DRASTIC MEASURES

The voluntary absence of Steve Walsh from Kansas prior to the release of "Vinyl Confessions" was a blow that the band absorbed with difficulty. But the subsequent departure of Robby Steinhardt with his representative violins and significant vocal contribution, added to Kerry Livgren's dry creativity, were events too notorious to go unnoticed, and ended up weighing down one of the band's least fortunate musical proposals, "Drastic Measures" (1983), their ninth album.

And in this context, the active John Elefante, very much given to developing conventional AOR structures with accessible, markedly melodic atmospheres and even with some elements of bubbly eighties synth pop, took a large part of the compositional responsibility. The result brought under his arm agile and weightless developments such as "Fight Fire with Fire", "Everybody's my Friend", "Don't Take Your Love Away", the dreary ballad "Andi" (although with a powerful and brave stance on gender identity), or the pompous lightness of "Incident on a Bridge" (one of Livgren's few contributions), tracks in which it is difficult to recognise reminiscences of the early sonorities of Kansas.

And despite the almost imperceptible presence of progressive elements in "Drastic Measures", some passages like the experimental industrial interlude in "Mainstream", the dynamic melody and interesting refrains in the grandiloquent "Going Through the Motions", and just a fragment of the middle section of "End of the Edge" can be rescued. Not much else.

After the faded album, both Livgren and bassist Dave Hope left the band to create the Christian-oriented music project 'AD', and Elefante also stepped aside to pursue music production and eventually become a musician for Christian groups. The future of Kansas was left in suspense and few were betting on their continuity.

2/2.5 stars