REASON (Harvest / EMI Records 4063, 1977) is one of my favourite Gryphon albums. If I have to make a choice, I'd put it in second place, right after Red Queen to Gryphon Three and just before Raindance (Someone who's into folk music, rather than 'progressive rock' would probably prefer the remaining two albums.).
![['Treason' cover]](covers/Treason-1b.jpg)
Treason is better produced than any earlier Gryphon album, and Dave Oberle sings and does the percussion but leaves the drums to a new drummer, Alex Baird. Both facts result in a tighter, more polished sound. (I like Oberle's 'decorative' drumming a lot, but Baird's cleaner, more straightforward, drumming supports the music better, I think.) In contrast to my other two favorites, Treason contains no twenty-minutes pieces. That, along with the polished sound I mentioned and the many consonant, ending-on-the-tonic melodies, might be the reason some people think of Treason as a poppy album. I certainly don't agree. The typically Harvey, Red Queen to Gryphon Three keyboards in 'Spring Song'; the rocking "tribesmen doing more part vocal", in 'Flash In The Pantry' ; the "folk with heavy-metal arrangement", as a friend of mine described it, in 'Falero Lady'; the jazzy arrangements for bassoon and English horn, especially in 'Snakes And Ladders'; the beautiful quietness of 'Fall Of The Leaf', the use of counterpoint throughout the album, they all make Gryphon's fifth a great album which anyone who likes Gryphon's third and fourth album will like.
Jan Brascamp
(February 1998)
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