YMMV / Gentle Giant

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• Awesome Music: Their first 8 albums qualify from start to finish. Some people also throw in The Missing Piece, Giant for a Day!, and Civilian. As for live material, Playing the Fool is among the greatest prog live albums ever made.
• Broken Base:
  • The Gentle Giant fanbase is torn as to which of their eleven albums is considered their best. Popular choices include Acquiring the Taste, Octopus, In a Glass House, The Power and the Glory, Free Hand, and occasionally Interview.
  • The quality of the band's last 3 albums. Some say that the new-wave influenced direction was the band selling out and putting fame over music, while others say the albums are quite good and reveal a unique side of the band that was never fully explored.
  • Interview. For some, it's the last great Gentle Giant record before their last three pop albums, while for others it's a mess of underdeveloped, derivative songs tied around a silly concept that showed the band struggling to rush an album out to sustain the momentum Free Hand had given them.
  • Derek Shulman's voice. Fans either think he's a good vocalist who adds flair to the music, or a terrible singer who brings down the band's quality and wish that Kerry or Phil would take up the reigns of lead vocalist instead.
• Epic Riff: "The Boys in the Band" is a pretty good example.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: They were most popular in Italy. This was the case with many prog bands; somehow Italy really took to the genre.
• He Also Did:
  • After the band broke up in 1980, Derek wound up as the president of Atco Records - meaning that he was responsible for signing a little-known Long Island band to the label in 1991. The band? Dream Theater.
  • Kerry Minnear and Ray Shulman later went on to score Azrael's Tear.
• Heartwarming Moments: The band, along with dozens of their biggest fans and progressive rock luminaries, came together to record a virtual collaboration of "Proclamation" during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sweetest part of all is seeing all seven members of the band singing "Hail!" on screen together at 2:07!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The vocal bridge of "Pantagruel's Nativity".
  • Also, the spooky "Alucard".
• Suspiciously Similar Song: A case of self-plagiarism, as the title track off of Interview is often accused of sounding similar to "Proclamation" from The Power and the Glory. Both tracks have a similar keyboard jig feel to them, with similar tempos and vocals.
• Tear Jerker: "The Moon Is Down", "Think of Me with Kindness", "His Last Voyage"

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