ESCAPE [AKA: E5C4P3]

I like AOR, and in a superficial way I like this album, but this gets just too pop for any acceptable standards. It remains by far among their most well known albums, and solely because of the sell-out factor that makes even Infinity look like a truly artistic piece of work. Don't get me wrong, it's well written pop nonetheless, but made for the sole purpose of financial gain in the musically barren eighties world dominated by greedy businessmen who knew nothing about music itself. Not that today is much different (though illegal downloading certainly has taken their power over the masses away, thankfully), but this combined no doubt with the decade lasting prog backlash made truly artistic music the most taboo thing you could probably think of. And I can't really, in all honesty, put this album above the standards above a lot of modern pop, though I obviously prefer this for personal reasons, mainly the rock instrumentation (is that a fretless bass I hear? I like that sound...) and half-way decent use of keyboard.

Don't Stop Believin' has in itself become an iconic song in pop culture, even modern, or at least with everyone I personally know. It has become so overplayed I almost can't stand to hear it, and not because it is too good to be overplayed as with Stairway to Heaven, but because it is just such stupid boring pop that hearing in public being loved by people who's musical opinions I hold in near contempt makes me almost unable to hear it know. Most of the other songs on the album, however, I do still find fun to come back to just because I liked them so much when I was 12 or so, especially the more driving hard rock ones (tracks 2,4, & 6). I especially enjoy the album title track. Overall the first half of the album is generally decent pop and the second half (tracks 7-9, mainly) pretty much sucks, not terribly, but even for pop standards it's below par. Other than of course the last track, the nice pop ballad hit Open Arms.

Get this if you're a fan of Journey overall, mainly their pop stuff. I grew up on this music, so there's no doubt some sentimental value for many of the songs on this album. But no true standard progger is likely to find anything they'd enjoy in anything beyond a light listening superficial level. If you've never heard Journey and think you might like them even as an AOR band, I say start with Infinity, which did in fact have some great musicality to it. If you already have this band's greatest hits compilation, there's no point in buying this album at all, for it's the hits and a couple other fun tracks that make this album worth a damn, which it probably isn't and shouldn't be to us proggers.

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