Kansas.
I’ve mentioned them before. Alright, I often go on about them for hours, but why the hell not? They are, pound for pound, my favourite band of all time, and if you can’t batter on to whoever’s listening about your favourite band, then who can you batter on about?
I’m reminded of them because when I got home from a day of honest toil and a lunchtime of even more honest drinking with the Bossman, there was a jiffy bag waiting for me on the welcome mat, bursting at the seams with musical goodness of a classic kind.
Contained within these straining seams were albums – factory sealed for your convenience – by, amongst others, Journey, Toto, Survivor and of course Kansas. The Kansas album, Audio-Visions, is an overlooked classic. The band had hit paydirt in the middle-to-late-‘70s with two monumental albums – 1976’s staggering Leftoverture (still my favourite album of all time, some 34 years after the fact) which contained the song that will be played as my casket wobbles over the rollers on its way to the incinerator in Carry On Wayward Son, and the following year’s multi-platinum follow up Point of Know Return (which features the band’s biggest hit, the timeless Dust in the Wind).
By the time Audio-Visions was released the band were commonly thought, by those who proclaimed themselves to be experts on such things, to be in terminal decline.
This is pure pish of course. A-V is a marvellous record, chock full of delights for those curious enough to root them out. Opener Relentless is just that – a steady, grinding rocker that introduces us to guitarist and principal songwriter Kerry Livgren’s new found Christian beliefs for the first time, and with a force not often employed by the band. Relentless is backed up by the astounding double-kick mayhem of Loner – two and a half minutes of proto-speed metal, believe it or not. The baroquely crushing Curtain of Iron mark this album as one of Kansas’ heavier outings. Certainly the stentorian riffage in the mid part of COI was the heaviest Kansas had been thus far, but the sturm und drang was balanced by some exquisite balladry in the shape of hit single Hold On. Often unfairly derided as a second division Dust in the Wind, Hold On is in fact a spectacularly successful, poignant song in its own right, detailing Livgren’s desperation at, and disappointment in, his wife’s failure to follow him to Christianity. And the glorious No One Together signified the last knockings of the band’s Art Rock beginnings as the band’s songwriting responsibilities passed from Livgren (who left the band after Audio Visions to become a lay preacher and release Christian rock albums under the moniker Kerry Livgren AD) to the more hard-rock minded stylings of vocalist Steve Walsh.
Indeed it’s Walsh who is the real star of this album, as he turns in a vocal performance that has it all; it’s his voice that adds the flesh to Phil Ehart’s splendidly fleet-footed drumming on Loner, and it’s his voice that tops off the superbly quirky mix of militaristic snare drums and bagpipes that close the album on Back Door. Walsh himself was gone from the band not long after Audio Visions, to form the slickly impressive AOR unit Streets and, though he returned for the 1986 album Power, the damage was done and the band never quite got their mojo back in the eyes of those pesky critics. The band’s fans – known as Wheatheads – thought differently, and thanks to them the band tours to this day; but for many of those fans Audio Visions marked the end of Kansas’ halcyon era.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUF2rlpfAPc
