Again I can't remember quite why I got this. I've been skirting round Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator for over a quarter of a century. I think Still Life was the first album VdGG's that I got, and ever since I've been hoping to light on one that's as good as that.
I started dipping my toes in the water of Hammill solo albums while still at school. I had a copy of Enter K at one point — don't know what happened to that — and I also had The Love Songs, which I think I returned to the shop on some dodgy pretext (Wikipedia says it was released in 1984, but I could have sworn I had it early '83). The fact that I got Skin on vinyl, from Our Price for £5.99 apparently, suggests I got it around the time it came out— it must have had a good review somewhere.
As I've found with almost everything except Still Life, it's more of the same. I feel like it's a taste I ought be able to aquire — that's why, from time to time, I keep going back for more — but I never quite seem to get it. It may be my problem: indeed, I assume it is; that's why I use the term 'acquired taste'. The lyrics perhaps contribute to this problem. They frequently lapse into 6th Form pretentiousness, and there's one song (Shell) that manages to reference Escher, Borges and William Blake in under 4½ minutes. I was going to quote, as typical of Hammill,
All the wonders Man achieves
emerge from cerebral tissue;
chemical reactions' ebb and surge
form that Thing that is You
but a glance at the credits reveals these words are not written by him. However, these were:
In the here and now…
between sensation and the nerve-ends
and arrival of information at the cortex
time elapses.
Cracked, forgotten statues, we are
strangled in the undergrowth,
lying on the mattress of the magic
and the wonderful,
nothing really matters as we're
sucked in by the undertow…
We are Motion, we are Feeling, we are Now!
My recommendation to PH would be to read Being and Time
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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