...E VIA

Oh god, it's always so horrible when prog heroes from the glory years of the early-to-mid 1970's desperately try to cling on to some kind of notion of being 'cool' and 'hip' by producing electro-pop dirge like this. Heard from a 21st century perspective it's even worse. There is no discernable link between this risible studio album and the glorious classics of yesteryear, such as the majestic 'Darwin!' or the beautifully-crafted 'Io Sono Nato Libero', so, in actual fact, if your close your eyes and wish hard enough, you may just wipe the fact that 'E Via' ever dared stain the resume of this once great group. However, you can't really blame the band themselves. Punk killed prog, punk died a natural(and rather young) death and was subsequently replaced by post-punk, then shimmering eighties synth-pop, which is the little and much-maligned window of history that this 1985 album has sprung from. It was a truely horrible affliction that affected many a great rock band, a kind of strange, vulgar desire to change with the times and speak to the kids coupled with a temporay absence of musical talent. Just look at Genesis' 1981-to-1991 period, or 'Love Beach' etc by Emerson, Lake & Palmer to name just a few. Again, once great prog behemoths reduced to peddling out mass-media cardboard confectionary posing as music. Happily, the 1980's finished and were replaced by the slightly cooler 1990's - which, to keep it simple, was basically grunge, britpop and then, right at the end, hip-hop - before the much more acceptable noughties engulfed us and suddenly prog was hip again and, hey presto, bands like Banco started to make better music again! Many have wondered about the strange time of the 1980's. One day, far in the future, generations of musologists will ponder over the terrible time of the 1980's, when cheap synth-pop stalked the earth and held our ears hostage in the gloom of the three-minute keyboard-orientated popular music single. They will refer to this time as 'the time of the dreadful crap' and will use it as an example so that never again will this world have to endure a decade of ghastly sin. So, just to re-cap: don't you dare go anywhere near this album. Fans of prog beware, fans of eighties pop rejoice!