As a listener, the music you listen to is as varied as the moods you could possibly be in-but rarely does anyone in the business of making music ever try to cater to the full spectrum of what you want to listen to, given your feelings at that moment. So, you end up buying a dozen different albums by different artists whose specialty it is, which of course is the music the record companies have made them play in a narrow context (not that they couldn't be more diverse, but the record companies won't let them, to fit within the parameters of their marketing scheme). The "suits" have deemed that if you are a "heavy metal fan", for example, that your life's experience is banging your head on a coffee table, and of course the powers that be wouldn't ever think that your taste buds could ever fit in more than one pigeon hole at a time...

    In fact, most everyone who is made part of any given "target" market is being corralled like cattle to streamline the cost of promotion by any corporation, not just record companies. So, what has this to do with this album concept? Everything.

    As a writer-when songs sometimes come out of you, you can't always steer them this way or that way-if one is totally honest with oneself it is a natural process instead of "pushing" a formula. A couple of artists that probably operate this way given the diversity of their material are Billy Joel and Joe Jackson. They want to convey an idea, emotion, or message, and they will use any musical form that exists to achieve this. However, they were both established in the seventies as artists, back when more idealism and craft was the norm as opposed to market skew agenda first, and because of this, back then they could get away with these noble priorities, and they now have a guaranteed following.

    No one starting out these days can do this, again, because it is easier to sell a readily identifiable musical form (a la carte), than "combination plate no.3," because diverse musical tastes of the public will breakdown specific market share, whereas 30 years ago there would have been a central feeding frenzy (The Beatles) which of course will never happen again, due to fragmented and polarized market share priority, and the aging (read: less active buying) of the "Boomers".

    The music on the album "Alien Resident in Waiting" is heavy, soft, funky, humorous, ethereal, serious, macabre, & sentimental. They are songs of hope, anger, sympathy, frustration, regret & love. I don't much care about the varying levels of simplicity or complexity of the musical forms herein, nor do I mind the different levels of maturity and naivete' found in the songs, because each listener and each song has its own frequency, and its up to them to find each other without intervention-Case in point- Greg Lake wrote "Lucky Man" when he was twelve, and wasn't afraid of dipping into his youth for a song, turning the whole world on its ear, and providing the cornerstone for a band's career. So, you might want to check this out, maybe, because the playing is good, or the production values are excellent, or that the lyrical direction is your cup of tea-but maybe, just maybe, you'll want to get this album because the corporates might think that its "unsafe".-gary mcgill

If you want to confound taste dictation, buy this album.

copyright fine fight publishing (c) 1995