Review Summary: "And though my face is smiling I'm really feeling low"
Have you ever been at a soda fountain and gotten a bit of every soda？A sugar overload of that magnitude is most tolerable at your birthday party where your parents would allow that sort of thing. This was as close I got to going outside myself and making intuitive decisions in my youth, but in years past we’ve stumbled across plenty of recipes that have become the most iconic foods to exist. Based on much of the artifacts of what has become ‘progressive rock’, the recipe needed some tinkering before
In The Court Of The Crimson King was fresh out of the oven. You’ll find that early prog was inseparable from the psychedelic movement, but there are bits and pieces of that era we can make sense of, even if your lyricist once claimed your music was intended to sound like what a Salvador Dali painting looks like.
Yes, combine that dude with a classically influenced organist, baritone-wielding pianist, blues guitarist, bassist who looks like Eric Idle, not to mention a drummer who was offered a spot in Led Zeppelin before John Bonham. The secret ingredient on this list is rather dependent on who you talk to, but the result was the eponymous
Procol Harum of 1967, preceded by the monster of a lead single in “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”. We’ve all heard that one before, right？ Good, good.
Only someone’s cat could offer up a satisfying name for the band, which ends up sounding like nonsense to the rest of us anyway. We had no reason to expect this band’s sound to work any better than their name did, but for some reason, I found myself returning to this album last year and finding some reason in the surreal nature of Keith Reid’s head-scratching lyrics. The ten tracks have absolutely wild names , from the “Salad Days (Are Here Again)” which originated as a Shakespeare idiom, to “Repent Walpurgis” which is a longer, instrumental version of “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” with a guitar solo, and the closest this album gets to full-on progressive rock. The paralyzing feeling of pure drama is not quite here in every track, though we get glimpses in “Something Following Me” and “A Christmas Camel”, where Robin Trower’s rather pissed-off strumming finally shifts to a solo. His chunky, vibrato-laden tone throughout is one I personally find more satisfying than the Eric Clapton style that must have served as an influence.
I’ve always loved the fun intermissions in “Mabel” and “Good Captain Clack”. Fun melodies and sexy organ solos are to be had, though these tracks also indicate to me this band hardly takes itself too seriously. At least at first, if you’re aware of Matthew Fisher’s lawsuit to receive a writing credit for his unmistakable organ part in “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”. This is the kind of album I could see people calling pretentious for the same reasons I argue it’s not, though really, often times we call things pretentious when we don’t like them, and vice versa.
You must have noticed the fat score I’ve placed on
Procol Harum. After a few months of pointless ruminating over my future, I found this album was the only thing that could keep me dangling in a state of foolish optimism despite how little I feel I understand the world around me. I can’t tell you I ‘understand’ this album, though, because something about it is past explaining. When you die you can only hope to understand one percent of what the hell’s going on in life, past, present and future. It’s during the guitar solo of “A Christmas Camel”, those final chords of “Kaleidoscope”, and the piano interlude of “Repent Walpurgis” where my mind suddenly clears and I emerge on the other side of all these tracks with some newfound understanding. That’s what some of us would call ‘sublime’.
