In a Glass House opens and closes on the sound of breaking glass — a loose concept album about fragility, judgement and hypocrisy, and the first Gentle Giant record made without Phil Shulman. Released in 1973, it was rejected outright by their American label, and went on to become one of the best-loved albums they ever made.

The short version

In a Glass House (1973) is the fifth studio album by Gentle Giant, self-produced at Advision Studios. It is the first by the quintet of Derek Shulman, Ray Shulman, Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and John Weathers, following the departure of eldest brother Phil. Built loosely around the proverb about glass houses and thrown stones, it is leaner and more aggressive than Octopus, and contains ‘The Runaway,’ ‘Experience’ and the towering title track.

Down to five, and dropped

Phil Shulman had left after Octopus, returning to teaching, and his brothers and bandmates recorded this album under real strain. Derek took on more of the woodwind duties, and the group pressed on. Then came a blow of a different kind: Columbia, their American label, listened to the record, judged it uncommercial and dropped the band — a decision that, by the terms of the contract, handed Gentle Giant ownership of the master tapes. In a Glass House would not be released in the United States for nearly twenty years. Instead it circulated as a costly import, and sold in such quantities that it became one of the biggest-selling imports in America.

The sound

With one member fewer, Gentle Giant sound harder and hungrier. John Weathers’s drums sit high in the mix and drive the music with real force, Gary Green’s guitar bites, and Derek Shulman’s voice has a new edge of menace. The old ingredients remain — medieval and Renaissance melody, chamber-music textures, dizzying counterpoint, sudden changes of metre — but the mood is starker, and matches the stark black-and-white sleeve with its transparent panel of ‘glass.’ Then, without warning, the band will drop into two minutes of quiet beauty. It is a restless, brilliant, faintly anxious record.

The songs

Glass shatters, and ‘The Runaway’ erupts on a rolling groove that John Weathers reportedly borrowed from a Buddy Rich record. ‘An Inmate’s Lullaby’ is one of their strangest creations: every instrument on it is a percussion instrument, and the effect is eerie and weightless. ‘Experience’ unfolds through a Renaissance-tinged middle section built on a slip jig, while ‘A Reunion’ — two minutes of strings, electric piano and Kerry Minnear’s tender voice — is the album’s heart. The title track rocks hardest of all, and the hidden coda, ‘Index,’ stitches fragments of everything together before the glass breaks once more.

Reception and legacy

The band themselves have never quite warmed to it, recalling the pressure under which it was made. Almost everyone else disagrees. In a Glass House is routinely named among their finest albums, its songs stayed in the live set for years, and its title track often closed the show. The American rejection, painful at the time, proved a strange blessing: it gave the band their own masters, and turned the record into a coveted object among US fans. Today it stands as proof that Gentle Giant, reduced to five, lost nothing at all.

The verdict

In a Glass House is essential Gentle Giant, and one of the great progressive albums of 1973 — a year that also gave us Selling England by the Pound and Brain Salad Surgery. It is tighter and angrier than Octopus and more forbidding than Free Hand, and it rewards close listening enormously. Come for the breaking glass and the thunder of ‘The Runaway,’ stay for the fragile beauty of ‘A Reunion,’ and hear five musicians turning a difficult moment into one of their very best records.

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