IF

Perhaps, if (!) I was more objective, I couldn't rate this so low, but I can't help that this album was a disappointment to me. I have found and enjoyed many Fusion artists recently (including COLOSSEUM which is one of the groups IF are compared to) and naturally I expected to like this British vintage debut too. But I found quite a little here that I wanted to listen multiple times. The problem is not with the music per se, but with my taste which just happens not to favour funky, brassy, souly, bluesy jazz-rock. Neither was I very fond of the vocals.

There were a couple of tracks with the flute up front rather than the saxes, which I liked more, but the whole album just didn't turn me on at all. No wonderful compositions, some OK at best. Skillful playing, definitely, but the aesthetics of this band didn't meet mine very well. So, take my humble opposite opinion (against the six praisings here) just as a notice that you may not enjoy this band as much as you might expect. It's not very progressive, for starters. But if you like (sorry to repeat the names jumping up again and again in previous reviews) the bands such as BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS and CHICAGO, forget my words and hear this yourself.

(I'm not always this subjective in my ratings; that is, for strong musicianship I sometimes give more stars than I actually enjoy the music personally, but I do think that we need shameless subjectivity when we rate albums here. It's the matter of our OWN feelings of the music. Naturally one has to know enough about the musical style/genre in question to make a worthy statement. Fusion IS one of the genres I enjoy. Brass-rock ain't, I admit, and had I known better that it's this style more precisely, I probably wouldn't have borrowed the CD at all - which, on the other hand, is prejudicious...)