BOSTON @ 50

Everybody loved More than a Feeling. Generations beyond it, in a mini quiz in something like The NME a then current rocker was asked for his guilty pleasure and named it, adding that anyone who says they don't like it is a liar. That's what Boston lead with on this, their debut album. It fades in and takes over with an armoury of perfectly sweetened rock hooks and a soaring vocal. It mixes the kind of arpeggiated chord progression that every bedroom guitarist will "discover" in their teens and, as such, is an apotheosis of adolescent creativity.

And then it shits the bed with a series of equally adolescent numbers played by note perfect session musicians and a songwriter who only has those hooks in the single. Block harmonies, keyboard flourishes, fuzz pedal guitar tone and big vocals that just try slightly different settings, song after song, that flow the same way that bricks in a wall flow, solidly and unremarkably until their job is finished. True to the time, there's even a moderne take on an old style rocker in the tradition of serious bands having a bit of a laugh. That usually happened with prog rockers to show how loose 'n' regular they really were among all the side long soloing and lofty odes. 

Imagine yourself at fifteen putting a song together from everything you liked on the radio. Now imagine a hotshot producer came along and turned it into a massive overloaded aural bowl of cereal. That's what this album is like. This was my first time hearing anything by Boston apart from their great one-and-done and felt interminable. This is exactly the same deal as the same year's Blue Oyster Cult LP Agents of Fortune that contained their wonderful Don't Fear the Reaper but also a load of mid-'70s dreck like this one. You can consider that sentence as my article for that album. Now, all I've got to do is the '76 records by ELO, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. Holy bloody Mama!