STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

This is a tough album to review. My intro to the band is the excellent Show, their last studio album, which came out in 2003. Instead of going into their back catalog, I decided to go with this double live album, figuring I would get the highlights from their earlier work. I also liked the idea of this format on the hope they would use the live setting to do some improvising with the wide array of instruments that they use. This is the only AC album I have heard outside of Show. And it is a pretty patchy effort.

It appears that some of the songs are recorded and others done live, probably at differing times, so you do not get the one concert experience. There are Hungarian (I assume, I can't speak Hungarian) and English vocals but many of the songs are instrumental. When the band plays together proper, there are many wonderful songs, encompassing the usual guitar, keys, bass and drums but they also mix a good amount of horns and strings, both of which I love. These songs have quite a bit of variety and are usually quite bombastic. And I can't easily draw comparisons to other bands, but KC lovers would surely enjoy them. But there are many songs with one or two instruments that are mostly noodling and were probably performed to appease some of the lesser used members of the band. These are mostly sans drums and vocals and really turn the affair into quite a bit of drudgery. I have tried to compare this version to the one disk version of the album, and it doesn't appear that the one disk version is totally without some of these sparser songs.

AC really have a bit of the eclectic in them and their music often is adventurous and encompasses the true meaning of progressive. The musicianship here is wonderful and I applaud their attempt to break out of the mold. I normally am loathe to say that a double album would be much better cut down to one by getting rid of the filler but in this case, the filler really is totally against the grain of a full band effort. And the peaks and valleys that this album offers really keep me from reaching for it very often. If I ever were to make my own single CD into a double with MP3's, this would be the first and thus far only one that would come to mind. That album would easily be four stars. This one waffles between 2 and 3, but I'll go with 3.