An Incomplete Guide To Kayaking: Part 1
Posted on | April 19, 2008 at 1:27 am | Comments Off
This is a continuation of my series of blog entries on the Dutch progressive rock band Kayak.
Phase 1: The Prog Years (1973-1974)
See See The Sun
Kayak (II)
Kayak’s first album See See The Sun came out in 1973. Like it’s 1974 followup, Kayak (aka Kayak II), it’s pretty much a pure prog affair, though most of the songs aren’t too long, as you usually find in this genre. The young band originally consisted of Ton Scherpenzeel (keyboards), Max Werner (vocals), Pim Koopman (drums), Johan Slager (guitar) and Cees van Leeuwen (bass). Those first two albums produced a few hit singles in Holland and Europe, but probably didn’t get them much attention outside of that.
Unfortunately, there’s not much I can say about Kayak’s first two albums from a first person perspective, since I don’t have them on CD. I do have See See The Sun on vinyl (found in a used record store back in the early 80s), but I never liked it enough to even commit it to tape. However, the CD release of their third album Royal Bed Bouncer does feature many songs from those albums as bonus tracks. So, I did get a pretty good handle on what they sound like from that sampling. The critics who say they were trying to ape the British prog rock group Yes are pretty much on the money. The songs are interesting in their own way, but don’t really have the riffs and hooks and melodies that are evident on later efforts, and are frequently too slow-tempo. Max Werner’s vocals on these albums are especially annoying to me, though he eventually turned into my favorite Kayak vocalist on the subsequent albums. I think the problem is primarily that his vocal style does not fit the musical style they are attempting here.
One of the problems that I and others have with prog rock is that it’s just so schizophrenic and not really “song-based”. There’s a lot of tempo and style changes within a song that make it hard to focus on the song as a discrete entity. What I’ve heard, and what I can remember, from these two albums certainly reinforce that opinion in me. They sound too monotonous. That said, I think the song “Alibi” (from Kayak II) does have some energy and catchiness to it, and would certainly rank it higher than some of their latter material. But for the most part, I don’t find these albums essential listening.
Next: Kayak finds its way.
Latre.