RACKET SCIENCE

This album, Forever Einstein's fifth, has their third bass player, Kevin Gerety, who replaced Jack Vees, who replaced Marc Sichel. While Gerety's playing is similar to the previous bassists (probably because Charles O'Meara, who has now dropped the C.W. Vrtacek alias, wrote all the bass lines anyway), he adds an acoustic bass to the mix (I like acoustic bass). O'Meara himself has moved almost entirely to electric guitar, instead of the amplified acoustic and electric sitar used on previous albums (although both can still be heard here). This unfortunately gives him a more conventional sound than on earlier albums.

The songs themselves are more developed than those on the first two FE albums (which I am more familiar with than the third and fourth), and sound more like traditional prog than quirky ideas stretched into song length. And the songs are generally longer. And so are the song titles, always another bit of entertainment from FE.

So there is a tradeoff from the early albums. Better songwriting, but not as interesting guitar tones. But it's still a great album.