Most prog records collapse under the weight of their own ambition. Octopus by Gentle Giant does the opposite, and that alone makes it worth your time.
Released with a Roger Dean sleeve and eight tracks, the album's title is simply the number of songs it contains. No grand mythology, no sprawling concept. Just the music, doing the talking. And what it says is this: progressive rock, at its best, is not about excess. It is about precision disguised as extravagance.
A Band You Have No Excuse Not To Know
Gentle Giant remain what one listener accurately called "a connoisseur's choice." While Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd crossed over into the mainstream, Gentle Giant stayed put in the margins, influential beyond their reach but largely unknown outside serious collectors. That is a genuine injustice, and Octopus is the album that makes the case most convincingly.
The opener, The Advent of Panurge, draws on the novels of Rabelais. A Cry for Everyone takes its cue from French existentialist Albert Camus. This is not prog navel-gazing, it is prog with actual reading behind it. The band carry their learning, and their instrumentation, which spans sax, mellotron, xylophone and more, with a lightness that bands with far less technical ability rarely manage. The whole thing has, as more than one listener has noted, a very British sense of self-deprecation running underneath it, which stops the whole thing tipping into pomposity.
The standout, for our money, is Knots. Its vocal interplay between the Shulman brothers, Derek, Ray and Phil, builds from something deliberately hairy and dissonant into a melody that genuinely catches you off guard. One reviewer called it "a more intellectually coherent precursor to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody," and that is not as mad a comparison as it sounds. The Boys in the Band takes a similar approach with its time changes, demanding repeat listens before the structure starts to feel not just natural but necessary.
[What prog does at its best is exactly this](/uprise/music/prog-was-a-dirty-word-but-so-much-music-of): it earns its complexity by making you feel the payoff. Octopus does that better than most.
The Honest Verdict From The Listeners
The Album of the Week Club community that reviewed this record split, as you would expect. Scores ranged from 5 to 7 out of 10. The criticisms that surfaced most often were fair ones: the vocals can feel overly formal, even churchy, and the occasional tendency to stack overdubs for their own sake does clutter certain passages. The guitar sections were identified as the most dated elements, though mercifully they are kept relatively brief.
One reviewer put it plainly: it did not click on first listen, and it did not click by the second or third either. That is not a mark against the listener's taste. It is just the reality of what Gentle Giant ask of you. [Some bands require that kind of patience](/uprise/music/had-we-started-a-little-earlier-we-might-have-survived), and the ones worth the effort usually announce themselves eventually.
Octopus announces itself slowly, then all at once. It is not an easy record. It is not meant to be. But the rewards are real, the musicianship is extraordinary, and the fact that future Human League producer Martin Rushent cut his engineering teeth here tells you something about the talent orbiting this record.
Give it three listens before you make a decision. You owe it that much.