Crisis? What Crisis? [Original recording remastered, Import]

I bought this CD at an excellent price at Amazon, because my original CD has been through the ringer. It was badly damaged over the years and I needed a new one. Plus I love Supetramp's music. I grew up with it and I've seen the band several times over the years. I recommend this CD to all Supertramp fans.

There seems to be a major resurgence of interest in 1970s music as today's 15-25 year olds rediscover music from that decade. I grew up in the 70s and my friends' teenaged sons and their friends are now frequently asking me about 70s bands and looking for lesser known bands and albums from that era.

Supertramp is one band I've told them about.

For those of us who were around in the 1970s, Supertramp is hardly a "lesser known band"; these guys filled stadiums and arenas back in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. But the younger guys I talk to only know Supertramp, if they know about the band at all, from hearing tracks like "The Logical Song" on classic rock radio stations.

To help rectify that situation, I'm putting up reviews of four Supertramp albums I tell these younger guys to check out: Crime of the Century, Crisis! What Crisis?, Even In The Quietest Moments and Breakfast In America.

All four of these albums get 5 star ratings from me. Excellent material; not a weak track on any of these four albums.

Supertramp is a hard band to categorize. They had a very unique sound and, for me at least, it's difficult to come up with other bands to compare them to. A lot of their material has been posted on YouTube if you want to give some of it a listen before you buy it.

But the four albums I've mentioned are all excellent and all worth including in your music collection if you're discovering or re-discovering 1970s music. Highly recommended!

English art rockers Supertramp's fourth album entitled Crisis? What Crisis? in November of 1975. Like its predecessor, 1974's Crime of the Century, the album was once again co-porduced by the band and Ken Scott. Crisis was the second album by the classic lineup of the band which were the two singer-songwriters Rick Davies(keyboards) and Roger Hodgson(guitars and occasional keyboards), saxophonist/woodwind expert John Helliwell, bass player Dougie Thomson and drummer Bob C. Benberg. Thhis new lineup did a superb job fleshing out the sound and managed to do a great job of embelishing the prog pop sound that Davies & Hodgson had developed. Hodgson's interest in spiritual themes comes to the fore with this album(although it was hinted at previously). Roger's guitar driven one-two punch of Easy Does It and Sister Moonshine kick the album off in full throttle. The latter track is called by some as the lost sequel to The Beatles' Here Comes The Sun(Hodgson is a huge Beatles nut). Hodgson also contributed the lovely A Soapbox Opera, Lady, Meaning and the acoustic-tinged closer Two of Us. Davies' crafted four songs on this album starting with the shuffling Ain't Nobody But Me(a minor hit when released). That track was the first in a long string of Davies sung songs that played with the traditional pop love song in new and surprising ways. The playing on this particular track showcased the strengths of the band's new sound. Despite its quirkiness(and had an instrumental arrangement that matches the quirky, anti-love song sentiments) but doesn't try to coast on just that single merit. Rick's other tracks like the rocking Another Man's Woman, the ballads Poor Boy and Just a Normal Day(which had Roger sharing vocals) are also great tunes. Although Crisis tanked upon its release, peaking at a dismal #51 compared to Crime's Top 40 peak, Crisis sounds stunning today. The remastering, done painstakingly by Greg Calbi and Jay Messina made the album sound much better than it did when first released. Highly recommended!