Top Ten Songs by Gentle Giant

Highlights from the Career of a Progressive Rock Band

Gentle Giant was a highly innovative progressive rock band that formed in 1970 and enjoyed a 10-year career, which spanned the lifetime of the original prog rock movement. Gentle Giant is known for their unique use of instrumentation, genre blending and sophisticated compositional techniques influenced by Renaissance and 20th century classical music.

1. Advent of Panurge

This is an undisputed classic Gentle Giant song from the band's fourth album "Octopus" (1972), widely considered to be one of their finest. The song opens with Kerry Minnear's quiet, psuedo-Medieval vocals, which burst into a hard rocking jazzy groove driven by trademark piano, funky bass and wailing blues guitar. The lyrics were based on a scene from Francois Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel," a humorous epic of the French Renaissance. Many of the songs on "Octopus" were inspired by literature.

2. Just the Same

A single from Gentle Giant's most commercially popular album "Free Hand" (1975), the song features plentiful polyrhythms and off-kilter counterpoint yet manages a generally poppy sound, essentially a "rock" song for all its unorthodox use of multiple time signatures.

3. Pantagruel's Nativity

Another piece inspired by "Gargantua and Pantagruel", this was the opener to the band's second album "Acquiring the Taste" (1971), which is considered by most Gentle Giant listeners to be somewhat different in tone from their other work. Decidedly haunting and ethereal, the song moves from flutes and trumpets into a chilling hard rock guitar riff, dark Renaissance-style vocal polyphony and back again.

4. Knots

A trademark piece for Gentle Giant, this standout piece from "Octopus" features masterful 4-part vocal counterpoint, a xylophone solo, and an almost metal-like hook. Inspired by the knot-like riddles of R.D. Lang. The album's liner notes proclaim it to be a "modern-day madrigal".

5. In a Glass House