – a sub-genre that had a particular obsession with orcs, druids, ensanguined fields of medieval slaughter and other fun-time masturbatory enthusiasms of the young guitarists who sought to take the technical excesses of Eddie Van Halen and combine them with the wretched obscurantism of Jethro Tull.


We’ll cover the excrement that is Hobbit Prog: The Metal Years in part two of this essay, which is below. - TR

Hobbit Prog Part Two: The Metal Years

In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche expounds upon one of his more interesting concepts: that of “instinct”, and the idea that the highest level of human achievement is to do things with consummate skill and complete unthinking; the notion of the greatest genius being perhaps reflexive in his genius, simply creating by some unknown and unteachable force that shows itself in the seamless beauty of a truly epoch-defining work of art.


Perhaps this is why so much of Prog-influenced Metal is such irredeemable gobshite. For years I wondered why I wanted to hurt babies and urinate on flowers when I heard Yngwie Malmsteen, and I finally decided that it was because his perfection was literally inhuman, that for all the man’s ability to “shred” and pound out hundreds of notes in a single guitar solo, the antiseptic flawlessness of his sound and musical execution (savor the aptness and beauty of the word) marked him as essentially soulless, with the evanescent beauty of a well-pancaked debutante and the ice-cold clarity of a novel by Robbe-Grillet. This is the music of an over-heated artisan, not the insight of a slightly imperfect visionary. Disconcertingly anodyne like a corporate stand-up comic and exuding all the ardor of a Mormon stripper, technically precise music like Malmsteen’s Fantasy-influenced Rising Force or Odyssey are as well-honed and unforgiving as a particularly efficient firing squad. This is Eichmann-rock, too banal to be evil, the work of a slavish bureaucrat who knows his file card system down to the last gassed Jew. Playing with the full chill of the Baroque and none of the delight and whimsy, it is fitting Malmsteen obsessed over Paganini but seemed to have no place in his vast fretting-vocabulary for Mozart. The result is some of the most inhuman music ever made. It is also anti-instinctive, obsessively rational, the exact opposite of the Nietzschean genius for natural improvisation that makes Robert Fripp probably the most interesting guitarist who has ever lived.


Alas, the cold killer Malmsteen is also without question the most influential Metal guitarist of the last 30 years. If only Dream Theater had listened to a little more Zeppelin or Van Halen when they were teens, perhaps they would have learned the art of self-deprecation and not trying to make THE MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM IN THE HISTORY OF FUCKING MUSIC and doing so every goddamn time these pinheads decided to masturbate all over a studio somewhere. I start with Malmsteen because I loathe him, and the whole appalling history of Metal Hobbit Prog would have never existed without the implacable scythe Malmsteen’s Razor; as Solzhenitsyn remarked of the Gulag, “a hand more unrelenting than Death.”


Ghosts, goblins, doom and death litter modern Metal like family secrets after a tornado; you never knew that your neighbor had a massive child pornography collection, that is until a twister came along and vaporized that little shed at the back of his property that he always swore was a “root cellar”. And while a smooth-Cambodian boy obsession can be pretty embarrassing to a church-goin’ type, I can’t imagine it would be any worse than if somebody found out I had the entire King Diamond discography on my IPod. (I don’t; this is simply for illustrative purposes) The Hobbit Prog of the 70’s had a quasi-charm that allowed for mirth even when it was completely ridiculous; the maddeningly violent and astonishingly fascistic “fantasy” Prog that exists to this day is an indictment of Les Paul for ever having the thought of plugging a fucking guitar into an AC outlet.


The problem is that most of the 80’s “Fantasy” metal bands with an obvious Prog influence are just flat out psychopaths who would make great serial killers if only they had the guts to stop their lippin’ and get to slittin’. Of course, like most poseur Mansons, this is not likely to happen, as acts like King Diamond and Cannibal Corpse are obvious put-ons and about as scary as re-runs of Sesame Street. The fact that there is also no musical value to any of this shit is actually a relief; I sure would hate to be a closet admirer of a band whose albums include Eaten Back to Life and Tomb of the Mutilated. Jesus Christ, can you imagine how much better this world would be if every “alienated” teenager who threatened to kill himself after listening to this garbage actually did it? The decline in sales of Windows-based PCs and black eyeliner alone would make this mass self-kill-off a worthy goal.


After the “murder metal” fad ran its course, true Hobbit Prog staged a comeback – unfortunately – and this avalanche of noise is a threat to this very day. Bands got back to their Middle Earth roots, stopped singing about the pleasures of necro-coprophagia, and started making good old fashioned shitty records about Tolkien, armored midgets and imaginary flying reptiles. It’s the simple pleasures that make sure Rock n’ Roll is here to stay, big daddy.


Blind Guardian is a particularly atrocious example of “orc metal”, a bizarre sub-set of Hobbit music and one that must be considered “Prog” due to the ambition of the concept storylines, vaulting overkill of musicianship and general bombast of production which, though rocking like a hurricane, is all Rick Wakeman at heart. There are numerous metal bands who seem to do nothing but write about Hobbits and such; the wonderfully named 3 Inches of Blood (think about the implications of that name for a second – oh, there’s some phallic inferiority demons being vented there, I tell you) has carved a career out of Middle Earth, coming from Canada (of course) and bringing the only challenge to the aforementioned Blind Guardian for the title “Most Ridiculous Orc Metal Band Ever”. Devolved from a common source – all of this stuff is born of kids who listened to too much Ronnie James Dio back in the day – listening to Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle Earth was one of the more painful experiences of this project, and the less said about the anthemic vocals, turgid storyline and general idiocy of the whole mess the better. 3 Inches on the other hand was doing fine until the guy started “singing” – this is a band that was raised on a combination of Slayer and Iron Maiden, and you know there’s really nothing wrong with that. The singer though...no album has gone downhill more quickly with the introduction of a vocal track since my quasi-religious experience with Paul Gaffey’s Mephistopheles (q.v.). I just can’t listen to stuff like this, and with tracks called “Destroy the Orcs”, “Heir to the Chaos Throne” and the final insult, “Balls of Ice” (guess what that one’s about) I’m going to have to beg out of my oath to listen to at least two albums by any artist before I go on with my shattered life.


What is interesting about Guardian is that the music is very “gay”, while at the same time being of that mock-heroic mold that pegs it as pseudo-Wagnerian and, therefore, overtly fascist. As long as the combination of frustrated teenage homosexuality and music that is essentially power-chord updates on the “Horst Wessel Lied” goes on without intervention by parents, teachers, and perhaps the military, Democracy will continue to die as a system of government, Humanism will give way to pagan barbarism, superstition will rise and thwart science, witch burnings will return as a feature of this new proto-Troglodyte world, and the eventual end of Western Civilization will be a mere matter of time. You think I’m kidding. I found this album at a Chilean blog called “AngelsHolocaust666”, and am pleased to note the existence of Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises in South America, fueled with overwhelmingly militaristic music and worshipping Old Scratch himself. This album was so relentlessly violent and bloodthirsty I had to put some Dan Fogelberg on afterwards just to cleanse myself of all that Ernst Rohm-testosterone, then settled back and forced myself to think about men in Speedoes, little dogs in carrying bags, brunch, and other somewhat less violent gay outbursts to calm the frenzy all this orc killing had engendered in me.


There’s no point to going on and on with all of this critiquing – it’s fucking heavy metal, of course its mindless and knuckle-draggingly banal – but there is one “wild card” of a band that is both horrible and Prog influenced – and nowhere near fitting the pattern of Metal Hobbit that has reduced me to fits of apoplexy and tears the last few days. This is the overtly Medieval stylings of Glass Hammer and their supremely silly Middle Earth Album. From start to finish, it’s orcs and trolls, dwarves and ballads – and is a uniquely annoying indictment of LARPers and a strenuous argument for enforced eugenics and mandatory abortions. Coy, cloying, faux-bawdy and filled with the supposedly-entertaining antics of a room full of madrigal-singing ye-olde-ale- sippers, this is the one album you want to play in the nursing home over and over again for that one uncle who was always trying to molest you when you were a kid. Because this is the torment of Tantalus crossed with the labors of Sisyphus; and I stopped rolling that fucking rock after about four songs. It has been rare that I have not forced myself to listen to an entire album before dismissing it as trash fit for modernity’s bonfire, but this doggerel-and-pony show of these Renaissance rejects is the one truly interminable album I had to suffer in wading to the very depths of Hobbit Prog. I take no responsibility for any who read this review and then go listen to it, just to “see how bad it is”. Knock yourself out, Proganauts, but the PRHOI is announcing right now it is not responsible for damaged laptops and the self-mutilation that will surely follow a full listening of this album.


We have now covered the quasi-history of Hobbit Prog, and I for one am resolved to never listen to any of this shit again. Remember, here at the Progressive Rock Hall of Infamy, we suffer so you don’t have to – don’t be stupid and not take The Curator’s word on these records. Because this might be the most ridiculous sub-genre of Prog I have ever investigated. - TR

Welcome Back My Friends...

An Epiphany Sublime- The Debacle Extraordinaire of Mephistopheles

Paul Gaffey- MEPHISTOPHELES (1975)


What if someone decided to make a Prog album, and along the way a really bad off-off-Broadway musical broke out? The kind that music teacher you had back in 9th grade auditioned for as a young lad full of dreams, but backed out of because of the nude scenes and the lecherous old tart of a producer who kept wanting to buy him Beefeater gimlets and precious, shiny trinkets – on an “understanding”, of course. Or better yet, the kind of album that sounds like a gay karaoke bar in the Theater District, where wizened old queens sit nursing their lemondrops and bile, smoking fuchsia-colored cigarettes and defiantly belting out “MacArthur Park” at last call, frazzled in their lost youth, distempered and desiccated, too old to beg a cab ride or a quickie blow-job in the alley, truculent decrepit bitches positively shrieking out that last chorus of “It took so long to bake it...and I’ll never find that recipe aga-a-a-in”...a Blanche DuBois meltdown each and every night and solemn rejoinders out the door that “I can sing, you pack of jackals and gypsies – goddamn you all I can sing!!!”


Lots of people think they can sing. But perhaps no one has ever been more cruelly misled regarding his talent than poor Aussie popster Paul Gaffey, who followed up a very minor Oz Top 40 hit about the lost era of ballroom dance with a super-ambitious retelling of the Faust legend, and baby, you ain’t heard singin’ until you’ve heard Paul Gaffey do it. There is literally nowhere to start with this absolute masterpiece of schlock and horror, so let us breath deep and prepare for the indefatigable vocal gifts of Mr. Gaffey the only way I can think of: ladies, belt down a Martini or two and prepare to be walloped like a “curious” Marine heading to his first Bangkok bathhouse on a 48-hour pass. ‘Cos you’re in for a treat, honey.


The Faust legend has seen many classic treatments – from Gounod’s astonishing opera to the very best book of Thomas Mann’s career, and of course Goethe and more obscure variations like the silent film The Student of Prague. But it has never been done like this. Nothing has. Starting with the oh-so-melancholy Mellotron (backed with real strings!) opening to the stupendous treacle of Mephisto’s final send-off, you are so far into the delusional world of a quasi-artist that at certain points I had to put down my cup of coffee, take off the headphones, and go outside and stand in the rain to stave off madness and complete despair. He didn’t actually just sing off the register about a big party in Hell fraught with movie stars and demons, did he? Oh yes he did – and he does it a couple of more times before the song “Paradise” ends. Paul Gaffey you gorgeous hunk of man, name your kink because I’m game – anybody with balls big enough to perpetrate an atrocity this overwhelmingly flamboyant and sublimely bombastic can make “Do as Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” with me anyday! Oh god – please download this album and listen to it. If you’ve ever stared at a car wreck or just couldn’t help yourself and looked up burn victim photos on the Internets, then you have what it takes to face Paul Gaffey. He is truly without peer in the world of Pop or Prog, a sui generis satchel of grandiosity, pomposity, magniloquence and the worst tenor voice ever heard outside of William Shatner’s storied and apocryphal audition for Hair.


Lots of incredible music is perpetrated on the first few tracks. But as the album goes on, the production seems to get shallower and more basic. I couldn’t help but think that the would-be auteur Gaffey blew the whole budget on the first epic track, and by the time he got to “Paradise” had no money to pay the string section or anybody except some poor bastard at a stand-up piano who was forced to provide “accompaniment” for perhaps the greatest moment in singing history. Yes, the rest of the album is splendidly awful and there are little tricks like the pizzicato in “Dreamer of Dreams” that are so formulaic as to almost strip Mephistopheles of its value as the anus mundi of obscure Oz Prog. Ah, but then THE moment occurs – when the Devil himself makes an appearance, beckoning jocularly from the very fires of Hell, part raconteur and part impresario, and arrives on the record absolutely FLAMING!


Who knew The King of Hell was such a randy nance? Gaffey’s bawdy dance-hall strumpet of a Satan makes Peter Allen look like Merle Haggard. This Lucifer is Freddie Mercury with a pitchfrok, Scott Walker with bat wings and horns. What kind of infernal Dark Prince of the Underworld would sing something like “I’ve got just the place for you/ Be you Cath-o-lic, Hindu or Jew” and do it in a production that is so kitschy that Meatloaf would have put his foot down? Would Beelzebub really shriek out “Rock me baby!” right before a really cheese-ball saxophone solo? And who the hell is “Fifi LaMour”? Apparently she’s in Hell and hoofing it up nightly, and the party is so blisteringly swish that all the Devil can do is stand there and hiss out “Ha cha cha!”, a moment of pure genius, the one flirtation with orgasmic that Mephistopheles makes, and something I will be listening to until I die. When a self-pitying Mephisto closes the album with a poem so mawkish that Rod McKuen would have protested, you will be in raptures of amazement that something so openly fab-a-lous was ever sold in a record store not on Fire Island and hawked by muscle-T shirted mustachioed joy boys who are the very picture of strict disciplinarians with a soft, sentimental underbelly. Oh joy, Oh heart – Paul Gaffey, you are glorious!


Mephistopheles is such a grand album that it must be reserved for the most solemn of occasions. Someday I shall be on my deathbed, and my hours short. And my factotum or house boy will come and say – “Master, the time is nigh. What shall I bring you to ease you from this world?” And I shall say, “There is only one thing that can stanch the maudlin flow that is each man’s indulgence in his moment of demise. Go, Hwang Mi – go to the musical room and bring me my Gaffey.” And the smooth Chinese boy will put the album on the phonograph, his ephebus-self glistening in the soft morning honey-hued light, and perhaps I will cough my final vile sputum to lips cracked and rasping their last – but they will be lips wearing the idiot grin of the astonished and overwhelmed, the grin one can acquire only through moments of contemplating the most pure-hearted artistic catastrophes. Yes, with glee shall I leave this world – shuffled off by Paul Gaffey, indeed, off to – Paradise! - TR

Kings of Cock Prog: Styx and the Triumph of Japanese Robots

Styx- KILROY WAS HERE (1983)

I’m very proud of the fact that I can stay in any conversation about Krautrock and know my Grobschnitt from my Eloy, that I have 42 different King Crimson concerts on my IPod from all eras of the band, and that I am one of perhaps a dozen global experts on the Danish Prog scene of the early 1970’s. Esotericism has its perks. It keeps the Coldplay-listening riff-raff away, pegs me as an elitist and thus ensures my continued Olympian detachment and peaceful segregation, and obviates any danger that someone might stop by and say “Hey, I’ve got this extra ticket to Springsteen Friday night, wanna come with?” Because sneering at someone’s taste in music is not a good way to preserve a friendship. My cock-rock listening friends know better than to even ask such a ridiculous question of me. And I truly believe Bruce Springsteen is the most overrated musical act since Nero’s lyre rondo, ca. 64 AD.

But sometimes you have to acknowledge the genius of mass-marketed musical “product”. There are excesses and stupidities that no marginal band could ever perpetrate, ludicrous flights of ambition that only a band that plays in arenas and stadiums could be responsible for. And it is unthinkable that a truly underground band could ever have been at the very vanguard of horrible 1980’s pseudo-Prog, like today’s subject for post-mortem dissection, Styx, the progenitors and apotheosis of Cock-Prog.


Cock-Prog is a style of music that developed from the deep need owners of ’74 Chevy Novas have for cock. An onus which can’t be admitted openly because these same muscle-car jockeys are scabrous cowards. In the 70’s, bands like Supertramp had an enormous string of hits based on Prog-like formulae, but were frankly too obviously feminine for the macho toughs of the American Midwest to publicly acknowledge as 8-Track fair. These young men – driving fast cars and wearing tight jeans, drinking warm Budweiser and impregnating their girlfriends before settling into their career at the local NAPA franchise – needed something more sublimated to match their stunning cowardice in facing the fact that they needed cock, and needed it badly. While Bruce Springsteen brought Broadway showtunes to FM radio and therefore provided an avenue for these closeted Nova drivers to explore their more obviously “swish” side, there was a need for a type of Prog that was jazzy and ambitious enough to be “Prog”, but still could be blared from car stereos while beating up queers behind the town library.


Enter Styx. From their first records, the Prog elements of the band were fully on display, including bloated song structures, pitiful lyrics, meretricious insight into the human condition, annoying synthesizers with pitch-bending technology, heroically preposterous album covers, hausfrau-romance-novel storylines, laser beams, and a general level of awfulness not available to more straightforward and less ambitious bands. But Styx also managed to be as dumb as Foghat while faux-rocking to the cockish extent of Molly Hatchet. Thus carving out their own niche, Styx sang about lizards and wizards and such and peppered their music with ample annoyances of keyboards, but were still rocking enough that no one knew the entire front row at their concerts was watching Tommy Shaw’s package with the intensity of a Green Beret sniper. The sheer absurdity of the band grew through a series of amazingly bad records through the Seventies, but it was only with Kilroy Was Here that the overwhelming anti-talent of singer and demiurge Dennis DeYoung found full flowering and stench.


There has never been anything quite like Kilroy, and that it is a travesty of uniqueness matched only by the Crucifixion of Jesus. Styx had four straight gold albums before this mess, and didn’t make another record after for five years. And well so they should acknowledge the dread pinnacle of their career! For where can a band go after making a rock opera/concept album about Japanese robots enforcing a 1984-style dystopia on a society ruled by an anti-Rock crusading preacher named Doctor Righteous? And that the only way for Democracy to survive would be that the persecuted rock star Kilroy (De Young) would need to break out of prison and hand the flame of rebellion to young Jonathan Chance (Tommy Shaw, in an especially “chicken-ish” turn) – leading to the album’s most superb lyrics, “It’s high time for us to start a revolution/Just like an A-bomb explosion”. But of course you need to hear how De Young is singing that gibberish, because he warbles and ululates like a gravely injured small bird, and then add the accompanying Sha-na-na production of the song in question, “High Time”, and you have a masterpiece. Adjectives are wasted trying to describe such a fiasco, like explaining to an investment banker the virtues of a conscience. Dennis De Young sold a song like Herb Tarlek sold commercial time; with great unction, oleaginous insincerity and absolutely no sense for fashion. You simply have to hear it.


Very rarely does an album excel at slovenliness in all aspects of production from start to finish, but Kilroy is no ordinary Bad Prog album and reeks of failure in a way only the Special Olympics can match; surely, they are trying hard, and of course they really believe that they are all “champions”, but watching retarded children pole-vault is still a painfully embarrassing spectacle nearly as discomfiting as Dennis De Young in a lavender jump-suit singing about Japanese robots while he is accompanied by band mates dressed like those Japanese robots doing the “potato masher”. You can download the album if you want, but the really extra-special best way to experience Kilroy is via the follow-up video from 1984, Caught in the Act, the title another little nod that the band secretly knew that most of their followers were gay men who simply weren’t brave enough to embrace the cock. I, of course, have the video in an excellent DVD-rip quality, and will gladly share with anyone who writes, provided you come up with a way to send a 1.4GB file through the Internets. I can’t stress this enough: the album is perfectly horrible, but the stage production is where the true Holocaust takes place. Imagine being a fan of Styx, bringing your best girl to the Syria Mosque or Stanley Theater and expecting to hear Paradise Theater and getting THIS. Dreams were dashed and women beaten following the Kilroy shows, I guarantee it. The lavender jump-suits are the most overwhelming, but certainly not the only, vaulting monstrosity contained in Caught, and James “JY” Young has never been at a more frenzied Cowardly Lion-esque peak than here, sporting the worst modified mullet in the storied annals of shit rock.


As a kind of bonus, you get not one, not two, but THREE power-ballads that you can croon to your pillow while pretending it’s that hunk of a mechanic who is always so greasy, sweaty and inviting down at the Esso station. And the great thing is that all three of them are so superbly treacly and maudlin that they, too, are highly enjoyable in the way that squeezing an infected pimple free of pus is. While students of Freud will notice a certain ejaculatory confluence to my choice of metaphor, I assure you this is only about the bliss of minor pain, the small splendor of the minor masochist or bush-league flagellant. “Don’t Let it End” is the kind of “hit” that undermines popular music by its total incompetence and fraud, and “Just Get Through This Night” is a fantastic synthesis of sitars and gobshite, but “Haven’t We Been Here Before” is the stunning apex of Styx’s complete mastery of sentimental gobbledygook, a song whose full import of Broadway-bound balderdash must be seen in the video to fully appreciate. Picking my favorite song from Kilroy is sort of like picking which bodily orifice I would most like to bleed to death from, but if haemorrhage has a name, thy moniker be Tommy Shaw, and he gushes life from the rectum of Prog in what is very likely the worst song ever written to actually make the Top 40.


If your tastes run to the foul, open up and swallow the rotting carcass of Prog that is Kilroy Was Here. Anybody who still doubted that American rock n’ roll had reached the full pitiful depths of abysmalness hinted at by so many releases of the previous decade must bow to the epic vision of Dennis De Young, a silly, pretentious, gangrenous, mawkish, knife-to-the-guts of Cock Prog that enters you, tears you, leaves you bleeding and in agony, yet strangely satisfied and fulfilled all the same.


Sort of like...oh, never mind. It’s Styx. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes Bad Cock Prog is just the death of irony and the end of Western Civilization.


But at least it’s not gay. - TR

Triumvirate of Doom: The Yes Catastrophe of the mid 1970's

Surely the most beloved Prog band of basement-dwelling virgins everywhere during the moribund sludge of the Carter Presidency – and on, shockingly, to this day – Yes was a band I listened to as a youth because my brother had all of their albums, and after all, had it not been for my much older bro, I would never have known of Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, Dark Side of the Moon, or even Physical Graffiti, the album that taught The Curator the power of the Rock. Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania in an old coal mining town that was haemorrhaging jobs like a slaughtered hog, my misery was tempered by my love of Prog. I even had a pretend Prog band in which I played keyboards – they were called Palace and had one album, Mechanical Mysteries, of course I still remember it, I was about nine and heavy into 2112, I did the album art myself (you have to with imaginary playthings) and it was a spaceman floating by a lifecord outside of a generic-looking starbase. My pretend band broke up not long after – I had the guitarist die in a horrible car wreck ala Marc Bolan – and I never actually learned to play the keyboards; but I always loved Prog and still consider King Crimson to be my favorite band. Prog is very important to me for reasons you will never be able to understand.


I listened to those albums and was one weird kid, digging Jean-Luc Ponty because my bro did, reading too much, being gangly, wearing glasses, being regularly beaten by the grimy-nailed cognoscenti of coal patch hauteur, digging on the Alan Parsons Project and plotting revenge, picking up a lifetime’s worth of neuroses and swearing that someday I would leave and never return. As I grew older and started to think for myself, I followed through with my threat to leave, and began to acquire obscure culture as a proof that what those bullies held as sacred was in fact trash, and that I was better than they were because I knew who Antonin Artaud was. Off in college, one day I was listening to Jon Anderson’s idiotic New Age-y vocals emitted in that unutterably piercing and shrill voice he had crafted and was never held accountable for, and I realized that I really didn’t like this band very much, even considering the skill of the musicians and generally trippy atmosphere of the whole production, from album cover to finished vinyl. I believe I truly entered adulthood and independence from my faulty childhood the day I accepted that Yes was a fucking horrible band.


Over the years, thinking more and more about the time lost to Rick Wakeman’s keyboard peregrinations and Anderson’s sheep-being-slaughtered vocal excesses, I came to despise Yes, blaming them for ruining Prog and making an already bleak and sorrowful world an even darker place with the truly wretched excess of their output. There have been many things said about Yes, and if I wanted to, I could keep the PRHOI in business for the next five years just publishing reviews of Yes albums proper, various side-projects and the myriad groups they somehow inspired to make similarly indulgent and pointless music. I’m going to pass on that option, as I’m forbiddingly depressed enough already to ever survive writing my thoughts on Tales from Topographic Oceans or Wakeman’s own Journey to the Center of the Earth madness. Instead, I’m going to deal with three of the albums that Yes released over a roughly 40 month span in the mid to late 70’s, albums that signaled a band in decline and yet simultaneously at the height of their powers. For as they died, like a great god or king, they resolved to take everyone down with them, and the results of this infernal pact with the Lords of Suck were Relayer, Going for the One, and Tormato – the last perhaps the worst and most ridiculous title ever bestowed on any album, crap or classic, Prog or mainstream. Look at that goddamn album cover, look at it – and tell me your liberal heart still yearns to abolish capital punishment for a crime against aesthetics so vile and miserable. Shark Sandwich was made up, but these motherfuckers were coming from the heart.


The incomprehensible – and in my view inexcusable – long-term popularity of Yes is largely due to a phenomenon I have observed in other culturally-challenged sub groupings of society – prison Nazis, collectors of Thomas Kinkade paintings, people with a lot of Pottery Barn flatware in their kitchens. The problem is one of mistaking all similar product with being of similar quality; i.e., if I like King Crimson, it is only natural that I would have a yen for Yes. If I drink beer, then Budweiser or Kokanee will be fine if Pilsner is too expensive. If mushrooms make for a good trip, perhaps I’ll try huffing nail polish remover. The point is, none of these quasi-syllogisms ring true, and are in fact dangerous misjudgments that help define the culture whore as opposed to the truly cultured.


Yes exemplifies that lack of discretion in the follower of Prog. Take these three monstrously abominable and mind-numbingly boring albums as proof of the gaping void that must animate the Prog whore’s discernment reflex. Relayer was in the spirit of earlier Yes efforts, meaning that the record starts with a 21:55 second “song” that is about as focused as a drunk’s urine stream and hops from notion to notion (none of the elements could be properly called “ideas”) like a third-grader who forgot to take his Ritalin. Sadly, as Steve Howe’s guitar work is often dynamic – there is even what appears to be a little nod to Jimmy Page’s brilliantly messy solo from “Heartbreaker” on “Sound Chaser” – the music is controlled by the interruptions of Alan White’s overly noisy drums and the unusually aggressive vocal stylings of Anderson. Indeed, what identifies Relayer the most to me is its sheer noisiness – new member Patrick Moraz, having replaced the grandiose stylings of Rick Wakeman on keyboards, is given little chance to do other than offer fills to violent bursts of cacophony and the ever-present threat of Anderson’s bleating; allowed to calm these tracks down a little, Moraz might have proved valuable. As it is, he’s lost in a mix overrun mad with ego.


While Anderson’s lyrics were mildly annoying and pretentious on Relayer, the follow up album Going for the One presents a man in full flower of personal idolatry. There’s much more actual singing on this album – a threat on the order of magnitude of Ethel Merman or Anthony Newly – and an unconscionable need to fill the mix with an avalanche of noise. Alan White may be the best drummer in the world for all I know, but I still hate him because on these two albums the sheer overload of sound he produces makes following the interesting guitar work utterly impossible; and yet, perversely, he gets back to hammering out a beat when Anderson’s vocals start, just the moment when any amount of noise is desperately needed to drown out the pseudo-mystical chicanery mewed out with the unction of a Papal castrati by the loathsome Jon Anderson.


Going is also notable for its cover. A Roger Dean operation that is very far removed from his sword-and-sorcerers proto-Heavy Metal style that essentially defined both the band and the genre for the entire decade (and mercilessly and spot-on parodied by Krautrock geniuses Grobschnitt on 1977’s Rockpommel’s Land – a triumph of slander) , this is another of those bare-assed Apollos that popped up way too often in those years on album sleeves, Rush being similarly obsessed with this “masculine” imagery. Regardless of what this may let slip about the band and its followers, the design is as pointless as the record, and is as foolish as Black Sabbath’s Technical Ecstasy, a horrible cover that perfectly matches the shit product contained within. Thus, it’s a package compleat; a holistic hell of shallowness and wasted virtuosity, crappy album art, Jon Anderson, and the knowledge that the music you’re listening to is beloved by guys who have been to every Rush concert since the Power Windows tour.


Finally, the triumvirate collapses utterly on Tormato, an album so worthless that I almost feel bad for the kind of band that would produce such drek. Not a lot can be said about the banality of this waste, so why not just consider the song titles and tell me that you have any desire to actually listen to the fucking thing: “Don’t Kill the Whale”, “Arriving UFO” and “On the Silent Wings of Freedom” – the last very probably the worst song on any of the three disastrous albums in question, and having the fetid scent of John Anderson all over the composition, like a small mangy dog that in a fit of petulence pisses on its homeless master's blanket of newspapers. Indeed, what seems to have pushed the group from the rather innocuous blandness of The Yes Album to the aggressive and metastasizing horror of The Triumvirate is that Anderson took control of the band, enforced his philosophies on the proceedings, and insisted that he could sing. For years I have wondered: what is it, precisely, that makes me hate Jon Anderson as a singer above any other performer who has ever picked up a microphone – beyond Tito Jackson, Barry Manilow, or even the loathsome Dennis DeYoung? Recently, while thinking the problem over, I believe I came to an answer. If you listen to Anderson at his most obnoxious, there is a depth to his would-be falsetto that hints at a range of bad vocals all going on at once. Specifically, I invite you to listen to CSN&Y and their most bloated track, “Deja Vu”, coincidentally one of the most homicidal-rage-inducing songs this side of Harry Chapin. During the chorus of “we have all been here before”, you can hear the vague outlines of Anderson’s voice as it blossomed to full atrocity – indeed, I am convinced that what is most awful about his “style” is that Jon Anderson is, somehow, a one-man barbershop quartet, harmonizing with his own voice to create a chimera vile, perverse and utterly unequalled for horror in the history of rock music. Squire could play bass, Howe was a fine guitarist, when Bill Bruford was in the band they had probably the best Prog drummer in the world. But Jon Anderson was capable of drawing attention only to himself, and merely by giving voice to his own inane, Deepak-Chopra-deep lyrics; like a dwarf rushing the stage and setting himself on fire during the swordfight scene of Hamlet, what goes on around him may be brilliant or even sublime, but you can only watch that little fucker burn and scream, burn and scream, just like my ears will only ever hear the endless la-la-las of Anderson as he destroys yet another song with his interminable singing of utterly vapid lyrics.


I am forever coming to grips with the tragedy of my childhood; but already, tonight, a burden has been lifted, and a perhaps brighter future beckons. I hate Yes, and now the world knows. And, even more importantly – I now know why.


Liberation, you are a sweet, sweet mistress. - TR

L. Ron Hubbard- SPACE JAZZ (1982)

Now we’re getting down to brass fucking tacks, Proganauts. The Curator has had the pleasure divine of listening to many, many bad records since the start of this project (State-sanctioned Soviet-era Prog from Romania, Estonia and Tadjikistan, a variety of Yes-offshoots and imitators, Canadian Cock-Prog and the horrors of Jethro Tull and the assorted “I Am Merlin” Hobbit-Prog and Dungeons & Douche-bags symphonic drek) but rarely have I found something so perfectly awful and without redeeming value that I would bestow on it the ultimate compliment/curse: L. Ron Hubbard’s Space Jazz is so laughably awful and mind-blowingly inane that it is truly Hubbardian. A tautology, a redundancy, a question-begging ontological muddle; be forewarned, reader, when you enter into the realm of the Hubbardian, an Event-Horizon of taste has been breached and in this cold hell of artless kitsch shall you suffer the very greatest excess of Pure Fucking Bad that has ever been allowed to foul our Big Blue Marble.

Congrats, Elron – you cleared your body thetans and died with enough Bennies in your system to overdose a fat John Travolta, but what I will now forever remember you for is Space Jazz – the worst fucking album in recorded music history.

I don’t know about you, but when I’ve shopped around for the proper cult to join, I ask the tough, pertinent questions that any seeker/supplicant needs to have answered: One: How long before I get to have multiple teenage sex partners and, Two: Precisely how fucking crazy is the guy who started this banana stand?

The first is usually answered in such a way that it is clear that I still have not found the cult just for me. The second is best answerable from outside sources; if you’ve ever met an actual starry-gazed Scientologist, you realize they are something of a cross between the house Negro from Mandingo and the chair of the People’s Birthday Celebration committee for the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Scienos worship Elron like an Emo girl fouls her panties for Thom Yorke; they scrape and genuflect for His Grand Exalted Xenuness like a humbled gimp before a particularly militant and rotund Mistress; and they moon, coo and awe before his artistic accomplishments like a Sarah Palin supporter at an exhibit of lynching photographs. Moribund, anaesthetized and gray-matter scrubbed until their eyes shine gossamer to betray the vapidity that lies beneath, the Scieno has the independence of a tapeworm and the initiative of an opium-eating coolie. Not surprisingly, the kind of music that Elron came up with to appeal to these folks lacks a certain “something” in appeal, that thing being a mad scramble for prominence between taste, talent, competence and joy as to which element Space Jazz most conspicuously lacks.

What a fucking incredible album this is! First off, the grandiosity of the claims for Elron’s music sets him up for a catastrophic come-down. Edgar Winter claims Hubbard’s theories on “counter-rhythm” were ahead of everybody but Paul Simon – and we all know what an ass-shaking OG nigga of pure funk Paul Simon was! – and poor Chick Corea (who I really like) claims the “revolutionary” toy synthesizer Hubbard “invented” has “completely revolutionized electronic music”. Well, folks, Space Jazz ain’t exactly Trans Europe Express, but in its own vile, superfluous and uniquely degrading way, it carves out a corner of the corpse of Prog so swiftly killed off by the excesses of ELP and Yes. In that carcass, wallowing like a tick by the purulent and reeking dead anus of Prog, resides the alterna-masterwork that is Space Jazz. Ecce Homo; people of Jerusalem, here is your king, scourged, whipped, whimpering and not long for this world – a failure. L. Ron Hubbard by his singular lack of talent has made an album for the ages; it is inconceivable that even if one hundred monkeys were placed at one hundred Moogs for one million years, any of the faeces-flinging anthropoids could conjure musical excrement to even approximate the drug-addled Sci-Fi bowel movement that is Space Jazz.

Conceived as a soundtrack for a book (“First of its kind!” raves the typically overheated Scientology press release), Space Jazz is music “inspired” by Hubbard’s own monumental disaster of a novel Battlefield Earth – later, of course, turned into one of the worst movies ever made by big fat John Travolta, who apparently has more than a little Barbarino in him after all. The book – one-thousand pages of padding, irrelevancy, Dickensian-levels of scenery description and overall Cambodian-holocaust excesses of horribleness – is touted by the “Church” as “the largest work in Sci-Fi history”. Mistaking quantity for quality is nothing new, as anyone who has ever smoked crack or read Norman Mailer can tell you; but this particular excess is galling in a spectacular way, as neither crack nor Mailer is responsible for a record album quite like Space Jazz.

The album begins with a “salute” to the “Golden Age of Sci-Fi”, and features (no joke) stirring lyrics such as “It’s Buck Rogers! Buck Rogers! Buck Rogers! Yaaaaaa-yyyy!” Pointless drivel like this continues for a few minutes until we get into the meat of the story; the invasion and destruction of Earth (in nine minutes!) by the mega-evil Psychlos, characters so one-dimensional and dubious that their marching theme here on Space Jazz consists of them saying “Psychlo, Psychlo, Psychlo – Kill, Kill, Kill!” over and over and over again. Subtle shading of character was never one of Elron’s strong suits; his villains are to cruelty what the Village People were to gay: Out, proud, annoying and ridiculous. And Space Jazz is Hubbard’s Can’t Stop the Music, girls.

It gets even worse when we meet the main characters; first, there is Terl, whose song is perhaps the highlight of the entire album. Like the Imperial Death March if written by Rick Wakeman after a traumatic brain injury, this utter silliness tells the story of the chief of security for the evil Psychlos, Terl, who apparently minced his way down to Earth to the accompaniment of an old Simon game set up to play bad lounge jazz and emit the occasional sound sample of a woman screaming in terror. There are some awesomely repulsive lyrics for this one, too, consisting of Terl speaking about “man things” and his “woman friend”. Then he laughs in a very evil way, and we secretly wonder if this isn’t some kind of elaborate put on; that the whole goddamn Scientology cosmology/con is just one big misanthropic uber-joke by a master craftsman whose total, unconscionable hatred for humanity could only find vent through the founding of a UFO-cult and the writing of – easily – the worst Sci-Fi ever to be perpetrated by a man not named Shatner.

I could go on, but I’d rather do something else – end now and plead with you to immediately put your life on hold, click on the link above and download the entire album, and prepare for what might be the most wonderfully destructive experience of your life. Because, Proganaut, let’s be clear on something: times are tough and you may be poor, unemployed, unable to get laid, wearing dirty underwear, living on Ramen noodles and water, stealing extra butter pats from the condiment bins at McDonalds, hell I don’t care how fucking low you think you’ve gone. You listen to me now and you listen to me good – your life now has a reference point for absolute bottom, because even if you’re a child-fucking smack-addict coprophage who secretly keeps a necklace made of human ears, even if you’re the kind of person Charles Bukowski would look askance at, even if you’re secretly harboring dreams of Joe the Plumber running for president in 2012 – hell, even if you’re all of these things, you are NOT a Scientologist and you did NOT write Battlefield Earth or this incredibly amateuristic, banal, childish, stupid, and positively fan-fucking-tasticly awful and ridiculous soundtrack – again, the worst album in recorded history, the essence of all the failure that was Hubbard, the apex of his total lack of talent and taste – BEHOLD! – I give you...Space Jazz.

Ha cha cha!!!! - TR
DL

Dream Theater- IMAGES AND WORDS (1992)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Jethro Tull: THE BROADSWORD AND THE BEAST (1982)

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I know as much as I do about arguably the most boring band in the history of Prog, the execrable Jethro Tull. Historically, like Art Zoyd, there is no one in the band who is actually named "Jethro Tull". The real JT of history was a pioneer in British farming; meaning that he was an expert at spreading shit in order to coax crops to grow. Obviously, by referring to the band as "execrable" in my introduction, I believe the parallel fitting, considering the staggeringly long period of time (34 years!!!) since Tull has released even a LISTENABLE album.

Going to All Music Guide and looking at this roster of failure is truly awe-inspiring; EIGHTEEN studio albums of original material, five live albums, one Christmas album (oh for fucking Christ's sakes...) and this is just the OFFICIAL output. Like other shitty no-talent losers (Phish, The Grateful Dead, Sarah Palin, etc.) a veritable army of denizens-cum-worshippers follows the band and trades in a massive black market of concerts surreptitiously recorded over many years. Website searches show as many as 500 Jethro Tull concerts available for purchase or trade, a truly staggering collection of miserably fallow and ponderous music that must rank as the greatest treasure trove of soporifics stored anywhere outside the visual valium that is the Museum of Modern Art. At their most bodice-and-crossbow Medieval folk sleepiest, Jethro Tull makes Brahms look like Slayer. How a court dwarf was never part of their road act is completely beyond me. Huzzah! You suck!

Despite having nothing to say for as long as I've been alive, Tull surges on through the slough of despond that is their creative life, pounding out album after album that each capture perfectly the misery and weakness of the music of their eras. Take- for god's sakes please- The Broadsword and The Beast, the very worst of the Tull ossuary of creation.

There is almost nothing to say about this album other than that this is what happens when rockers reach middle age and haven't started on a nice fiber program to go with their paregoric. Because this is the opus of a band so full of shit that if they were given a collective enema, all five members could be buried in a match box. "My Dinner with Andre" pounds with throbbing excitement and the International Sloth Races are a shrieking chest-thumper of a time compared to the vast boredom that is Broadsword. Courting Mormons get to the point faster than the worst Tull ditty, and both are about equally arousing to the spirit. I've watched blood tests more exciting than this lackluster crap, and I refuse to believe an actual live human being was responsible for the drum parts on this album, sounding as they do like those retarded guys you see playing plastic buckets in the subways or in front of methedone clinics.

Since it is 1982, there are several very dated studio tricks that sound like Phil Collins' producer had stopped by to ruin things still further, or perhaps Ian Anderson had talked to Steve Winwood about how to make sure your record would sound really fucking cheesy in 25 years time. The cover is pure Dungeons and Dragons, though curiously enough the lyrics seem to be Cubist poetry attacking Margaret Thatcher somehow- meaning it's clever to Anderson, and makes no bloody sense to anybody else trying to untangle his lyrical spaghetti monster. The overdubbed vocals are hilariously non-disturbing, the use of sythesizers by rote, the goddamn flute as annoying and misplaced as ever and the Tom Scholz Rockman-effects guitar sounding like these things always do, like a little buzzsaw malfunctioning or one of those silly vibrators girls use and think nobody can hear in the other room.

The ballads are babbling and the rockers rebarbative; this is easily the worst output of a fantastically overrated band who have been coasting on one decent album since Nixon was president, and at this point I'm thinking reperations to FM radio are called for due to all the aggressively bad pulp-folk these Haggis-eating fucks have foisted upon the public. Jethro Tull has got to go, man.

Like listening to a couple of Robert Jordan fans argue about whether orcs or druids would make better sex partners, "The Broadsword and The Beast" is boring even to the initiates, and completely enraging to those sane enough never to have joined the cult. Absolute drek, zero stars. - TR