POINT OF KNOW RETURN

This is a five star progressive rock album, no doubt about it! It comes as a physical continuation of Leftoverture both in terms of song writing and of production with Leftoverture being slightly one step better. It all begins wonderfully with the cover of this album and the belief of the times the cover represents that earth was a flat disk and then you fall into chaos... My only disagreement for this album is the top-forty hit that came out from it and its no else than Dust In The wind, which isn't a bad song actually...it is just that became the only song with mass appeal and the rest of the songs which are far better stayed into the obscurity, at least, for non progressive rock or rock fans all over the world. In my opinion Hopellesly Human and Closet Chronicles are fine examples of prog compositions. A combination of strong song-writing, enough duration to be adventurous and quite complex technically avoiding the loss of the song's main substance. And that goes surely to Hopelessly Human which is an excellent song-strong main theme and chorus based on classical music progression, excellent vocals by both Walsh and Steindhart, a nice bridge leading to the instrumental parts with guitar, organ and moog solos carefully balanced and again finding the main theme which leads to a bell chiming end . Lightning's Hand is a real thunder-so much power within 4:21 minutes-excellent! Paradox and The Spider are songs that work mainly to show the technical abilities of this band, something Kansas never exposed in supercilius way like Dream Theater do sometimes the recent years. Portrait(He Knew), Sparks Of The Tempest,Nobody's Home and the entitled song are three more gems fullfilling harmonically this great album. Great positive energy, excellent songs and by far the last really big album by Kansas.