AGENTS OF FORTUNE

Fortunate for those who wish to hear ''Don't Fear the Reaper'' in the comfort of their own homes. All of that classic guitar riffage and spaced out vocal stuff whenever we want, or for those from the current generation (me inclusive), you get to hear the song that inspired the ''Cowbell Sketch''. But AGENTS OF FORTUNE is more than that cowbell.

The rock here is a bit more intelligent than your standard rock album. Maybe here, not enough to categorise as ''prog'' (at the time of writing, this is the only album of BOC's that I'm remotely familiar), but it's a different take from the redundancies of sex, drugs, booze and rock-n-roll. From what I know, Patti Smith helped collaborate on a couple of songs, so that may explain something about the ''cerebral-ness''.

There's plenty of material to fetch from this album. For me, the pumping ''Vera Gemini'', the smooth ''Morning Final'' and the punchy ''This Ain't the Summer of Love'' are the three strongest songs off of the album, followed closely by the cowbell song. In fact, I don't think there's a weak track excepting ''Debbie Denise''; a bit too slow. It's scratchy to figure out how much prog is here, but this is an outside-the-ordinary hard rock album definitely worth a spin.