It’s a little hard to believe now, but for a period in the 1970s, progressive rock wasn’t just seen as the direction rock music was headed but it was super popular.
Progressive rock – prog rock for short – was a catchall term for bands that mixed a range of influences into bombastic, guitar and keyboard-heavy rock. Some of them (Yes or Todd Rundgren’s Utopia) had a foot firmly in the rock camp while others were more on the progressive side. For example, Emerson, Lake and Palmer didn’t just play Modest Mussorgsky’s long classical music piece “Pictures at an Exhibition,” they released it as a live album. It peaked at #10 on the US charts, too.
Indeed, ELP represented both the good and bad of prog-rock: high musicianship, complex music, and piles and piles of excess and showing off. Keith Emerson used to tour with an entire Moog synthesizer, which doesn’t sound too crazy until you realize how goddamn large the thing is, especially compared to the other 13 keyboards he regularly employed.
At it’s peak, prog was big popular enough that bands like ELP could sell out Madison Square Garden. And within a couple of years, the whole scene grew so bloated it collapsed on itself, especially when punk bands like The Ramones, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, and The Sex Pistols blew into popular consciousness with straight-ahead, simple and aggressive rock.
So it was easy to get lost in the shuffle: first, when the scene was popular and there was a glut of prog bands and second, when the scene rapidly dried up as popular tastes changed. One such album is the only one released by a small group called Kestrel, a self-titled record that initially came out in 1975 and is just now getting a deluxe, 2-CD reissue by UK label Cherry Red.
Kestrel was a five-piece band from Newcastle, England, comprised of Tom Knowles on vocals, Dave Black on guitar, Fenwick Moir on bass, Dave Whitaker on drums and John Cook on keyboards. After releasing their first (and only) record on Cube Records in 1975, the band quietly slipped into oblivion.
Of them all, Black enjoyed the most success. He played on a post-Bowie Spiders from Mars record, had a minor hit with Goldie’s “Making Up Again” in 1978 and played in a band called 747 in the 80s. Everyone else kind of vanished from the scene. Their album did too, until a Japanese label reissued it in the 2000s (more on this in a bit). As far as I can tell, it’s only now getting a proper CD release.
Which is nice, since Kestrel a pretty good album. It’s not a lost masterpiece or anything, but it’s an enjoyable slice of 70s prog with some good tunes and solid playing throughout.
Kestrel is book-ended by it’s two most overtly proggish numbers, it opens with “The Acrobat,” a soaring number where Knowles sings over a steady rock groove before Cook takes a jazzy electric piano solo. It reminds me a bit of groups like Gentle Giant, although it’s a little less tricky in its rhythms.
For a band lumped into prog-rock, there are a few straight-ahead rockers. “I Believe in You” is chugging 70s rock; ‘Take It Away” has nice, fuzzy guitar work by Black and a slightly spikier beat. And “End of the Affair” opens with a Santana-like opening guitar solo before it settles down into piano-driven soft rock.
But the key to Kestrel is an instrument that’s very 70s and almost uniquely suited to prog: the Mellotron. Essentially, it was a tape recording of strings, operated by a keyboard. Press a key and you’d get a string section playing that note. They had a unique, eerie sound and were notorious for their unreliability; they probably broke down more often than they worked.
Kestrel is packed with Mellotron touches and flourishes. It’s pretty much the only reason it was plucked from obscurity by a Japanese label and given a second life. The album’s closing song, “August Carol,” makes heavy use of this instrument. The band stretching between time signatures, guitar riffs, and a thumping bass line before a drum break and a heaping helping of Mellotron, before Black closes with a very 70’s guitar solo.
And songs like that are both what this album does best and where it fails to excite. In a crowded prog field, Kestrel’s lone album doesn’t stand apart from groups like King Crimson, Yes, or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Unlike them, it never ventures off into extended musical improvising.
But that’s almost to its favor: since Kestrel keeps things short, there’s a real lack of noodling and excess. Black’s guitar solos never wander off into the distance, Cook never plays a ten-minute keyboard solo and Knowles sings his ass off, giving songs like “The Acrobat” or “August Carol” a noticeable energy. At the same time, the music doesn’t have the same spark its peers do: there isn’t anything as exciting as Crimson’s “One More Red Nightmare” or Yes’ “Siberian Khatru” for example.
Granted, this kind of music isn’t for everyone. But I expect that if you’ve gotten this far into my review, chances are you’ll dig Kestrel. Like I said, it’s not legendary or anything, but there definitely moments of inspiration, particularly “The Acrobat” and “August Carol.” The Cherry Red reissue (available through their website) contains a bunch of bonus stuff, too: new liners, alternate takes of those two songs and even a couple 7” edits.