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
Gentle Giant's fifth album was the maker (or breaker) of their career. Evidently of no interest to Columbia Records or to England's Vertigo label, which had issued their prior albums, it marked a break in their commercial stride; fans in England could buy it on the WAA label, but in America -- where imports were still carried mostly by specialty shops and a tiny label like WAA didn't exactly rate next to EMI, British CBS, etc. -- fans had to scramble to find it. It's arguable that the group never recovered from the lapse, because between its relative obscurity in England and the near-impossibility of finding it in America, it created a major gap in their library -- you couldn't really absorb the record that followed, The Power and the Glory, without listening to In a Glass House first, so there was a major piece in their musical matrix missing for actual and potential American fans from that day forward. Additionally, plain and simple, In a Glass House was their best album, bar none, so on that basis alone, the group was fatally damaged in the United States. On no other record did they so freely and effectively mix their strange amalgam of modern and medieval sounds, or challenge the listener (successfully) with songs that juxtaposed heartbreakingly beautiful and searing dissonant sounds within the same songs. From the opening, "Runaway," they combine a bracing attack on their instruments with surprising delicacy in the singing and highly (and finely) nuanced musicianship and vocalizing, amid some pretty bold ideas for songs. This was as close as this band ever got to intersecting with King Crimson of the same era, and heard in this remastered edition it's possible to marvel at the sheer elegance of the playing, even on the hard rocking numbers such as "Way of Life," which vaguely calls to mind Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" or "Starless and Bible Black" (only with a better beat) until the finale, where the group suddenly switches to its neo-medieval sound. But it all works, Gary Green and Kerry Minnear's bracing guitar and keyboard playing somehow slotting in perfectly next to the faux-archaic bridge and all of it combining in a finale that builds from that medieval sound to a hard progressive rock finale, complete with amplified violin and swelling electric keyboards, all supported by Ray Shulman's muscular electric bass, until Minnear's synthesizer and organ carry an extended fade. "Experience," which follows, starts in the reverse order, from the faux antique sound and adding the rock elements, including a lead bassline by Shulman and a short celesta solo, before the medieval harmonizing returns above the bass in an eerie rock/medieval call and response, and then Gary Green bursts in with several guitars with their amps cranked up to "12." And as good as "Experience" is, "A Reunion" only raises the ante with louder, more powerful riff-driven hard rock passages broken by folk-like interludes and even some bluesy slide guitar. The result is an album that is as close to the content, effect, and spirit of the Jethro Tull trilogy of Aqualung, Thick As a Brick, and A Passion Play as anyone -- even Tull -- ever got again, only a bit bolder musically. And the anniversary edition throws in a priceless bonus track, a ten-minute live rendition of "Experience" from three years later, on a German tour; it's amazing to hear these guys actually pull this material off (even the vocals, which have not been retouched) on-stage, but they do it, including some killer up-close bass work from Ray Shulman.