ALPHA

Alpha is the second album from supergroup Asia. The lineup which consist of Geoffery Downes ( Yes) on keyboards, Steve Howe ( Yes) on guitar, Carl Palmer ( The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Atomic Rooster, Emerson, Lake & Palmer) on drums and John Wetton ( King Crimson, UK, Uriah Heep) on bass and vocals is unchanged since the self titled debut which was released in 1982 the year before the release of Alpha.

The music unfortunately has changed a bit towards the worse. The debut had some enjoyable moments where you could hear that these four musicians where once some of the most prolific people on the British prog rock scene. I don´t care much for the debut but it had a few progressive moments, that were at least partially enjoyable. Alpha sees Asia digging even deeper into AOR symphonic rock territory. The songs are now even more simplistic and plastered with commercial sounding keyboard parts and especially memorable pop choruses. I won´t point out any song on this album for being either worse or better than the others as all the songs melt together into one big pile of plastic music. The cheesy lyrics are just horrible too. Banale pop lyrics written for an audience who doesn´t demand anything else but girl loves boy lyrics.

The musicianship is of course good, but nothing here really demands good musicians maybe except for the choir arrangements which are well done but too cheesy.

The production is thin. An eighties nightmare. Well I´m being a bit harsh here as I would normally love a production like this but put in the context of the weak songs the production fails.

The coverart signals prog rock which is false marketing.

Well there isn´t really anything I like about this album and I will give this a small 2 star rating. I would love to give this one a 1 star rating but as there is nothing wrong with the quality of the compositions and it´s really just a matter of personal taste if you like this music or not. I can´t recommend this to prog lovers though.