ARGENT

Hold Your Head Up is a mid-tempo, spacy song, and the reason I bought this LP in the first place. Nice song. Liar is more psychedelia, better than the 3 Dog Night cover, which was a bigger hit. Pleasure sounds like a Crosby Stills Nash & Young leftover. God Gave Rock And Roll To You, once covered by the dismal Kiss, is okay, and threatens to turn prog in some sections, but never quite gets there. It's Only Money, Part 1 has a nice jam, but it ends before the band can take it to any sort of height. Thunder And Lightning is a driving rock piece, with some nice synth work. Tragedy is a slightly funky song, with some good, but not great keyboard & guitar soloing. And everyone should know Time Of The Season by The Zombies. This is a decent live performance of that song.

It's hard to believe from these songs that Rod Argent was considered as a replacement for Rick Wakeman in Yes in the mid-seventies. I could see him replacing Tony Kaye, but Wakeman?

2.5 stars, rounded down for lack of prog.

Another 2 albums in one release. In this case 2 albums, the 1st and the 2nd Argent's albums in 2 CDs. This fact is good for me. Normally I bought this typpe of release because the final cost is minor for 2 separate releases. So I think that this release is extreme good.

But the music... Hmmm... The music is only R'n'R with great arrangements and for this motive the music is Prog. Argent is not bad band but the style is not so distant from Rock with Classic Music influences. Is this musical proposal aged in a good manner? Not all songs aged in a good manner but yes, the songs that aged in good manner are small masterpieces.

If please you the more pure Rock part of Prog, Argent is a great band. Otherwise I think it will be interesting to have a compilation like this out of pure curiosity.

There is a good balance here between Ballard and Argent compositions. For Prog fans the Argent compositions are probably the most interesting, being generally more progressive than Ballard's more straightforward rock 'n' roll numbers. But I feel that it is the counterpoint between the two elements that makes this album work so well.

As we all know Rod Argent used to be in The Zombies, and here we get a nice version of The Zombies' classic Time Of The Season. Good stuff!

The sound quality is generally quite good and the performance is properly recorded. Nothing annoying on that account.

Like Barclay James Harvest, Argent is not really an essential band for the Prog fan, but if you want anything by them in your collection, Encore is a very good choice. And this might well be all the Argent you'll ever need. Still, this album is hardly essential.

And then out of the blue comes Lothlorien. This is as perfectly constructed a prog song as has ever been written, at least back in its day. Driven by Argent's Hammond (and this is certainly Argent's song), it is by turns playful and aggressive, baroque and romantic. From note number one it engages and challenges the listener; by the end of the song it is soaring way up there, ripping mad gashes across the sky. Let's just say it deserves a place in that rarified air where the great prog songs of the era exist.

In terms of listening to this album, I rarely get beyond Lothlorien, the remainder being somewhat of a letdown, following as it does perfection. Chained (the aforementioned covered song) is that typical cowbell-driven 70's rocker, albeit with above-par vocals. Argent contributes pleasant organ work on Rejoice before it lapses into nothingness. As for the rest, well it's purely average.

I'm torn here. This is an average album that hosts one spectacular song, but that song is special. So let's say it's a qualified 4, simply to encourage a newcomer to Argent with an inquisitive mind to give Lothorien a listen.

The result was the most solid Argent album up to date. The album starts pretty well with lush mellotron, in the opener Circus, and only gets better in the lengthy Highwire, with great guitar and synthesizer solos in a long instrumental section. Clown is a beautiful lush ballad that borrows Pink Floyd's Echoes riff on the piano, giving a spacey feel to it. Then comes the best song of the album, the jazzy Trapeze, with superb keyboard playing by Argent. He freaks out during the instrumental parts of this song. And to conclude the album, there are three short and less progressive songs, but all of them are nice and in the mood of the album.

If I had to have just one Argent album, this would be the one, because it is high quality prog music. Argent has good albums in the seventies, but this one is the most solid and the most prog as well, so it gets my recommendation to prog fans.

I need to put on my wayback-machine ears here. A lot of this sounds like typical 70's rock -- great vocal harmonies, great melodies, powerful keyboards, chucka-chucka guitars, and in the end not much happening. But there's a big however: this album was recorded on the front-end of the 70's. In other words, it's a template for what many of us associate with the typical 70's rock sound, because it is one of the sources. You'll hear sounds here that were successfully appropriated by various 70's bands. So Lonely Hard Road engenders a Doobie Brothers sound. Liar, or at least its intention and invective, shows up on Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.

It's not surprising, really. Rod Argent came to the band via The Zombies, one of the more intelligent of the original British Invasion bands. Argent's keyboards are invariably perfect, and the rest of the band, while not exactly capable of causing one's jaw to drop, provide a perfectly competent background.

The prog tendencies are here: the guitar intro to Like Honey and the mid-song passages with swirling vocals and Hammond, the Hammond intro and subsequent second- and third-harmonics of The Feelings Inside. And Stepping Stone almost reaches velocity here and there.

This is a pretty decent first album for the band. There's a competent rock writer (Ballard) and an above- competent keyboardist trying to find their way. They hit some decent high points here and there, but never really pull it all together. It's a good listen if one's expectations are not too high, especially for those who appreciate keyboards.

Rod is allowed to start the album with three instrumental keyboard numbers giving the impression that this is going to be an all instrumental album. Then the soft ballad Love comes in followed by a number of vocal tracks. Maybe the album could have been better if they had put the songs in different running order?

The songs are melodic and there is nothing to complain about, really. Still, this album doesn't quite do it for me. It is good, but not great. There are many other bands in progressive rock that you would need to check out before turning to Argent. But if you want to explore this band, Nexus is the best place to start.

Good, but non-essential.

Singer John Verity actually gets to sing here - he didn't get the same courtesy on the last album for some reason. Both he and Rod Argent split the lead vocals equally. Fleet-fingered guitarist John Grimaldi gets to contribute two tunes - one an especially nice ballad, the other a frenetic fusion number with a very playful guest drummer Phil Collins powering it along. Bassist Jim Rodford adds only his second composition to the band's song list with the musically mischievous and fusion-esque Time. The Rod Argent-penned tracks (and no co-authorship with longtime writing partner Chris White anymore, by the way) are so much more subtle and less over-the-top than they were on either Circus or Nexus.

And it is jazz fusion that's the main power source on Counterpoints, though it's seamlessly incorporated within heavily arranged song structures. Though there are some nice Hammond and mellotron moments to bask in, the Fender Rhodes is the dominant keyboard at play here, for those who need to know such info.

I find the songwriting on Counterpoints to be consistently excellent. Even the lone stinker, Rock 'n' Roll Show, doesn't get in the way (much). Nothing here comes off quite like the proggy supernova that Nexus' Coming of Kohoutek displayed, for instance. Instead, Counterpoints presents a unique Argent that is more subtle in its presentation than any of its other releases. Finding a copy may be difficult - it's been out of print for ages, but it's got a really good payoff for those who make the effort.