WHITE MUSIC

Little else can be said about this album: the sky did crack open to let the boredom poured over the listeners/progheads who are looking for passionate and interesting music. A good look at the track title and their length should be enough to about the contents of the song. In this case, you can trust appearances, and safely judge a book by its cover.

With all due respect to CTS, this is relatively dumb-ass RnR (and believe the lyrics match the mediocre song titles), very symptomatic of a band having lost all inspiration. Only the closing track Song Of Soviet Son (this was the only track with an intelligent title too - what a coincidence) is worthy of notice bringing us back to the debut or second album. A spent force that will apparently endure quite a long history, but even by the time this album was released, I was long gone towards greener pastures. I only heard this as I rented the 2on1 record from the library and it was coupled with the debut. Best avoided for progheads, maybe straightforward-rock fans with a slight pop edge will find happiness.

After John Palumbo left Crack The Sky when they were recording and touring for "Safety In Numbers", he somehow regained control and brough only guitarist Rick Witkowski and touring keyboardist Vince DePaul with him. Too bad.

I mentioned in another review for this band that one of the best things about them was the interplay between the bassist and drummer, and the two guitarists. Well, with all but one of the guitarists leaving, none of that interplay exists on this album.

The songs are all short, unimaginative, and forgettable, with the possible exception of "Song Of Soviet Sons". But that song isn't worth the price of admission.

Run away fast if someone dares to play this album around you.

I'll start out by saying that I get the overall lack of enthusiasm for this platter, but I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with my fellow Crack Addicts on its place in the pantheon. Of course I can't lift this one to the lofty heights of any of its predecessors, but White Music's embrace of stark new wave and its totally eighties concerns with the state of pop radio, wasteful American consumption, and of course - the Russians, always fills me with some kind of weird cold-war era spiked mixture of nostalgia and wistful admiration. White Music is less a CTS album proper, than a John Palumbo solo album employing two of his of his old CTS cohorts, suitably paranoid synth-ster Vince DePaul and the stinging guitar of Rick Witkowski, who also produces here. Another thing White Music has going for it, is that its got several of Palumbo's best pure rock songs - sly opener "Poptown," the sinister, pulsing hard rock and nasty social commentary of "White Music," and desperate ballad "Hot Razors In My Heart" which eschews Palumbo's normal world-weary cynicism and just goes for a pure radio single - and scores well enough to get maybe the last significant bit of national radio play CTS ever got. As a whole, White Music is definitely a bit front-loaded, and stops being effortless right around the blatant, somewhat tasteless jealous cuckoldry of "Suspicion", maybe finally getting too clever by half with hamfisted "The Techni Generation," and ending in delusions of MOR grandeur in "Songs of Soviet Sons," presaging Sting's ponderous synth-orchestrated Russo-pretension by a good five years. Flaws duly noted, as a piece I think it is fair to say the album has more depth of arrangement and ambition than any of the CTS records that followed up until 2002's Ghosts. A serviceable soundtrack to Palumbo's still-sharp pen, it deserves a little more respect, even if it certainly isn't prog, more like a stripped-down version of the hard rock aspects of the seventies lineup. Maybe in retrospect it also encapsulates and presages the bad habits of the long lost decade to follow, a decade that would finally bury CTS in the bargain bins of the rock kingdom for good (outside of Dundalk, that is).

Respect to those who have rated this album with 1 star. If you're looking for the prog rock songs of the first couple of Crack the Sky albums, or the later material that sounds a lot like Pink Floyd, this is not that. This was a new incarnation of Crack The Sky where John Palumbo focused on writing short, edgy new wave rock songs. There is some good material on here, but it's very distinct from other stages of Crack The Sky. I think the songs Skin Deep and White Music are up there with some of the best material they've done. It's definitely worth a listen if you like early 80s rock.