Hey folks, wassup? We’ve got another review lined up today, and once again it’s an album review. We’re coming a few months late to this one (it came out in March), but I don’t think an awfully large number of people know about Glass Hammer outside its fanbase and the general prog rock community, so I thought I’d reach back to talk about this one a bit.
I know, super-proggy, right? I’ve often heard it said that Glass Hammer is a Yes clone, but I’ve never heard any Yes songs so I have no reference point. But that doesn’t matter; I love Glass Hammer. I became a fan back in 2006 when they were considered to be at their height. The Inconsolable Secret had been released just the year before, the crowning achievement in a string of four excellent albums, beginning with The Middle Earth Album in 2001. I’ve never seen them live, but their albums are sharp and catchy, and their instrumentation intricate, sophisticated, and entertaining even just to hear, let alone see. In this way, they were just what a prog band should be: a marvel to observe.
As my musical tastes diversified in college and I shifted away from prog rock, I stopped following Glass Hammer’s releases, leaving an album gap in my collection that remains to this day. During that time, they released one very poorly-received album, from which (according to other fans) it took a few albums to recover. The gap in my collection got smaller when in the first week of May of this year, I bought Ode to Echo, which was hailed as “the return of Glass Hammer.” So how is it?
Concededly, opener Garden of Hedon does represent a true return to form for the band (I have heard the “bad” album). This song sounds like Lex Rex and Culture of Ascent had a child, only cleaner and shinier on the part of both. The fun instrumental breaks of Lex Rex are there along with the gentle vocal harmonies of Ascent, but they each have a strange polished quality to them, like they were the product of a machine. I know that sounds bad (I don’t mean it to), like there’s no human touch or anything – I can’t think of a better way to describe it. This is not to say I dislike the song, however; it has a character all its own, which in a Glass Hammer song is always a good thing – the distinctive ones are the ones that endure (The Knight of the North comes to mind).
It’s the rest of the album that concerns me. Whereas the opening track is strong because it’s “classic” Glass Hammer, much of the rest of the album feels a bit like Glass Hammer “by the numbers.” There is a difference, so let me explain. I don’t dislike any of the songs; I suspect Misantrog, Crowbone (which has some enchanting synth-violin breaks), and Ozymandias will go on to become some of my favorite overall Glass Hammer songs, along with A Cup of Trembling and Arianna. My problem with the rest of the songs is that although the band exhibits a diversity of styles over their catalogue, the songs on Ode to Echo sound too similar to each other.
The great strength of Shadowlands and the Inconsolable Secret was that they exhibited a wide range of different styles within the prog rock ambit. The Inconsolable Secret especially shifted between orchestral pieces, heavy keyboard prog, Celtic numbers, and a slew of other different kinds of instruments and whatnot. Lex Rex had classical piano, guitar-driven rock, and keyboard noodling. The latter came to represent the classic Glass Hammer sound: keyboard noodling, Babb’s prominent bass, complex but tight percussion, and entrancing melodies. And that’s okay for the first track, which says, “We’re back and we’re doing that thing you like – please enjoy this new album!” That’s not okay to do for seven songs afterward; they have to spice it up a bit. The one that departs the most from this formula is Porpoise Song, which dives (no pun intended) into pseudo-psychedelic choral parts (with a catchy hook, actually). But as the shortest track on the album at nearly the end – and a Carole King cover at that, not even a Glass Hammer original – it’s too little too late.
This may seem like unrepentant criticism for Ode to Echo, but I actually enjoyed the album immensely. Those fans who dubbed it the “return” of Glass Hammer are correct – this is the sort of album I’d hoped to follow the Inconsolable Secret. Maybe I just don’t demand a whole lot from Glass Hammer albums, maybe the lack of diversity is too insignificant to kill the album, but I nevertheless foresee Ode to Echo becoming an enduring part of my overall music catalogue, as much as my longtime favorites by this and many other artists. As with Paris in the Spring and my other music reviews, I will not give Ode to Echo a numerical rating, but it does get my endorsement. I know this review was rather on the shorter end, but that’s a bit easier for you all to absorb each week, am I right? Well, if there’s nothing more to say, I’ll see ya next week.
Hopped on Pop 
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