FORGET YOURSELF

I knew the band by name, remembered watching some video clips of them in the early eighties and had forgotten them since. Very recently I read a very positive post about them on this site, subsequently checked the list of their albums and noticed that "Forget Yourself" had a very enthusiastic 5 stars rating.

As a result, I decided to purchase the album and listened to it a couple of times. I must confess that I found myself more then a bit disappointed!

This album is much more New Wave than prog related. Not that the music is bad in itself but there is nothing that characterizes, IMHO, progressiveness. The rythms are mainly binary, the voices tones are closer to those of bands like "The Cure" or "The Opposition". Do not expect keyboard waves or haunting guitars, nor any sort of epics. Do not even expect appealing moments or anything that would make you think: "hey! that's nice"!

As a conclusion from an old progger (53 years old) owning more than 500 records quoted in this site, I do not understand how such an album may deserve 5 stars and hence become "a masterpiece of progressive music essential to any collection" unless Yes and The Mars Volta (to quote two very different bands in time and genre) deserve 25 stars. This is most probably a good album for fans of "The Church" but certainly not for prog fans.