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**Gentle Giant - Three Friends**
★★★★☆

The year was 1972, and while the world was spinning to the groove of "American Pie" and getting their rocks off with T. Rex, a quintet of musical mad scientists from Portsmouth were busy constructing one of progressive rock's most intricately crafted concept albums. "Three Friends" stands as Gentle Giant's third studio effort and arguably their most accessible gateway into a catalog that would later become so labyrinthine that even seasoned prog veterans would need a map and compass to navigate it.

What makes this album particularly poignant in hindsight is knowing how the Giant's story would eventually unfold. By the early 1980s, the band had dissolved into commercial compromise and creative exhaustion, their final albums bearing little resemblance to the audacious complexity that made them legends. The Shulman brothers—Derek, Ray, and Phil—along with Kerry Minnear and Gary Green, would scatter to the winds, leaving behind a legacy that would take decades to properly appreciate. But here, in 1972, they were still hungry, still pushing boundaries, and still capable of making your head spin while keeping your feet tapping.

"Three Friends" operates as both a conceptual statement and a sonic showcase, telling the intertwined stories of three childhood companions who grow apart as they pursue different paths in life. It's a deceptively simple premise that allows the band to explore their full range of musical personalities—from gentle folk passages to crushing heavy sections, all bound together by their trademark contrapuntal vocal arrangements that sound like a medieval choir that's been fed a steady diet of King Crimson and Yes records.

The album opens with "Prologue," a brief but essential scene-setter that introduces the three friends through interlocking vocal lines that dance around each other like old memories. But it's "Schooldays" where the Giant truly flexes its muscles, shifting from pastoral acoustic passages to thunderous prog-metal centuries before that term would even exist. Derek Shulman's vocals soar and growl with equal conviction, while Kerry Minnear's keyboards paint landscapes that are simultaneously nostalgic and unsettling.

"Working All Day" serves as the album's emotional centerpiece, a surprisingly funky meditation on adult responsibility that showcases the band's ability to make odd time signatures feel as natural as breathing. The way they weave together themes and motifs throughout the song's various sections demonstrates a compositional sophistication that most bands could only dream of achieving. Meanwhile, "Peel the Paint" explodes with an urgency that anticipates punk rock while maintaining prog's technical virtuosity—a neat trick that few bands could pull off without sounding either pretentious or primitive.

The real revelation, however, is "Three Friends," the album's epic conclusion that brings all the thematic threads together in a swirling maelstrom of counterpoint and emotion. At over three minutes—practically a pop song by Gentle Giant standards—it manages to encapsulate everything the band does best: complex but catchy, intellectual but emotionally resonant, progressive but rooted in timeless musical traditions.

What set Gentle Giant apart from their progressive rock contemporaries wasn't just their technical ability—though they had that in spades—but their willingness to embrace contradiction. They could be simultaneously ancient and futuristic, aggressive and delicate, cerebral and visceral. "Three Friends" captures this duality perfectly, serving as both a nostalgic look backward and an ambitious leap forward.

The album's production, handled by the band themselves, strikes the perfect balance between clarity and atmosphere. Every instrument occupies its own space in the mix, yet everything blends together seamlessly. This is crucial for a band whose arrangements could easily become muddy chaos in less capable hands.

Today, "Three Friends" endures as a masterclass in progressive rock composition and a testament to what can be achieved when musical ambition meets emotional honesty. While Gentle Giant never achieved the commercial success of Genesis or Yes, their influence can be heard in everyone from Tool to Between the Buried and Me. The album stands as proof that complexity and accessibility aren't mutually exclusive—sometimes the most challenging music can also be the most rewarding. For those willing to take the journey, "Three Friends" offers riches that reveal themselves with each listen, making it an essential document of progressive rock's golden age.