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Alternate Views
August, 1997
Scott McGill is the guitarist of progressive rock band Finneus Gauge. The Hand Farm was his previous band - a progressive trio which combines jazz fusion with progressive rock. The Hand Farm is the debut album and was released in May 1997. Scott plays electric and acoustic guitars throughout and is joined by Kevin Woolston and Matt Cantwell who share the bass guitar dutues, and Anthony DeSimone on drums and percussion. Scott wrote all the music and shared the production duties with Joe DeLuca. The album was recorded with an absolute minimum of overdubs at Why Me? Recording in Gibbsboro, New Jersey.
"The Great Unwashed" opens the album with a powerful jazzy rock track. Right from the opening Scott’s guitar work is evident. We are not talking screaming guitar solos here, Scott is much more subtle and intricate. I am reminded of Steve Morse’s work with Dixie Dregs - indeed the opener falls somewhere in Dregsland. "The Secret Linen Service" is more from the realms of Return To Forever. We have a guitar line running for the whole track with the drums and bass chasing along in pursuit. The main theme is cleverly off-beat and works a dream. After two up-beat songs, "Pools" is a more mellow composition with echoes of Gary Moore’s fretwork with Coliseum II.
"Death By D.M.V." fairly speeds along with Scott switching from electric to acoustic guitar to great effect. There are vague overtones of Brand X in the combinations of chording and lightning fast fretwork. "2000 Allen Called" has Scott’s fingers fairly smoking as they whiz up and down the frets. "Uncle Zippy" opens with a suitably "zippy" collection of exclamations before wandering into a meandering guitar line which drifts across drum and bass landscapes. More super-fast guitar-work from Scott but a track which needs yet more listening to, to get the most out of. "Luggage" is back to the Return To Forever ambience with the bass and guitar interweaving a horrendously intricate mesh of melody and counter-melody.
"Ignoramus Rex" is a combination of mellowly played well-crafted chords with some intricate breaks. I would pigeon-hole it along with Al Di Meola or maybe Allan Holdsworth in the way Scott combines wrist-breaking chords with tendon-straining guitar breaks. "Calvinist Pancakes" fairly charges along in leaps and bounds along with Scott managing to combine several different guitar sounds as different themes through the track. I am not a guitarist, so I am in awe of anyone who are take a lump of wood with six strings and make it sound "different" without seeming doing anything different to the playing style. Of course it is probably all done with effects pedals, but it impresses me! "Labyrinth" is the winding and intricate composition that it’s title suggests. Very quiet and subtly threatening, and all to short. "Alaskan Brick" closes the album with another up-beat high tempo composition with guitar, bass and drums powering along to the final climax.
I never look forward to reviewing instrumental albums. For a start they often require a lot more work to suss out what is going, but what I really struggle with it describing the different sounds and ambiences created. There are a myriad different adjectives I can drag up- but what I really want to say is "well, as you can hear..." This album sat beside the CD player for a while before I built up the confidence to put pen to paper - sorry Scott, but I wanted to do justice to this album. You see, The Hand Farm is a serious piece of music; it requires you to sit down and listen to what is going on to fully appreciate what is going on. The first few listens will leave you with the impression that Scott is a great guitarist who can play some really fast breaks - but that is about all. It takes a bot more work to start to appreciate the music underneath. However, given a little more time to sit back and appreciate what is going on you begin to get into the musical complexity and start to see what is going on in the melodies and harmonically in the chords as well as the "statistical density" of the playing. And it is worth giving it that time.
Review by Frank Blades
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