BREAKDOWN IN PARADISE

You may safely skip this one. Of all the albums I have reviewed on this site, this strikes me as having the least appeal to prog fans in general. Not to say it is the worst one, although it's definitely in the running. Chilliwack had been honing a middle ground of barely-FM rock for several years before this release, which, in spite of decent promotion from Mushroom, elicited little interest from any quarter.

From the awful quasi title track with the same name as a Led Zeppelin classic to the limp ballads "So Strong" and "Road to Paradise" and a variety of other sub-tepid rockers like "let it all Begin" and "Are You with me", nary a whiff of prog can be discerned, but that wouldn't matter if the songwriting, music, vocals, or lyrics were good, which they aren't. The only songs of any distinction occur in sequence - "Guilty", with a suitably paranoid mood and bass lines, and the excellent "148 Heavy", which seems almost like a thematic followup to some of the better material on the "Fly By Night" album.

If the also-rans here were even tolerable, I could justify 2 stars, but the album represents the near total breakdown of the late 1970s rock scene and little more, and we all know that paradise was already lost by that time anyway.