The sad fact about box sets is that there's always a fan out there who thinks they could have compiled a better one. An even sadder fact is that they're often correct, and the very notion of anthologizing Van Der Graaf Generator was a fraught one for that very reason. More, perhaps, than any other band of the early-'70s prog era, VDGG polarized their fans as much as the band's blatantly inhospitable sound outraged outsiders. They cut just eight studio albums, and all eight possess a wholly different character, all the more so since the band actually broke up midway through the sequence. Past compilations, then, sensibly dealt with one or other of those eras -- The Box, contrarily, swallows the entire beast whole, 34 tracks over four stuffed discs, and it gets full marks for courage, whatever its other sins may be. Unfortunately, there are quite a few other sins. From the collectors point of view, the most apparent flaw is the absence of any genuinely new material. Leaving aside two songs drawn from past posthumous collections, in official terms a dozen tracks are previously unreleased, including eight BBC radio sessions dating back to 1968, and four live performances from an August, 1975, show in Rimini, Italy. Unfortunately, not only have these long been available on two of the precious few VDGG bootlegs in circulation, but they're also taken from precisely the same source tapes, with apparently little effort made to clean them up. It's disappointing, too, that the especially hiccup-heavy 1968 session should be preferred over even a fleeting examination of the group's earliest strivings -- the original demos which the (genuinely luxurious) booklet discusses, the maiden "People You Were Going To"/"Firebrand" 45, the Aerosol Grey Machine debut album. On the plus side, several of these performances are spectacular, regardless of sound quality. VDGG were never going to top the pristine majesty of the studio take of "Refugees" (from 1970s The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other album), but a 1971 radio session at least shows them trying. The closing "The Sphinx in the Face," from the band's 1977 John Peel broadcast, too, is a magnificent indication of the oft-times chilling energies at the group's disposal. But the highlight has to be the churning live rendition of "In the Black Room/The Tower," a song best associated with vocalist Peter Hammill's solo output, but drafted into the VDGG arsenal following their 1975 reunion. A vicious, Byronic nightmare set to trauma-inducing turbulence and oft-times impossible time signatures; even with bootleg hiss and ambient crackle, it's like stepping barefoot into a snuff movie. The gig itself must have been terrifying. VDGG's first incarnation bows out midway through disc two with the purgative "A Plague if Lighthouse Keepers," the side-long monolith which highlighted 1971's Pawn Hearts album. Perhaps surprisingly, we get the regular LP version here -- surprisingly, because an astonishing live rendition exists, taken from a Belgian TV performance and, in its own way, it is actually superior to the official take -- plus, how many other rock bands are there who could so cleanly execute a multi-layered, multi-part 23 minute opus from memory? Probably about as many as would announce their comeback with the likes of "Lemmings" and "Man Erg," excerpts from the Rimini concert which informed the audience that whatever else may have changed during VDGG's absence, their ability to grind skulls between slabs of sonic cement was not one of them. Yet it cannot be denied that such moments become few and far between as discs three and four progress. Hammill, the band's chief lyricist, was conducting his own solo career parallel to the final VDGG albums and, while nobody would ever accuse him of keeping the best songs for himself, the fact that he did have another outlet ensured there was no longer anything to counteract his bandmates' long-held penchant for excruciatingly convoluted art rock -- a balance, of course, which was crucial to the original group's versatility. Of course there are still moments of sublime magic: the neo-classical vastness of "Wondering" would have dignified any earlier VDGG album, while "Sleepwalkers," "The Wave," and another live performance, "Sci-Finance" (from the group's final release, the in-concert Vital), all offer further insights into the passions which the group's memory still stirs. But too much of these final discs sounds are portentously overbearing today; too much is simply way too much, and the discerning ear retreats back to discs one and two -- or, better still, to the original albums from which the best cuts were culled: The Least We Can Do and Pawn Hearts, of course, but also the savage majesty of 1971's H To He, Who Am the Only One, and, yes, even to Aerosol Grey Machine. Place those four albums in a box together, and you might never need to buy another record again. You certainly won't be needing The Box.
© Dave Thompson /TiVo