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Rating:
The adventure with the multinational Atlantic ended quickly and poorly, which in 1987 had heavily invested in their seventh album "Wildest Dreams" only to throw everything overboard due to insufficient commercial feedback. The Saga try to regroup and react to the disappointment, taking a step back both contractually (returning to work with the Canadian BonAire) and musically: the progressive component and the taste for instrumental exploits become part of the arrangements again, albeit episodically, less flattened towards simplistic accomplicity and fawning accessibility as happened in the previous work.
Just listen to the spectacular start of the album "How Do I Look": a dragged-out prologue, noisy and effect-laden, is abruptly and literally torn apart by a tremendous guitar/keyboard riff in a flash. Ian Chricton's agility on the six strings proves to be on par with only a few, while as for the synthesizers... the sequencer takes care of it! (the group is still a trio without a keyboardist and with an external drummer).
Recording everything following a metronome in Los Angeles and then taking the tapes to Munich for a drummer (Curt Cress) to play on is not the right way to do rock: it lacks the group feeling, the instant and spontaneous interaction between performers, the accents and moods captured on the fly and transmitted immediately in the performance... The production of the album (credited for the first time to Saga themselves) therefore proves to be super cold, despite the usual interesting vein of compositional and especially executional creativity.
There are indeed good songs, but they are somewhat killed by electronics, as well as by the obtuse Cress who proceeds with snare drum cannonades, according to the fashion of the epoch (gated reverb... so much damage in the eighties, before going forever out of style!). A couple of them are practically electro-funk, come on! Especially "The Nineties", complete with female choirs and Michael Sadler's voice altered, modifying the tape speed to make it go towards... uh, Prince.
A couple of slow pieces are also not missing: the inspired semi-ballad "Starting All Over", with an elegant and lyrical chorus, the pinnacle of the work, and the less essential and more ethereal "Odd Man Out", which sees Ian Chricton also on acoustic. The wild "Shape", on the other hand, enjoys a knotty, fat, catchy synthesizer riff and refers more than any other episode to the marvelous recent past of the band, instrumentally brilliant and full of personality.
The album's closing track, "Giant", ventures successfully into jazz-funk territories, thanks to the very prominent (and fake... meaning bassist Jim Chricton pounding on a synth keyboard) bass a la Level 42. In its generous seven-minute duration, Saga fully release what their nature commands, engaging in tight guitar/keyboard duets, stop&go, vocal reprises, and continuous mood changes, the true ideal environment for a band born to elaborate and refine its musical proposal, without reducing themselves except episodically to a couple of verses and choruses, with a central eight-bar solo. The trio is about to understand it again and with the following album, returned to the historical quintet lineup, they will once again dazzle.
The album's artwork is splendid, creative, and elegant (Throwing Shapes is roughly equivalent to Chinese Shadows).
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