Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...script Chicago emblem on the cover, put their pictures up front for the first time, and try a different musical tack. They even use the Bee Gees for background vocals on one song. But the similarities are more important than the changes. Hot Streets is another high-class Chicago album, another platinum-to-be. Chicago is "Alive Again...
Friends, acquaintances, music industry officials and fans convinced them to go on, so Chicago searched for a new guitarist and settled on 26-year-old Frampton look-alike Donnie Dacus. With a new producer and a revamped style, Chicago came up with Hot Streets, an album destined to take its place as one of the better Chicago albums in a twelve-record pantheon of truly amazing consistency. Every Chicago album has gone platinum and deservedly so--the group is seriously committed to producing high-quality, enervating, harmonious jazz-rock (heavy on the rock); and Hot Streets is a fine album...
Chicago is blessed with so much creative ability that virtually every band member has composed a song or two on Hot Streets, which is reflected in the album's diversity of form and sound. The first cut, called "Alive Again" as a defiant challenge to the fates that almost broke-up the group, begins with a single guitar line, which is soon joined by another, and then a couple of horns sneak in, until, having followed the first guitar along, you find yourself enveloped in the upbeat, thematic richness of the chorus of voices and instruments...
...narrow focus on love and the loss of love as song subjects. Only the fact that Chicago can do a love song in a great variety of styles and patterns--from slow and moody, to light and airy, to classic bop-bop-bop hard rocking--saves the album from an over-specialization of theme. Still, one wishes they would throw in a few of the political songs they once did, before the '70s musical paradigms ruled out everything but immediate gratification as valid musical topics...
...album's lead song, "It's a Laugh," provides the newest offering for their "at-large" following. With a strong saxaphone line from the latest of the group's sax players, Charlie DeChant, "It's a Laugh" combines breezy lyrics with a light pop tune that has already appealed to "top pop" listeners...