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Kansas - On The Other Side CD (album) cover

ON THE OTHER SIDE

Kansas

 

Symphonic Prog

2.97 | 9 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

ClemofNazareth
Special Collaborator
Prog Folk Researcher
3 stars This is actually an okay collection if you are a hardcore Kansas fan. If you are not, the track selection won't make any sense at all. First time I saw this I thought it was supposed to be a collection of single B-sides.

Turns out that's incorrect. Some of these might have actually been B-sides, but this is simply the Sony reissue of a 1992 BMG Kansas compilation called "Carry On". Same tracks, different cover art. That's about it. If you Google the "Carry On" album cover you'll see why Sony decided to reissue this. The original cover doesn't use the familiar band logo, and has a really crappy promo photo of the band superimposed over a map of the American midwest with the album title written in red lipstick. Really cheap- looking. I guess Sony figured when they started remastering all the band's classics and after the tastefully done Sail On anthology, that they should spruce up the packaging on this one too.

I said up front that non-fans wouldn't understand the song selection here. Well I'm a hardcore Kansas fanboy, and I don't really understand it either. Aside from Best of Kansas, this is the only way to get a collection of Kansas songs in their original studio versions without buying one of the many multi-disc sets, but I fail to really get the logical connection between most of these songs.

Just for the record, the only song here that doesn't appear on any other compilation is "Two Cents Worth" from Masque. "Carry on Wayward Son", "People of the South Wind", "Can I Tell You", "The Wall", and "Dust in the Wind" were all released as singles, and are also included on just about every other Kansas collection on the market.

Besides "Can I Tell You" from their debut, all these songs are from Masque, Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, and Monolith in the 1975-1979 timeframe. The other songs are "What's on My Mind", "Child of Innocence", "It Takes a Woman's Love (To Make a Man)", and "On the Other Side". The cover photo is a promo from the same photo session as the one that yielded the photo on the back cover of the band's 1974 debut album.

So in summary - nothing here you wouldn't get with any of the other Kansas boxed-sets except for "Two Cents Worth". If you have the 1992 Kansas collection called "Carry On", you have this same album. Otherwise, the songs are all good, but the collection doesn't make a lot of sense. I'll give the songs 3.5 stars, but the collection two stars.

peace

ClemofNazareth | 3/5 |

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