Kansas
Somewhere To Elsewhere

The latest studio album by Kansas, although released fourteen years ago, is the result of an unusual but evidently necessary musical choice at the time: the band entirely entrusted themselves to the former founding member Kerry Livgren, the one who had left them a decade before to pursue a solo career.

By choice, or more likely out of necessity (a prolonged compositional block within the group, I believe), the corpulent Livgren steps in temporarily to compose all the music without the help of his former bandmates. Moreover, he even goes as far as to completely dethrone frontman Steve Walsh from his usual duties as a keyboardist, besides taking up the solo guitar, relegating the one-eyed Richard Williams to the background, as already happened in the good old days.

In any case, the album sounds entirely like Kansas and not like a solo album, both due to Walsh’s still grand although somewhat strained voice, which is highly distinctive, and the excellent violin performance by Robby Steinhard, who pervades almost all the songs with his evocative and romantic touch, giving a definite seventies flavor to this late but well-achieved and admirable work.

The AOR and hard pop aspirations that characterized the band’s production in the eighties (specifically from the seventh album “Audio Visions” to the tenth “Power”) disappear entirely. The occasional septet commits itself to its typical robust, intense, redundant, and romantic American progressive rock, less influenced by classical music compared to the English scene, and always in search of tempo and atmosphere changes, pomposity, odd time signatures in the rhythm, glorious fanfares, and swirling instrumental interludes.

I find two episodes particularly magnificent, namely the opening “Icarus,” with a full chorus transition from major to minor mode on the same chord that is simply magical, and the amazing “The Coming Dawn,” where the magic lies in the long and panoramic central violin solo, a grand instrumental theme over continuous chord changes, filled with august melancholy.

Kansas’ progressive metal remains at the pinnacle of the genre, even taking into account this latest contribution; in my personal judgment, only the name Rush is more prestigious. At the time of the release of these tracks, their descendants Dream Theater were dealing with the decent but nothing more “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence”… and there’s really no comparison: better the fathers than the sons. The latest news has the talented band from Topeka unfortunately deserted by the tired Walsh, who has retired to private life, while at the same time ready to return to the stage with a new singer and keyboardist! Let’s hope these new additions also provide strength and motivation to release new original material, which has been lacking for too long.