By Monk
It was the mid- to late-Seventies. Unlike most per-pubescent schoolboys of that generation, I didn’t like punk. I don’t know why. But, just as the punk movement was raging against the machine I was getting into bands like Yes, Pink Floyd and even Genesis. It was only when I first saw Judas Priest on ‘Top Of The Pops’ that my brain cells clicked into top gear and changed my life forever…
Since then, barring a few notable exceptions (such as Fish-era Marillion and the continually weird genius that is Brian Eno), I have more or less ignored the prog genre in favour of its slobbier antithesis…
Why this stupid preamble? Well. it’s my way of saying that I absolutely freaking love this, the seventh album from Malcolm Galloway and his insanely brilliant – and most beautifully named – HOGIA project. It’s so feckin’ out there that NASA are going to have to invest billions in a new probe to discover all the levels of its brilliant luminosity.
As with a lot of prog albums, ‘TLOAM’ is closely intermingled and intertwined with literary thematics, in this case most notably the works of sci-fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky and his ‘Children of Time’ series, which inspires three of the songs – ‘Avrana Kern Is Made Of Ants’, ‘The Requisitioner and the Wonder’ and ‘Gothi and Gethli’ – and the novella ‘Walking To Aldebaran’, which inspired the album’s epic and pivotal centrepiece of the same name.
‘TLOAM’ is prog at its most gloriously excessive and self-indulgent, but also at its most expressive and explorative, combining elements of jazz, folk, glam rock and down ‘n’ dirty trash miens (just in the aforementioned ‘Walking To Aldebaran’ alone). And, ironically, it also prog at its most accessible, blending together tropes and miens that will be familiar to younger fans of the heavier modern incarnation of the genre in a way which also pays due homage to the movement’s fore bearers.
I may have fallen out of love with prog 40 years ago, but shining light on some perceived ancient mistakes may well have rekindled a long-dead affair…
- ‘The Light Of Ancient Mistakes‘ is out now.
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