JAN AKKERMAN & THIJS VAN LEER: FOCUS

Well, I am a big fan of early Focus. The instrumental portion of their first album, and the next 3 albums are all simply amazing. Then I see in ProgArchives a string of bad ratings for their next few albums until this one. This has a mediocre average rating from my fellow proggers but at least it's not rated below 3, so why not give it a chance? Right? This is not horrible, but it really doesn't sound like the early albums. First of all there are electronic drums! This is not all that bad until we get to the track I was really looking forward to when I picked up the album. An 18 minute song by Focus called Beethoven's Revenge!! This is gonna be good! What a disappointment. This track is dominated by a very annoying electronic drumbeat and it goes on for 18 muinutes! The rest of the album has its moments in a new-agey kind of way. Think Vangelis or maybe Jean-Michel Jarre.