Supertramp

Supertramp's artistic peak was incontrovertibly the late 1970s (see Crime of the Century and particularly Breakfast In America). The year of their debut self-titled album was 1970, however, and it wasn't part of it. I picked this up as a special item in Singapore and as a fan of the band I tried very hard to like it, but this aimless album is overwrought hippie drudgery, clearly an obvious overindulgence at the permissive hands of their Dutch sugar daddy. The bookending two-part "Surely" is blunt, honest and forthright despite a poor recording, and the willowy frailty of "Aubade/And I Am Not Like Other Birds of Prey" and "Shadow Song" hinted at what they were actually capable of, but other than flashes of a groove in "Words Unspoken" the rest of the album (especially the amorphous 12-minute "Try Again") is dreary, slow and sometimes even utterly artless. I'm told that for reasons of superstition the band recorded in the studio at unsociable hours; I can well believe it from the quality of the product. It took the failure of this album, the even less accomplished Indelibly Stamped (complete with topless cover) and the departure of their patron to get the band's collective head screwed on straight, but this album does have that same disastrous appeal to fans as road accidents and muggings to rubberneckers, so I guess there's that. (Content: no concerns.)

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Supertramp, Breakfast in America

My best friend had this album on eight-track, and it was a revelation; prior to that time we'd never even heard of them. Who was this band who named themselves after the itinerant homeless, and more to the point, where had they been all our lives? There's not a clinker anywhere, not a bad song to be found. We listened enraptured from start to finish, with "Gone Hollywood"'s incisive commentary on fickle stardom, "Logical Song"'s indictment of conformity and "Breakfast in America" deconstructing the social implications of what's on the menu. And permit me to wax lyrical on "The Long Way Home" — rapturous wistfulness over choices not taken and roads not explored becoming more and more relevant the older I get. No band ever fused pop and prog rock so artfully as this album did, and no collection of songs came off so vibrant, alive and intellectually stimulating. Our later explorations demonstrated that while they'd had some great albums before, they'd never reached this peak. And sadly, they never would again. (Content: no concerns.)

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