AMBROSIA

Here's an odd one - Ambrosia's debut album leads off with the occasionally grating Nice Nice Very Nice (which features vocals which are either a half-hearted and somewhat racist attempt at an Indian accent or just whimsical and weird for the sake of it) and is littered with more commercial moments here and there, but when you get into the meat of it the band actually excel at vivid prog-psych instrumental workouts - it's just a shame they don't make as much space for those on the album as they could have done. It's decent enough pop-prog which doesn't quite hit the tier of the likes of, say, Supertramp or the Alan Parsons Project, but you can see how Ambrosia might have made it to that tier had they stuck with this approach and polished it a bit. Three stars, maybe three and a half if you don't mind cheesy vocals and unexpected outbursts of dirty funk or blues.