Van der Graaf Generator - A Grounding in Numbers

SKU 23-EVDGCD 001
Great to see VDGG firing on all cylinders and hitting the mark so hard and well!

"The brand new studio album by the legendary Van Der Graaf Generator. The stunning new album is the band’s 12th studio record by the band and is their first since 2008. In April 2010 Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton and Guy Evans met up for intensive tracking sessions in Cornwall, arranging, rehearsing and recording the album in a week. Some of the pieces were already fully-formed songs; others, even at this stage, remained more sketches than fully realised works. Over the next months the tracks were overdubbed, edited and adapted by the band in their own studios. By September the project was ready to be mixed. Legendary producer Hugh Padgham agreed to take on this part of the process - the first time anyone outside the band had been entrusted such responsibility. After three weeks in Hugh’s London studio, Sofasound (which shares its name with Peter’s original home set-up), “A Grounding in Numbers” was completed. With a fantastic clarity and depth of sound and a helter-skelter stretch of tunes, “A Grounding...” sees VdGG pushing ever further forward into the twenty first century. Clearly, they know they’re a group with a certain history - but they are also an emphatically modern one.

"While Trisector (2008) was finely wrought but felt a mite flat, the music here, while still driven by Van Der Graaf’s characteristic restlessness and intensity, sounds bolder and full of colour. It’s also their most melodic set since VDGG’s earliest days. Commencing with a typically hymnal Your Time Starts Now, the album gearshifts into the strident Highly Strung. Peter Hammill’s singing reminds us why he is the greatest pop star that never was, while the group’s momentum is at times diverted into some knotty unison instrumental passages. On the cruel and wry Embarrassing Kid, the interaction of guitar, keyboard and drums make it all sound like they are all slipping about on ice. “No one can never know what of their own’s very best” states Hammill on Bunsho, but one feels he knows that this album is pretty high up the list."-Mojo



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  • LabelEsoteric
  • UPC5013929710184
Your Price $16.00
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