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Rating:
Penultimate act of Supertramp's discography. It's 1997, and the group, after a few years of disorientation, reunites, with some new faces, around the pianist, singer, and composer Rick Davies. Having long missed the train to remain among the greats of pop rock, the band settles for indulging the adult whims of the leader, always oscillating between jazz blues, ironic falsetto voices, and elegant and rhythmic piano accompaniment. However, now there's an additional narrowing of the band's uniqueness, already significantly impaired by the departure of Roger Hodgson many years before.
Symbolic of this is the initial, interminable (ten minute) "It's a Hard World", where all of Davies' jazz and soul desires are vented in an extended, nocturnal rhythm&blues wander, undoubtedly of exquisite class, but unfortunately lacking thematic consistency and thus adequate accessibility.
It's clear that the album is more polished than the previous ones... great sounds and a nice instrumental groove with the new musicians who are much better than those who are no longer there. For example, the fresh addition on guitar, Carl Verheyen, is an amazing musician, even if underutilized here. However, in terms of musical genre and composition methods, it has slipped towards the academic, the standardized, the unforgettable without hope. The album thus sounds great, entertains, but the real Supertramp were something else: they brought unpredictable and incisive melodies, surprising chord sequences, chiselled and sublime piano riffs... Davies here becomes a sort of poor man's Ray Charles, talented and passionate yet superfluous, with this regression towards his black masters that appears as respectful and appropriate as it is useless, or even harmful because it screws up the specific nature of Supertramp, almost completely lost along the way.
For example, the eponymous song of the album enjoys a tasty funky guitar and a juicy double solo, first of mixed acoustic/electric piano and then a brass blend of trombone/sax but... it sounds like Steely Dan! And the attack of "Sooner or Later" recalls that of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", heck. It's pure American rhythm&blues, nothing like English progressive pop. After all, more than half of the musicians in action are made in the USA, a country where, by the way, Supertramp has been residing for over twenty years.
"Help Me Down That Road" is then a very scholastic boogie blues... help! The best melodically ends up being "Give Me a Chance", modestly sung by the Australian guitarist (well...) Mark Hart, who may also be part of Crowded House but can't even lace Hodgson's shoes or pants. However, at least it is garnished with an airy and memorable pop chorus, a rare commodity in these late Supertramp.
Quite the opposite of "C'est What?", a mockery of the (wonderful) "C'est Le Bon" by Hodgson from fifteen years earlier (album "Famous Last Words"): the usual groove on a single chord... they sound like the Traffic (more awake) heck, it's not possible! Beautiful, but there's nothing left of the Super. Not even in the closure with the intense "Where There's a Will", which takes us fully into Billy Joel territory when he in turn chases after Ray Charles. There are even gospel choirs: great, but what about Supertramp? Change is right, but not by regressing and returning to the grandfathers of blues.
Played and produced excellently, with Davies singing well, happy as he is to regress to his teenage origins, with New York-style horns everywhere, always the same four chords, everything groove and little melody... This work would deserve four full stars if only it were the album of a new classic American jazz blues band. But it's the tenth of the legendary Supertramp, and compared to "Crime of the Century" it would hardly deserve two... So let's make it three.
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