A Quest for Prog 22: Gryphon – Red Queen to Gryphon Three

"A Quest for Prog" is a series of 50 Progressive Rock reviews to be written over a year.  The band selection is taken from the book in the first post on this blog.  And the albums I am reviewing is based on the highest user ratings for each band on Progarchives.com.

Gryphon – Red Queen to Gryphon Three (1974)

Produced by Gryphon & Dave Grinsted

Richard Harvey – Keyboards, Recorders & Krumhorn

Brian Gulland – Bassoon & Krumhorns

Dave Oberlé – Drums, Percussion & tympani

Graeme Taylor – Guitar

Philip Nestor – Bass Guitar

Track listing:

Side One:

01. Opening Move (9:42)

02. Second Spasm (8:15)

Side Two:

01. Lament (10:45)

02. Checkmate (9:50)

Released in 1974 “Red Queen to Gryphon Three” is the third album by English band Gryphon.  The band formed in the early 70’s by Richard Harvey and Brian Gulland.  They began as a Traditional English Folk group and expanded their sound with the addition of Graeme Taylor, Dave Oberlé & Philip Nestor joining the band by the time this record was recorded.  The toured as support act for Yes after this album was released but subsequent releases featured more conventional folk music.

The album begins with “Opening Move” a upbeat tune with an Progressive Classical feel to it.  The song is quite dynamic but also at time quite jarring with changes not flowing into each other.  The track seems like a lot of different pieces of music tried together but not creating one piece of music.  This track reminded me of early Split Enz without the structure and song writing.

Following on is “Second Spasm” which is a kind of coy Medieval track.  Again this track suffers from a lack of flow and in places it sounds like the band are playing different pieces of music at the same time.  The guitar is nice on this tune but fairly traditional.

The second side begins with “Lament”.  The track begins with a quite long Acoustic Guitar and Flute passage that doesn’t really go anywhere.  When the band comes in the track becomes quite bubbly some strong playing.  The track is dense and has quite a few layers but like the previous track the band seems to be playing parts from different tracks at the same time. 

The album ends with “Checkmate”.  The song begins with a nice Keyboard intro.  The Guitars come in with some nice interlocking signatures between Keyboards and Guitars.  The playing is quite restrained which means the song does drag quite a bit.  At the half way mark I was waiting for this song to end and the last 4 minutes really didn’t add much to the track.

 “Red Queen to Gryphon Three” is a fairly uninteresting album that I found quite hard to get through.  The songs are far longer than they really should be and don’t really have any focus even though the playing in places is really strong.

2/10