RENDEZVOUS

2.5 stars really!!!

With this effort, disaster struck! Obviously their label A&M saw their talents and wanted them to achieve national success by breaking them in the Western provinces, so they brought in Jim Valence (the man behind the yet-unknown Bryan Adams, who appears in one track doing back-up vocals) who had certain ideas on how to achieve success - he would certainly do with his protégé. So he forced his ideas on the now-septet (André Paiement is conspicuously absent from this album >> related?), introduced them to a new concept of presentation including new artwork. If the album title hints at a wink at bilingual policies, the ugly artwork is typical of what was being done in the late 70's in Mid-West Canada: this looks like a Streetheart album artwork.

Right from the upbeat funky-folk-jazz into rock Rebound and Clown Alley, the shorter more straightforward rock music sound disastrous (as if Cano is only going through the motions) and Valence is obviously unable to get them to correct their unconvincing English singing to par. This is plainly obvious on the atrocious Floridarity Forever.

However not everything is bad on this album as Other Highways gives us a good wink of the old days and Autobus is a semi-jig sung in French, light years better than the rest of the tracks. The longest track is the finale (clocking at a meagre 5:30) is also worthy of a positive note. Little more to raise the proghead's enthusiasm, though.

As this review hints, this album (and most likely the following ones, which I have not heard since I stopped paying attention to the band after this dud) is best avoided, although there are glimpse of a previous heaven.

The fourth CANO album, 'Rendezvous', continues on the same trajectory set by the former "Eclipse", but now roughly half of the songs are sung in English instead of French. I don't think this is a problem in-and-of-itself, since this is a bilingual band from northern Ontario. (and the vocalists all have perfect accents in both languages). Saying this, it does speak to their desire to tailor their sound for more commercial appeal, and this clearly shows on the album, *particularly* on the English songs. Of the 8 songs on this album, I think only 3 are really good ("Entente", "Other Highways", and "L'Autobus de la Pluie"). Meanwhile, two of the songs here ("Clown Alley" and "Floridarity Forever") are virtually unlistenable (while the remaining 3 are OK but nothing to write home about - I don't have any desire to ever put them on again). So really I would get this album only for the 3 good songs (and only if you already have the first three albums). On balance, I give this 3.9 out of 10 on my 10-point scale, which translates to 2 PA stars.