Acquiring the Taste is the album on which Gentle Giant declared war on easy listening — a dense, dark, gloriously perverse record that fuses medieval counterpoint, jazz, blues and hard rock into something no one had made before. Released in 1971, it announced its own ambition on the sleeve, and remains the moment the band became themselves.

The short version

Acquiring the Taste (1971) is the second studio album by Gentle Giant, produced by Tony Visconti. Recorded by the six-piece line-up of the three Shulman brothers — Derek, Phil and Ray — with Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and drummer Martin Smith, it swaps the debut’s relative conventionality for extreme eclecticism and forbidding complexity. Its sleeve carried a manifesto promising music that was unique and adventurous whatever the cost in popularity. They meant it.

A statement of intent

Gentle Giant were formed by the Shulman brothers out of the ashes of their pop group Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, and they had something to prove. For their second album they made the boldest promise in progressive rock: on the gatefold sleeve they announced that their aim was to expand the frontiers of popular music, even at the risk of becoming thoroughly unpopular, and that every piece had been written to be adventurous and fascinating rather than agreeable. With Tony Visconti producing — and quietly playing recorder and percussion — and Chris Thomas programming the Moog, they set about proving it across eight extraordinary tracks.

The sound

This is the darkest, densest Gentle Giant album, and their most experimental. Kerry Minnear moves between harpsichord, Mellotron, vibraphone, celeste and Moog, Ray Shulman between bass, violin and twelve-string, Phil Shulman between saxophones, clarinet and trumpet. Gary Green’s guitar snarls and sings, and Martin Smith’s drumming holds the shifting metres together. Above it all rise the band’s astonishing vocal arrangements, madrigal counterpoint transplanted into rock. The contrast between Derek Shulman’s gruff bark and Minnear’s delicate high tenor gives the record its light and shade. Medieval, jazzy, bluesy, sometimes almost frightening — and never dull.

The songs

‘Pantagruel’s Nativity,’ drawn from Rabelais’s tale of the giant Pantagruel, opens on Mellotron and a heavy riff. ‘Edge of Twilight’ drifts through panning harpsichord and clattering percussion like a half-remembered dream, before ‘The House, The Street, The Room’ turns menacing and ends in something close to apocalypse. The brief title track is a solo Moog madrigal by Kerry Minnear. Side two brings the poetic ‘Wreck,’ the beautiful ‘The Moon Is Down’ — whose saxophone theme nods to Samuel Barber — the slinky ‘Black Cat,’ on which Gary Green makes his guitar meow, and the bluesy stomp of ‘Plain Truth.’

Reception and legacy

Acquiring the Taste sold poorly, as the band had all but predicted, and it remains a demanding listen: newcomers expecting the nimble, playful Gentle Giant of Octopus can find its murk forbidding. But its reputation has grown steadily, and it is now regarded as one of the essential British progressive albums of the early 1970s, and the record on which the band discovered exactly who they were. Ray Shulman later called it perhaps the purest music they ever made. Its influence echoes through decades of bands who learned that complexity and adventure could be their own reward.

The verdict

Acquiring the Taste is essential Gentle Giant, though perhaps not the very first album to try — Octopus offers a friendlier way in. Give it patience, though, and it rewards like few records of its era: the vocal writing alone is astonishing, and the sheer nerve of it still thrills. Come for the gothic grandeur of ‘Pantagruel’s Nativity’ and the dreamlike ‘Edge of Twilight,’ stay for ‘The Moon Is Down,’ and hear six musicians keeping the boldest promise ever printed on an album sleeve.

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