What Gentle Giant listeners chase is a method, not a mood. Every member sang, and the vocal lines were split between them rather than doubled; medieval and baroque figures were working material, not decoration; the credits on one album ran to forty-six instruments, all played by the group. Other bands have worked that way, and this guide to the best prog rock albums for Gentle Giant fans follows the trail through six of them. None is a Gentle Giant record: that catalogue is covered elsewhere on the site, and the job here is to send you somewhere else. Every choice is held in place by something documented: a shared line-up, a shared stage, an influence stated in print.

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound — Without Reservations (1967)

The bridge is the line-up: this is the group three of Gentle Giant’s founders were in before they were Gentle Giant. Two brothers were born in Glasgow and the third in Portsmouth, where the family settled and both bands began. The album they cut for Parlophone came first, and is another trade entirely: a soul band being nudged towards pop. It stalled at 39. The hit landed months later — Prog Magazine called Kites a pop-psych novelty — and reached number 9 in Britain, and the brothers dropped the name in 1969 and regrouped a year later with a classically trained keyboard player and a semi-professional blues guitarist.

Yes — Relayer (1974)

The bridge is a stage. Gentle Giant were among the support acts on the Close to the Edge tour, the long run Yes played from the summer of 1972 into the spring of 1973, and Relayer arrived two years on, after the double album that came between. It holds three pieces, one filling a whole side, and was cut at the bass player’s house in Surrey rather than a London studio, with a new keyboard player brought in after the previous one left. AllMusic, quoted in the album’s Wikipedia entry, describes it as alternating “abrasive, rhythmically dense” sections with “delicate vocal and choral sections”. It reached number 4 in Britain.

Gryphon — Midnight Mushrumps (1974)

The bridge is a comparison ProgArchives draws in its own band biography: Gryphon’s compositions resemble Gentle Giant’s, it says, with far more weight on authentic Renaissance texture. The circuit backs it up, since both bands did time supporting Yes — Gentle Giant on the Close to the Edge run, Gryphon on the tour behind the record above. This one was taped at Chipping Norton in January and issued by Transatlantic that April; the side-long title piece is wordless, and grew out of music written for a stage production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Observer, quoted by Record Collector, called what they did “curiously pleasing music” and reckoned it might get even an archdeacon tapping his toes.

Cardiacs — A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window (1988)

The bridge is stated in print: in a Prog Magazine feature from December 2017, a musician who had played in Cardiacs said plainly that Gentle Giant were “one of many big influences” on the band’s chief writer. What you can check on paper is the instrumentation: saxophones, clarinets and recorders beside the usual rock line-up, with marimba, trombones and violins on top. It was recorded at a London studio across the middle of the decade and released in March 1988 on the band’s own Alphabet Business Concern label. Uncut has since called it “an astonishingly creative debut”.

Echolyn — As the World (1995)

The bridge is documented lineage rather than a shared room. Prog, reviewing a later Echolyn album in September 2015, wrote that the band’s earlier releases held “smatterings of Yes, Gentle Giant and The Beatles”; the Wikipedia entry for this record names Gentle Giant among its influences too, singling out the syncopated vocal writing on the title song. The context is the strange part: a Pennsylvania band signed to Epic in 1994, handed a major-label budget for a record of this kind, then dropped by Sony inside the year when it did not sell. It appeared in March, and prog listeners have kept it alive ever since.

Spock’s Beard — The Light (1995)

The bridge is an influence the band has never hidden. Their Wikipedia entry, citing a reference book on the genre, describes them as drawing on Yes, Genesis and Gentle Giant, and names their signature as intricate multi-part vocal harmony and counterpoint. The debut runs to four tracks on its original release, opening with a title suite in eight named sections, and came out on the American independent Syn-Phonic before Metal Blade reissued it in 1998. Prog, reviewing the band’s twentieth-anniversary set, wrote that long multi-part treks like this one “take the bones of 70s templates and turbocharge them”.

Where to start

As the World is the easiest way in. The Light is the friendliest modern version of the vocal writing, the one to try if the stacked voices are the whole attraction. Relayer is the next stop if you know Yes only by the famous early-seventies run. Midnight Mushrumps is for when what you miss is the recorder-and-crumhorn side rather than the riddling side. Cardiacs ask the most and give the most back. Without Reservations is not a way in at all: it is the archive photograph, and it lands better once the rest have gone in.

Go deeper

If this suits you, the neighbouring guides run along the same lines: the one written for Hawkwind listeners heads for the other end of that underground, the Frank Zappa guide sits closest to this one for sheer density, and the Roxy Music one covers the art-school end. The map for the whole set is Prog Rock Recommendations: What to Listen to Next.

Two of the six have full guides here: The Best Yes Albums and Where to Start with Yes, plus The Best Echolyn Albums and the Echolyn band page. For the band this page is written around, The Best Gentle Giant Albums is the beginner’s route and the Gentle Giant band page gathers the rest, while the wider canon sits at The Best Progressive Rock Albums of All Time. My book Beyond the Thames covers the British scene most of these records came out of at greater length.

View Beyond the Thames on Amazon →

Enjoyed the read? Find your next one on the bookshelf below →