Steve:
In our earlier post about Procol Harum's self-titled debut album, I mentioned that the albums immediately following the debut were the ones I identified with the most. Of those, Shine on Brightly is my favorite, hands down, and a treasured album that I know by heart, listen to often, and would most likely place on an all-time-favorites list. On this album, guitarist Robin Trower gets a bit more space to play his expressive leads, and the band experiments with song structures that match the literary ambitions of the lyrics -- the beginning of prog as we know it!
The first 2 1/2 songs follow the template of the debut album - tuneful & concise songs driven by Procol Harum's unique piano/organ mixture, Gary Brooker's rich vocals, and Keith Reid's striking lyrical themes. Where these songs depart from the debut album's template lies in Robin Trower's increased presence; in between the vocal lines, his thickly distorted guitar interjects similarly to Eric Clapton's playing on the Cream albums. This adds to the music's weight and introduces a new melodic element to enhance the already colorful songwriting.
At the midpoint of the third song, "Skip Softly (My Moonbeams)", things start to get strange. The first half of the song was a fun, whimsical oom-pah oom-pah music hall number (albeit with howling lead guitar), but a transitional section leads it down into a completely different, darker space. The remainder of the song (all instrumental) goes from moody, dark ambience to a one-note guitar solo, a false ending, then a sudden jump into a super-fast coda that sounds like circus music at 45 RPM. This is a hint that this album is trying out new stuff. From there, even relatively straight songs are delivered in ways the band hadn't shown us before: "Wish Me Well" is a straight blues tune turned psychedelic thanks to Trower's wailing guitar, and "Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone)" avoids rock entirely in favor of a church chorale arrangement.
The tour-de force takes up most of side 2 and is arguably the first multi-part progressive rock epic: "In Held Twas in I". This was the first song I remember hearing by Procol Harum - Dan must have had a copy of it on tape, and at a young age I was mystified by it. The suite's title is an acrostic: it was derived by stringing together the first word from each section of the piece. It begins with a long spooky narration and goes through several very different sections to a climactic conclusion with choir (pre-Atom Heart Mother!) in about 17 minutes. It's the perfect capper to a near-perfect album.
Dan:
I remember getting this album when it came out, just about the time Steve was born. It must have been the LP he heard at a very early age since I didn't have any taping equipment and CDs were to follow more than 10 years later. I love "In Held Twas in I," which begins with the recitation "In the darkness of the night only occasionally relieved by glimpses of Nirvana..." and ends with the Dalai Lama's advice to the seeker of the meaning of life. "Well, my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?" Other phrases from this opening narrative, such as "wallowing in a morass of self-despair made only more painful by the knowledge that all I am is of my own making," still drift into my mind at odd times.
"In Held" also contains a second narration that is more cryptically disturbing than humorous. And the part of the suite titled "Autumn of My Madness" lays it out expressly as the troubled lyrics perfectly match the anguished chords. The title track is also about madness. This obviously dark foreboding appears often in Procol Harum's recordings. Hey, this is the band that wrote about shipwrecks!
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