ALL TOGETHER NOW

Argent is hardly new to me, although I am way too young to caught them when they existed as I was born in 1972, I first remembered hearing "Hold Your Head Up" in 1988 when I was 15 and loving it, but it took me a year later to get some info on this group (at the same time I knew of the Zombies, so I figured Argent was Rod Argent's post-Zombie project). It took me until quite recently to buy any Argent albums because I knew they had to be very inconsistent, and from listening to All Together Now, which includes the famous hit, I was proven right, it is very inconsistent. A lot of blame goes between the division of Russ Ballard and Rod Argent with Chris White, with the more adventurous and often proggy material going to Argent and White. The album starts off with the famous hit, which isn't Russ Ballard (a couple websites credited this song to Ballard, which is incorrect), but Argent and White, which isn't too surprising, this song is just too proggy for anything Ballard to come up with. A wonderful piece of prog rock that became an FM rock classic. I especially dig those extended organ solos, which was the same way I felt at 15 years old (at that time I didn't know what progressive rock was, but turned out a lot of the music I liked, even then, was progressive rock, just didn't realized that until a little later on).

The rest of the album, well, it's all over the place. "Keep On Rollin'" is just plain awful, '50s style rock and roll boogie is just so out of place on an album, especially since the previous song was a prog rock masterpiece. Strangely it was Argent and White responsible for this disaster, so it's a big surprise that Ballard gives us a great rock piece, "Tragedy". Might not be prog, but still a great rock number. The prog tendencies are kept to a minimum, since this is Ballard's song. A great piece of heavy rock. Argent and White gives us "I Am the Dance of Ages", which is a sorta heavy prog number, but Ballard's "He's a Dynamo" is as bad as it sounds. When people speak of bad Argent songs, Ballard is often to blame, and this song (to me) is one of them (after hearing my share of Argent albums, I've come to the conclusion there are Argent/White songs I like and those I don't, and same goes for Russ Ballard, who gets little love in the prog community). "Pure Love" is a prog suite, which is obvious who wrote it (Argent/White), which is how not to do a prog suite. It starts off actually quite good, with great organ passages, but it seemed they wimped out towards the end when the vocals kick in, instead of doing something grand or simply mindblowing to end it. At least Argent did a much better suite on Nexus with "The Coming of Kohoutek", even if were disguised as three separate songs (and surprisingly, it was a full-blown symphonic prog piece).

Argent has certainly done better albums than this, like their debut (very good, even if it's not particularly progressive) or Nexus ("The Coming of Kohoutek" suite is full-on symphonic prog, something Argent never done before, with lots of great Moog, organ, and Mellotron), so you'd probably should try those albums first. As for All Together Now, it gave them commercial success they never had before, but not a favorite, but still has good material to warrant three stars.