With Understanding Comes Appreciation
In just a few short years, Peter Hammill’s Van Der Graaf Generator project had evolved from a de facto solo effort (“The Aerosol Grey Machine”) to an early progressive rock band (“The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other”) and then up another few notches to one of the most innovative and boundary pushing pioneers within the prog world on “H To He Who Am The Only One.” And as if the world were coming to end in the foreseeable future, this outlandish quartet that consisted of Peter Hammill, Hugh Benton, David Jackson and Guy Evans went for the jugular on their fourth album Pawn Hearts, an album so gorged full of musical ideas that it seems like it’s ready to collapse under its own bloated grandeur in a shriveled heap of sonic sesquipedalian entropy. But it did not and instead created a beacon of complexity that would continue the arms race of proposing which band could compose the most challenging and daring music set in a rock context possible. The album’s title resulted from a humorous spoonerism where Jackson stated "I'll go down to the studio and dub on some more porn harts", meaning "horn parts.”