AMBROSIA

When this album came out in 1975, I was, coincidentally, just reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" for the first time. I had been wondering just how the Bokononist hymn from the second page of that novel would sound if it were actually sung. I just couldn't imagine any appropriate music for it. Then one night on the radio, I heard these lines, "Oh, a sleeping drunkard/Up in Central Park..." There it was, and it actually sounded great! The last line of the chorus was changed (deleting the word "different") to make it scan better, and a new verse had been added. I had to buy the album to find out what else this band was capable of.

In addition to "Nice, Nice, Very Nice", I was pleased with "Time Waits For No One", "Make Us All Aware", "Lover Arrive" (a soft ballad but with some nice artful backing orchestration and piano), and the wild fantasy of "Mama Frog". "Holdin' On To Yesterday" is another ballad, pleasant but a little more pop-oriented. "World Leave Me Alone" is more standard rock, OK but not compelling. The album closes with "Drink Of Water", a philosophy-of-life number that was to be echoed in the next album's "We Need You Too", but these closing numbers are the weakest points of these two albums.