AUDIO-VISIONS

"Audio-Visions" (1980), the seventh album by Kansas, confirms the band's musical tendency shown in "Monolith", significantly reducing their interest in elaborate and intricate structures in favour of more commercially digestible and less demanding sonorities, under the influence of the expansive wave of the early eighties, with pieces that fit into similar dynamics to those of Boston, Toto or Foreigner, among other AOR bands.

And so it is that in addition to raspy and contagious hard rock riffs, many chanting refrains also take force in the North American proposals, as with the powerful "Relentless", the scornful "Anything for You", the harmonic "Hold On", or the energetic "Loner" and "Don't Open Your Eyes".

On the other hand, a bit of colour and versatility comes from the bluesy and painful "No Room for a Stranger" with a very good guitar solo by Rich Williams; and the sorrowful "Curtain of Iron" and "No One Together"', the best pieces of the album, try to rescue their progressive roots with interesting instrumental elaborations starring mainly Kerry Livgren's keyboards and the vocal interplay of Steve Walsh and Robby Steinhardt, although it seems that the compositional magic no longer has the same strength of their beginnings. Finally, the gentle "Back Door", another AOR track, adds some epicness to the closing of the album with a good final chorus accompanied by Steinhardt's fiddles and some melancholic bagpipes in the background.

Differences over the musical direction of Kansas, which included Livgren's religious convictions not necessarily shared by Walsh, led to the singer taking a hiatus for the next five years to devote himself to personal projects until his return to the band in 1986 with "Power".

2.5/3 stars