Three double albums in three years is a Herculean amount of work for any band, even one with seven members and multiple songwriters. So after the 1971 tour for Chicago III, <\/i>the band decided to scale back a bit on their fourth studio album (and fifth overall). The result is a streamlined Chicago sound that trims away most of the long solos and improvisational\/jazzy bits in favor of concise pop-rock-jazz tunes.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Hit By Varese\u201d is not completely representative of this approach, mind you; it\u2019s only five minutes, but it packs a lot of left turns, bonkers horn solos, some gonzo Peter Cetera basslines, and a completely original approach. It\u2019s one of the best Chicago songs you haven\u2019t heard from the band\u2019s early days, but it\u2019s also one of the few times the band would go down this road from here on out.<\/p>\n
More representative are pleasant-sounding pieces like \u201cAll Is Well,\u201d \u201cGoodbye,\u201d \u201cAlma Mater,\u201d and \u201cDialogue Pt. 1,\u201d the latter sounding like a template for every hit song the Doobie Brothers would write from 1973-1976. \u201cDialogue Pt. 2\u201d and \u201cNow That You\u2019ve Gone\u201d are mostly instrumental rockers, not offering anything really new but adding to the overall feel of the album with typically strong entries. The second part of \u201cDialogue\u201d concludes with a \u201cWe can make it happen\u201d chant that is typical of the politics of the early \u201870s\u2026which is to say, it\u2019s a tad corny, but it may make certain people smile.<\/p>\n
Actually, because Robert Lamm wrote eight of the 10 songs here, there\u2019s a slight political bent to several of the songs, but they hit a little harder because of the focus on the song and not so much on the instrumental wizardry, as on the solid \u201cWhile The City Sleeps\u201d and \u201cDialogue.\u201d Of course, most every Chicago album had at least one knockout hit single, and this one was \u201cSaturday In The Park,\u201d an innocuous bit that became the band\u2019s biggest hit to that point. There also are swaths of funk scattered throughout the disc, as on the political \u201cState Of The Union,\u201d which fuses a dirty chorus\/verse with an overlong, scattershot solo that threatens to derail the piece. <\/p>\n
The expanded edition of the disc offers a couple of choice nuggets for Chicago fans, including the studio version of \u201cA Song For Richard And His Friends,\u201d a skronky instrumental led by some ugly free-form guitar that morphs into a blues riff halfway through. The band would add some political (Richard being Nixon) vocals when playing live, but hearing Terry Kath\u2019s original ideas for the piece is interesting. An early version of \u201cMississippi Delta City Blues\u201d also appears, a piece the band would vastly improve a couple of years later, and then a single edit of \u201cDialogue\u201d is here in case you\u2019re in a hurry and only have five minutes to listen to the song instead of seven.<\/p>\n
The short answer is that Chicago V <\/i>essentially distills the long-form prog-jazz-pop-rock of the first three albums into digestible chunks with one great single, one great album track and a number of songs that either make no impact or sound like retreads \u2013 albeit good ones \u2013 of songs that have come before. In many ways, this is the beginning of the band slowly starting to phase out its old sound for a newer, friendlier approach. It\u2019s not a great record, but it has enough to recommend it to Chicago fans digging deeper into the vast back catalog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":32987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5830],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-44769","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-chicago","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44769","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\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44769"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}