ZOO

I'm being generous giving this three stars - perhaps it's just the nostalgia for my teenage years that this evokes - but much of it is quite good. The "Beatles Medley" is superfluous - probably forced on to them by well-meaning management - but the rest of the album is pretty good.

The opening track "Cold Night" is predominantly guitar and Hammond Organ led, so has a bit of the Focus sound about it. The next track "Summerday" has some strange key changes and a non-obvious melody - possibly the proggiest track here. "Everybody Knows" is a a pop-rocker and I played it to death when I was a kid. "I'm Here" is a ballad that I never really liked much at the time, but sounds better these days. The Beatles Medley is best forgotten, and the next track "Zoo Music" is fine, but really didn't need the extended drum solo! The last track - "Feelings" - uses two lead voices in either channel, to give a sort of "conversation" between alternating verse lines.

This band also released four singles (that don't appear on the album), but I can't find them..... They're here somewhere!

Not essential, but worth a listen.

At its worst, ZOO subjects us to a pointless drum solo and lyrics that reach for contemporaneous themes as though a record exec told them exactly what they needed to do to be cool, and they didn't realize they should do the exact opposite. The nadir is in the form of a idolatrous BEATLES' medley for which I can only offer the kindly anachronistic "too soon". They also fancy themselves quite the Acapella maestros, but GRACIOUS they aren't, pun intended. Another odd comparison I could make is to the late 1970s release by GALAXY, "Nature's Clear Well", but that's more a case of that album being behind the times than this one being ahead of anything other than its own flat front feet.

I can't recommend this to anyone except the prog fan equivalent of the tourists who have to go to the zoo in every foreign city they visit, no matter how poorly fed and kept its reluctant inhabitants. Oh yes, and blind followers of the Fab Four. Is there such a beast? Nah. 1.5 stars.