Jefferson Starship
Freedom at Point Zero

This album is bipolar, among the most bipolar I've ever known.

It presents half of its songs in the characteristic Jefferson Airplane style, cumbersome and not very catchy as usual. These are the tracks composed and sung by the differently talented Paul Kantner. The rest, instead, consists of melodic rock numbers, somewhere between brilliant and slick—a bit Toto-like—composed by other members of the group and interpreted by the sparkling, tenor vocals of the other frontman, Mickey Thomas.

Quite the slalom... it really feels like listening to two different bands on the same record. The atmosphere shift from the opener "Jane" to the second track "Lighting Rose" is exemplary in this regard. The first is a close cousin of Toto’s "Hold the Line" (released the year before, in 1978): same peremptory guitar+bass staccato riff, with a rhythmically pounding piano in eighth notes making it absolutely irresistible.

The hyper-sonorous and effortless delivery by Thomas then makes Bobby Kimball’s tense and somewhat forced vocals pale in comparison. "Jane" is nothing more and nothing less than a dazzling pop rock song, dated today but still enticing; miraculously put together by a moniker up till then engaged in much less direct and appealing things. Even the guitar solo is perfect, thanks to the then very young Craig Chaquico, and there’s even a reggae interlude—a genre that, in those years when Bob Marley was at his peak, was all the rage.

"Lighting Rose", in complete contrast, is the usual historic Jefferson number: double declamatory and blunt vocals, with Thomas effortlessly mimicking his predecessor Grace Slick. Same goes for "Things to Come", which insists on emphatic, almost speech-like patterns, poorly supported by weak melodies and already-heard choruses.

The same goes for "Girl with the Hungry Eyes" and for the titular track closing the album, with that cut-in-half rhythm in the choruses—precisely the same as dozens of previous tracks by the bespectacled freak from San Francisco. Nothing to do... I have an idiosyncrasy for Kantner’s style when it comes to melody conception and especially harmonies.

Inevitably, the album can’t keep up with the quality of its opening track, yet the rest of the songs where Kantner is out of the picture, as late-seventies American pop rock… works. Among these, "Awakening" is the central highlight, an eight-minute epic beginning with an atmospheric and pompous start, then settling into slow, piano-led melodic rock, alternately lit up by extended guitar solos or commanding choruses.

Thomas’s sharp vocals are unleashed on the dramatic "Just the Same", which even radiates some Beatlesesque vibes in its middle section, and even more so on the catchy, albeit predictable, "Rock Music", blessed with a very hooky chorus. "Fading Lady Light", to finish, is a graceful country rock number, with somewhat "by the book" harmonic progressions, but delivered with great professionalism and solid drive.

Three stars, plus "Jane", which on its own adds another one: = 4 stars. The cover is also nice, with the kid photographed while playing on the deck of a US military ship.