INVISIBLE TOUCH

You know that commercial that shows the egg frying in a pan and the voice over says "this is your brain on drugs?" Well, "this is your band on MTV." What tiny shards of progressive rock they may have still had at this point are buried in the close-but-no-cigar song "Domino" but it pales (in a death mask) in comparison to what they were creating a decade earlier. In all fairness, the pop songs on here are actually an improvement over the ghastly "Genesis" fiasco that preceded this offering in that they actually sound like real tunes. "In too deep," "Tonight, tonight" and "Throwing it all away" are well-crafted elevator muzak love songs suitable for contemporary adult radio for all eternity to come. I'll give 'em that much. But the highly annoying "Land of Confusion" should be banned from the planet and "Invisible Touch" would be effective as a torture technique to break Al Queda suspects by forcing them to listen to it on a loop for a couple of hours. Evidently the lure of being rock video stars was just too much for this trio to resist and they found it easier to pay the mortgage on their country estates with royalty checks than to continue to blaze trails into unknown progressive music forests. Perhaps they came to a point where they said "been there, done that" and took the road paved with gold records. I won't stoop to judging them (considering the incredible legacy they've left us in their earlier recordings) but I will venture to say that this album is equivalent to watching (and hearing) a stately castle falling into the ocean from decay.