{"id":41167,"date":"2008-10-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/drastic-measures\/"},"modified":"2008-10-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T00:00:00","slug":"drastic-measures","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/drastic-measures\/","title":{"rendered":"Drastic Measures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0.0001pt\">Panic makes people do the silliest things.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">You\u2019re <st1:state><st1:place>Kansas<\/st1:place><\/st1:state>. Your last album, <i>Vinyl Confessions<\/i>, has been your worst-selling album ever. You eked out one reasonably lame chart hit. Your new lead singer, John Elefante, just isn\u2019t cutting it when compared to Steve Walsh. You\u2019ve lost violinist Robby Steinhardt, whose strings made \u201cDust In The Wind\u201d the brilliance it was, because he didn\u2019t sign up to be in a CCM band. Do you get back to basics? Go back to the music that made <i>Point Of Know Return<\/i> what it was?<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Um, apparently not. Instead, you panic and put out a disc that sounds like Loverboy Lite. <i>Drastic Measures, <\/i>indeed; so drastic, in fact, it put the band on hiatus for the next three years. At its best, <i>Drastic Measures<\/i> is listenable. At its worst, well\u2026 there aren\u2019t too many albums that you can claim ended a band\u2019s career, even temporarily.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Once again, Kansas changed producers, this time signing up Neil Kernon, whose resume bears an astonishing resemblance to a late-\u201880s showing of MTV\u2019s <i>Headbanger\u2019s Ball<\/i> (Dokken, Autograph, and the ever-popular Britny Fox). Once again, the production sucks rocks. It\u2019s flat, it\u2019s monotone, it sounds like Kernon shoved the treble knob all the way out and stepped out for a corn dog. Kernon\u2019s ham-handed engineering makes songs like \u201cFight Fire With Fire\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Take Your Love Away\u201d sound like bad power-pop as played on a decrepit roller-rink sound system.\u00a0 Factor in the amazing lyrical subtlety of John Elefante and his brother Dino (\u201cAnd you know I\u2019ll fight fire with fire \/ I\u2019m burnin\u2019 inside, and my heart is a-cryin\u2019\u201d) and you\u2019d swear that compared to this, the Tubes\u2019 \u201cShe\u2019s A Beauty\u201d is a Shakespearean sonnet. Like <i>Vinyl Confessions<\/i>, <i>Drastic Measures<\/i> was remastered in a 1996 version which is very difficult to find.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The only two reasons to listen to <i>Drastic Measures<\/i>, frankly, are two of the three tracks that Kerry Livgren contributed. \u201cMainstream\u201d is a viciously funny and astonishingly bitter look at the music business and how <st1:state><st1:place>Kansas<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> had fit in &#8212; or not fit in &#8212; in it, and \u201cIncident On A Bridge,\u201d a melodic album-closer that could be either love song or hymn.\u00a0 Given the amount of dross, there is very little gold to be found here.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><i>Drastic Measures<\/i> is only recommended &#8212; and that guardedly &#8212; for the <st1:state><st1:place>Kansas<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> completist. It would be three years and an almost-complete lineup change before <st1:state><st1:place>Kansas<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> returned with anything resembling decent work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":29572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5839],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-41167","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-kansas","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41167"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41167"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}