EXPERIMENTS IN MASS APPEAL

After the great Milliontown album I was quite looking forward to the Frost's next CD. And. Quite a disappointment, for a start. WHERE THE HECK IS PROG? - that's what first came to mind. First song, Experiments In Mass Appeal, seemed like heard somewhere already. It took a couple of minutes to remember what it resembled - a German band named Guano Apes. No doubt there are lots of other similarly sounding bands, but this one I just happened to have heard quite a lot at some point. Ok, what's after that? After that things get a little better, and yet - sorry, but if you manage to repeat the refrain about 20 times during a song, it can hardly be called progressive. OK, I may exaggerate slightly, but at times it really seems so; especially on number 3, Pocket Sun, it gets truly boring. Well, after a collection of kind of intellectual hair-metal songs we come to the last number, Wonderland. Almost 16 minutes - finally a prog epic? Huh - you wish! Half of the song contains silence or whitish noise (what the hell, lately every other progger seems to feel obliged to include at least 5 minutes of silence in their albums! OK, it worked for King Crimson in 1971, worked for some others, but it starts getting on nerves! Really!), the rest is, at least musically, two different songs, first of which is, I am happy to admit, really great and quite proggy, a potential masterpiece which is unfortunately cut short without further expanding. Although maybe it's good, for in this album Frost's idea of expanding songs doesn't seem to go beyond repeating refrain over and over. OK, so far the criticism. BUT - I'm happy to announce that after listening to the record for something like five times, a 'but' started appearing. Despite all the weak points, Experiments In Mass Appeal still contain lots of interesting themes and turns, the sound is really good, the record is well crafted and eventually turned out to be a pretty pleasant listen. If you want quality progressive rock, look for it elsewhere, otherwise - well-deserved 3 stars, prog or no prog.