In 2004, Happy The Man released "The Muse Awakens", an album celebrating the resurrection of the American band after its split at the end of 1979. The album, excellent on the other hand, is unfortunately just a straw fire. Only Frank Wyatt and Stan Whitaker are sufficiently motivated to try to continue the adventure, which they will do within their new band formed in 2006, Oblivion Sun, whose music is very close to that of Happy The Man. But before the formation of Oblivion Sun, the two men experimented with a duo project from which a first album, "Pedal Giant Animals", was released.
The content of "Pedal Giant Animals" differs slightly from what the faithful are used to hearing. First of all because it's really a duo album: between Stan Whitaker's vocals and guitars, mostly acoustic, and the saxophone, the flute (more rarely) and Frank Wyatt's keyboards, piano in the lead, the other instruments make a discreet figuration, when they're not totally absent. Then because the record leaves more room for vocals in small, unpretentious and uncomplicated pieces than on Happy The Man's albums.
This is not to say that the instrumental tracks are forgotten, but they are caught in pincers between songs. So 'Pink Sky', 'Love' and 'Whole' at the beginning of the album and 'Everything' at the end are all acoustic and melancholic punctuations, stripped down, on a slow tempo. Although entirely instrumental, 'Blue Sun' remains in the same atmosphere with a little bit of new age at the limit of elevator music. 'Chapter Seven' and 'Mists of Babylon' remind us that King Crimson is one of the two men's influences, while the mocking theme of 'Stumpy Shuffle' gets its influences from another Wyatt, this one named Robert.
The two most progressive tracks are 'Turning My Head', a jazzy instrumental with bright ends and a darker centre, and 'Pedal Giant Animals', a long track sung from beginning to end, with Whitaker's voice sometimes reminiscent of Peter Gabriel and sometimes of Adrian Belew. They thus serve as a perfect transition between the closing Happy The Man period and the period that opens with Oblivion Sun.
In spite of a rather curious division concentrating the songs at the beginning and the end of the record to leave a long central passage entirely instrumental, unbalancing the album a bit, "Pedal Giant Animals" is an unexpected parenthesis that will please all those who liked the two aforementioned bands or who, more widely, like these elusive music but never dissonant and often tinged with optimism.