I was surprised to discover a few years ago that this is a pretty good record. Back in the day as a teen, I didn’t care for “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” though I did like “Leave It,” the follow-up single. I didn’t investigate the album though, because the whole thing smacked of my generation being catered to by an aging band (they were probably in their -gasp-THIRTIES)…and that assessment was right on target. Teens hate being catered to, except for the fact that they LOVE being catered to, and that’s what this album did. Yes threw out the 9-minute prog meanderings, and wrote a slew of 4-minute pop-rock songs that surely turned off their original fans, but between the fat, obvious hooks and Trevor Horn’s bombastic, dated but so delicious production, this was catnip for the MTV kids…like me. So, fast-forward 35 years or so. I picked up this Record Store Day edition for the heck of it and discovered that I already knew half the album thanks to WNEW-FM back in the day, that “Owner” was actually better than I remembered, and that I missed that OTT 1980s production style. Turns out this is a fun record with traces of everything from Billy Squier to Queen to Art of Noise in it. It is also a very Eighties record because it really seems to say: If you’re gonna sell out, go big. And that’s what they did.
