EVEN IN THE QUIETEST MOMENTS ...

My mother thought these guys were women. She obviously never seen a picture of them from the 1970s. Must have been the name and Hodgson's vocals. This album was an improvement over Crisis! What Crisis. If it wasn't for the pop fluff of "Give A Little Bit" I would probably like this more. I never really cared for "Downstream" either, basically just piano and vocals. Alright but nothing special. The rest of the album is good to great.

I have to admit that before I listened to this again, I was almost going to write off the title track and "From Now On" going on memory. They are both better than I remember although both songs get played a lot on the radio, which probably influenced me to not think much of them. "Lover Boy" was a song I always liked. Hodgson has some good girly-man vocals in the chorus. I like how the tempo picks up at the end. Nice guitar in this song too. The two progiest songs here are "Babaji" and "Fool's Overture". The former was always one of my fave Supertramp songs; the latter is one of the best 'epics' in prog.

Although the band's first album from 1970 has some proggy moments, they never did anything as 'progressive' as "Fool's Overture". It starts off with piano before we hear Churchill's "We will never surrender" speech. There's some brass which always reminds me of ancient Rome for some reason. Some bells(Big Ben I guess). All this before we get any vocals. The song really starts to pick up when the bass and drums come in. Some nice saxophone. Of course, the best part of the whole thing is the main synth melody. Hard not to get this stuck in your head. I remember as a little kid there was a show on Canadian TV that used that synth melody for the show's theme song. When I first heard this album years later, when I heard the synth part I went "WTF, where have I heard this before?"

Some of Davies and Hodgson's best songs can be heard here. They would never do anything as adventurous as "Fool's Overture" again. Because of the success of "Give A Little Bit" they went in a more singles oriented sound on the next album. 3.5 but I'll round it up to 4 stars because this is actually better than I remembered it being.