Supreme, eclectic collection of songs from a vital modern act

The Light of Ancient Mistakes is the seventh release by Hats Off Gentlemen, It’s Adequate, the project of Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland, featuring Galloway’s wife, Kathryn Thomas.

The band have released three tracks in advance of the official release date of 9th September 2023, and these are the title track, Avrana Kern is Made of Ants, and iamtiredandeverythinghurts. All three are embedded within this review, and I hope that, like me, you pre-order the physical product from their Bandcamp page at https://hatsoffgentlemen.bandcamp.com/album/the-light-of-ancient-mistakes You can also see a YouTube preview of the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGrvorJi7us

It has only been a year since the release of The Confidence Trick (you can see my review at https://lazland.org/album-reviews-2022/hats-off-gentlemen-its-adequate ), and this is the third since 2020, so they are on a fine creative roll. The new album is a very eclectic mix of styles, ranging from pure prog to post punk, with concepts referencing literary works, climate change, fascinating biography, and the deeply personal. It is a very intelligent piece of work. There are fifteen regular tracks, plus four bonus ones.

I am going to start with a three-part instrumental interspersed within the album, The Anxiety Machine. It exemplifies everything I like about this band’s modern rock music. The first part is dark, foreboding, with orchestral extended synths and dystopian organ notes which hint at a particularly unpleasant experience ahead. The second part continues with the organ but settles into the heart of the attack with a pulsing bass underneath as the anxiety takes control in a passage which is strangely quite beautiful, as, of course, images and words from nightmares can be. The final part is the shortest and amongst the same noises there is a set of disturbing guitar chords as the nightmare is given full vent before a wonderful lighter passage closes proceedings – no more anxiety, simply pastoral existence. These short pieces, to these ears, mark the band as the natural successors to the classic futuristic music of the day such as Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk.

So, let’s discuss the main body of the album.

Walking To Aldebaran is inspired by a novella of the same name written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award – you can get this on Kindle. It is the story of an astronaut who is lost and alone in The Oort Cloud, and amongst the rocks there is something very nasty indeed. He loses his sanity and is slowly transformed into a monster. This is a long track, just short of nine minutes and is heavy in parts. The flute swirls and whirls, the musical definition of going mad. Galloway narrates with screaming voice and sober reflection. There is a fantastic bass guitar riff throughout, absurdly weird piano notes bringing a jazz sensibility in a brief passage which stands in stark contrast to what preceded it, but also some gorgeous Floydian synths and a lighter flute as the subject of the story reflects on his transformation. The closing passage is simply beautiful with a sensitive guitar solo. This is a hugely impressive theatrical piece of music which really sounds like nothing else you will hear in 2023.

The same author is responsible for the “Children of Time” series, the first of which won him the award in 2016 dealing with terraforming and a clash of civilisations in what strikes me as being a very ambitious set of works. Three tracks are taken from this series, namely Avrana Kern is Made Of Ants (she is the character responsible for terraforming the uninhabitable world as the last vestiges of humanity leave Earth), The Requisitioner and the Wonder (two spaceships), and Gothi & Gethli (two crow-like creatures which insistently deny they are sentient). The first track is embedded below. I love the almost disco-type groove on this. I can see myself dancing to it, a track which rather defies description. It is certainly not stereotypical progressive rock, but a piece of music which absolutely grows on you with its incessant rhythmic vibe.

The second is a six-minute plus track which opens with some gorgeous synths, delicate guitars, latterly a gorgeous bassline, and especially jazz-infused percussion throughout. Close your eyes and see the spaceships making their way through the ether on a voyage of discovery. The final minute is orchestral and quietly majestic. This is probably the best unspoken track I have heard this year.

The final part has more of that bass and percussive groove. You really can’t help yourself moving along to it. The guitars and piano play the parts of the crow creatures, with some improv weighing in which suggest that (without having read the books) the subjects are trying their hardest to put their inquisitors off the scent. The quiet of the close suggests they were successful and can relax.

Iain M Banks and his novel Look To Windward is the inspiration behind the title track. It is part of his “The Culture” series (I am not familiar with it) and takes its name from a T S Eliot poem, The Waste Land. There is a sense of desolation in the bleak flute and synths which open the piece. There is a gorgeous guitar solo, desperately sad, some three and a half minutes in, and we get another later in the piece presaging dramatic keyboards to close and I get a sense of a modern narrative as well here, in that we seem to be doomed to repeat the same old mistakes (a familiar theme for this band). I have embedded it below. Do enjoy Galloway’s beautifully expressive vocals.

The album opener is Sold the Peace. The bass guitar is at the heart of a track which fair races along. Lyrically, I take this as a theme I have a great deal of personal and political affiliation with, how we won the war against totalitarianism (or, so we thought in 1945 and again in 1989) but owing to our greed and the ineptitude of leaders, threw it all away in the name of the corporate global market economy, thus bringing to the fore a new generation of despots, either in business or in hostile countries. In my professional life, I am sadly very familiar with the offshore greed piling into Britain Galloway bitterly sings about. The closing passage opens with a mournfully gorgeous keyboard leading a jazz piano and the angry denouement of where we are as a society.

Sixteen Hugless Years is inspired by the childhood experiences of David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré. They were a talented family; with one brother Rupert I remember well as a distinguished journalist for The Independent. As you might expect from the song title, it was a difficult childhood. His mother left the family home when he was five, and the father was a known associate of the Krays and did a spell in choky for insurance fraud. The sixteen years referred to is the time he did not see his mother until she initiated a reconciliation. I had a similar experience with my late mother, although far shorter at a couple of years, and my sister, sadly, never reconciled with her. The bitterness flows through this music, Galloway lyrically and vocally putting across a sense of anger so effectively that you feel that there is something personal in this as well as narrating a story. The rhythm section is urgent, and the synths are sorrowful. There is an emotional guitar solo. I really like this piece of music, something intelligently rooted in real-life experience.

But this, I think, is trumped by The Glamour Boys, inspired by the Labour MP (one I admire) Chris Bryant’s book detailing the experiences of a group of mostly homosexual or bisexual Conservative MPs who argued against appeasement – the government of the day threatened to expose their predilections, showing, if nothing else, that dirty tricks by the establishment to get their way are nothing new. Many of these patriots lost their lives in WWII. The song very cleverly talks through the secret lives these men had to live when one’s sexuality could be not merely an embarrassment, but a criminal offence, and certainly the ruination of a career. Musically very thoughtful, with keyboards oozing feeling and empathy, all the while the bass thumping underneath.

So, to the deeply personal. Iamtiredandeverythinghurts is brilliant. Galloway has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (please do go to https://www.ehlers-danlos.com/ to find out more) and the chronic pain led to him having to retire from his medical career. When people ask him how he is, understandably he rather takes umbrage because of the fact he is in constant pain. The vocals are so personal and tell a story of a condition in just short of three minutes, with angry guitars and an urgent rhythm section batting away the questions. He is not okay and listening to this, you get a sense of the pain. It is embedded below.

Goodbye Cassini is a tribute to the space probe which spent thirteen years orbiting Saturn. In 2017, it was deliberately “burned” in the gas giant’s atmosphere, hence the title. Kathryn shines on this gorgeous piece of music. Her flute playing is wonderfully expressive as it follows the probe’s final journey, in parts playful because this was such a successful mission, so the demise was a celebration as opposed to a failure. Expressive classical music in a progressive rock context, and very enjoyable.

The Man Who Japed is a cracking title and named after the novel of Philip K Dick published in the 1950’s, japes being the practical jokes we are familiar with (“jolly japes”). There is a cracking image from the album for this track I have reproduced below, and it refers to the jape where the lead character knocks off the head of a dictatorial leader’s statue. Again, there is a modern parallel here with the recent defacement of traditional heroes’ statues such as Churchill. The instrumental piece recalls the mental turmoil of the hero who is appointed to an important position in a nasty government, but (the jape) has the head hiding in his cupboard, waiting to be discovered.

Burn The World closes proceedings and is a climate change piece. Unbroken sea, islands disappearing, the burning of forests, encroaching desert, and a world in turmoil in a familiar, if important, contribution to the musical debate on the warming climate. It has a gorgeous guitar lead and some delicate backing vocals.

This is another very enjoyable album by one of the most important modern progressive rock bands in Britain. The sheer scale of the ambition and eclecticism is what makes them so good, and this is intelligent music wrought large. It comes very highly recommended.