The Hare and Hoofe

Despite never having been a fan of classic early '70s prog-rock, there's plenty of more recent music that bears its influence I do enjoy. The Hare and Hoofe is a case in point. It's the debut album (and so far the only one) by the band of the same name, and is decidedly proggy in spirit throughout, only with less of an emphasis on po-faced virtuosity and with more in the way of plain old fun than some of the original exponents of the genre. I first heard them via Marc Riley's show on BBC 6 Music.

The Hare and The Hoofe are nicknames for two of the band-members, with the remaining three going under the soubriquets of The Maide of Kente, The Master and The Wanderer. For their first release, they took the bold step of issuing a double LP in a limited edition run of 500 copies. I bought mine via Bandcamp. Regrettably, both records arrived warped, but, after each disc had spent a couple of months pressed under the weight of a 12kg Olympia SG1 typewriter atop a Max Ernst art book (conveniently about 12½" square), they were at least playable, if still not perfectly level.

On the spine of the gatefold sleeve is the message "Doin the fings the other bands aint!" which seems like a mission statement of sorts, and is one they've evidently striven to live up to. The songs on Disc 1 have a range of themes from the pseudo-mediæval ('Appledore Fayre' and 'Goodwin Pavane') to the space age ('Voyager') and sci-fi ('Lionel Mettle'). Disc 2 is a bizarre concept album 'The Terror of Melton' whose songs fall into a loose narrative about a time-travelling scientist and a giant laser-eyed robot - or something like that.

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