FOCUS II [AKA: MOVING WAVES]

This is one of my all time favorite albums.Van Leer and Akkerman are obviously very talented composers. Le Clochard and Janis are perfect songs. What I mean is that they do not need to be any longer. They satisfy the ear just as they are. There is nothing that anyone redoing those songs could do to make it better. They stand on their own. Focus II, on the other hand is way too short. Every time I listen to it, I wish it would go on for another ten to fifteen minutes. I just love that song! Moving Waves is also perfect, as far as the music goes. It is a fair song with Van leer's vocals. I wished that they would have spent the money and got a female that can sing suprano to do that one. If they did, I believe the song would have been awesome! On side two I love the song "Eruption" It was a very good song. With that said, I still would have liked for them to change some of the parts around. I noticed that Steve Vai's " For the Love of God" sounded a lot like part of the B section of that piece. I didn't like the way they ended the song. I thought that they should have put the part that sounds like you are experiencing paradise at the end. That was in the B section. Imagine that part playing and Akkerman is wailing on the guitar as the song fades out and ends. How cool is that? It seems like they couldn't quite figure out how to end it. Now comes that song that provoked me to buy the album in the first place. "Hocus Pocus" was a really cool tune. Unfortunately it is about four minutes too long. It should have been around two minutes and thirty seconds long. I remember that I used to skip it all the time after I got the album. That is sad. If they shortened that song and lengthened "Focus II" they would have had one of the decades best albums around. I still highly recomend the album anyway. It satifies and the tunes grow on the sceptic.