ALPHA

Words like "commercial" and "corporate" are slung at Asia a lot, and sometimes it's unfair and sometimes it isn't. One respect in which you can get them bang to rights when it comes to compromising their music for corporate reasons, however, comes to the songwriting on Alpha: the record company had noticed that the big hit singles on their debut album were all Wetton/Downes numbers, and so asked that Wetton and Downes write all the material here.

Thus it is that all the songs on Alpha are credited to the duo, bar for The Smile Has Left Your Eyes, which John Wetton penned by himself. This, of course, leaves Steve Howe and Carl Palmer almost on the level of session musicians, which might go some way to explaining why Howe didn't come back for the next album. Carl did, but Carl only had one songwriting credit on the debut anyway, so perhaps he was just happy to be there.

Not only did Howe have songwriting credits on about half the songs on the debut album, but they were fairly consistently the songs which had a bit more of a commercial spin and a bit less space for proggy moments, and that's exactly what the record company wanted here. Inevitably, the result is that the band's carefully-tuned prog-hard rock- pop blend ended up a little skewed away from the prog corner of that triangle.

If you're a listener who despised Heat of the Moment or Only Time Will Tell and regarded the proggier moments of the debut album as an oasis in a desert, then you'll likely find this boring. For my part, I find this at least an enjoyable blend of AOR and prog-tinged pop which benefits to an extent from a more unified musical direction behind it, even as it loses a little something as a result of losing the full range of flavours previously offered.

As a result, it's in a "one step forward, one step back" sort of situation: it's another enjoyable listen, but I'm not sure that I'm keen on listening on all that much Asia beyond this and the debut, and it's certainly a harder sell for fans of the four founder members' prog pasts than their debut was.