ANIMAL NOTES

Although only one half of the songs on this album have prog credentials, this is still a very fine set. The better songs here are "Animal Skins", and eastern flavored song, with an extremely cool staccato bass line and weird string arrangement, "Maybe I Can Fool Everybody (Tonight)", a sort of ballad with a few off time licks thrown in, morphing into a hard rock middle solo section, and "Virgin...No" a hard rock tune in varying time signatures.

"Rangers At Midnight" always sounded to me like a song that Gabriel era Genesis might have written, had they hailed from Canada.

The rest of the album is a more standard hard rock fare, with John Palumbo's sometimes political, and usually humorous lyrics. Then their's "Play On". I usually skip over this too- maudlin track.

4 stars, partly for being a big part of the soundtrack of my youth. But where this album is good, it's very good.