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Gryphon - Red Queen To Gryphon Three (1974)

Japan Mini LP

This fully instrumental concept-album about the rather well known game chess is widely and deservedly regarded as Gryphon's crowning achievement. Here they found the perfect balance between their medieval folk style and progressive rock influences mainly from Gentle Giant and Mike Oldfield. The album also introduced tasteful and sparse use of synths to the band's sound, which can be heard left away on the opening chords of "Opening Move". The track itself follows many of the same structural ideas and complexity of the title-track from the previous album, but now with a stronger progressive rock feel mixed in with Gryphon's trademark and delightful medieval sound. And the melodies and themes are again instantly strong and memorable. "Second Spasm" shows Gryphon at their most upbeat, cheerful and energetic. The middle part also reveals some sense of musical humour, and includes something that sounds suspiciously much like a fart! It should almost be impossible to pick a highlight from an album as thoroughly consistent and even as "Red Queen to Gryphon Three". But if I had to pick one it would have to be the masterful "Lament". It opens with a beautiful melody that alternates between Harvey's recorder and Gulland's krumhorn over the probably most genially constructed chords that the band ever created. It then goes into a quite mellow part dominated mainly by the krumhorn and a feel and atmosphere not too far from Mike Oldfield's "Hergest Ridge" from the same year. Oberle's cymbals then introduces a much faster and happier sequence that finally returns the whole track to the opening again, but now in a completely different and full-blown symphonic progressive rock arrangement. The closer "Checkmate" has a very jazzy opening that fits surprisingly well to Gryphon, but the track quickly stabilises itself into a complex medieval piece with a pretty theme on Harvey's recorder and a grandiose finale on synths. Gryphon never made a more consistent and better album than this, and will always remain a progressive rock classic of musical beauty, superb musicianship and compositional abilities of the highest class.

/ vintageprog.com /

Tracklist:

01. Opening Move

02. Second Spasm

03. Lament

04. Checkmate

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