DO THEY HURT?

By the time of relase of this album Brand X certainly had passed already their pinnacle which had been with their first two releases. Nonetheless the clearly better second half of this disk saves it from being considered completely redundant. First two tracks are more or less just quite pleasant but rather boring and ordinary jazz fusion and "Act of Will" is at least for me the worst and most horrible one featuring some awful vocoded vocals. Things start to get slowly better with "Fragile!" and the following guitar-orientated is the (only?) highlight of this rather mediocre (compared to earlier ones) album. Last two tracks are quite good jazz-rock but of course not to be compared with works by Mahavishnu, RTF, Soft Machine or Nucleus. This record had been for sure not an essential one anymore by this group but still slightly better than the previous one although Collins contributed here only 2 of the 7 tracks. Still good for 3 stars I would say!