They never earned the mass audience accorded to Progressive Rock contemporaries like Yes or King Crimson, but Britain's Gentle Giant did succeed in gaining a cult-like underground following based on the strength of their early 1970s work. Largely sidestepping the bombast and humorlessness that often plagued the genre, they built a unique group sound based on an unusual blend of influences including Blues Rock, Gregorian chants, and twentieth century classical music. They augmented the usual rock instruments with cello, horns, mallet percussion, and Moog synthesizers, and showed taste and dexterity in their use of tricky time signatures and leaping, atonal vocal lines. Their influence can still be heard in present-day underground acts such as Happy the Man, Ruins and jazz drummer Gregg Bendian.


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Review by Bruce Eder
The group's first U.S. release in two years featured ornate playing from Kerry Minnear on keyboards and Gary Green's loudest guitar work up to that time. Power and the Glory is also a fairly dissonant album, yet it made the charts, albeit pretty low. There seems to be a unifying theme having to do with one's place in the social order, but it's very vague in contrast to Pink Floyd's re-creations of the post-'60s drug experience, Yes' sweeping album-length suites, and ELP's sci-fi epics. "No God's a Man" is an infinitely more challenging piece of music than anything on Jethro Tull's Aqualung, but that wasn't a commercial virtue; nor could the electric violin break on "The Face" or the rippling electric guitar passages throughout cover the effort involved in absorbing these songs. Power and the Glory vaguely resembled Genesis' early art-rock albums, but without any presence as charismatic as Peter Gabriel. "Playing the Game" and "So Sincere" were the most accessible tracks and ended up as key parts of their concert set. The CD's sound is more than decent.