Corporate America
There's something very curious about Boston's fifth album--and the road the band has traveled from arena-rock heights to its current less-than-lofty status. Here, after all, is a band--really, guitarist-studio wunderkind Tom Scholz and company--that emerged from nowhere and set sales records with their 1976 self-titleddebut. Since then, Boston's profile has shrunk with each successive, widely spaced release. Their first indie release may not be causing much of a stir, but it's a strange creation from Scholz and his crew, which includes Brad Delp, the voice behind "More Than a Feeling" and "Don't Look Back." Like the Boston of the '70s, this unit creates polished, epic-scaled rock. Scholz's inimitable icy, soaring leads and polished production (call it heavy steel) remain in the fore. But Scholz has a pretty serious agenda here. The CD jacket champions a vegetarian diet, animal rights, and environmentalism, while the title track is a screed against modern living, business misdeeds, and, well, "DVDs, SUVs, and cyberspace." Who'd have thought Boston would pick up the banner ofRage Against the Machine?--Steven Stolder