This album is the best album by Journey, as far as musical range goes. It has the pop hits (Any Way You Want It), the blues sound (Walks Like a Lady), the funky-shuffle-beat rocker (Homemade Love), and Gregg Rolie has an awesome harmonica riff to finish off Precious Time. What else do you want?

This is a soundtrack for a movie; it's not going to rock your socks off or anything like that. Also, Perry's voice is only on three tracks (I think) so this is the "oddest" Journey album. Little Girl is the only commercially-viable song on the album.

But still, it shows that Journey can do more than just write pop-rock songs. I wouldn't go out of my way to purchase it unless you're looking for a complete set of Journey albums.

This is Journey's first album. Take one keyboardist with big-league experience (Gregg Rolie from Santana) and one guitar phenom (Neal Schon, who also was in Santana before that band imploded), a highly underrated bass player (Ross Valory), excellent percussionist (Ansley Dunbar) and a guitarrist I know little about other than he wrote Topaz, George Tickner, and stir:

This album has a heavy blues sound to it; it's light on lyrics and heavy on long musical interludes. That's fine with me; the "Journey bridge" (keyboard track leads to guitar solo) is an excellent musical motif.

The album opens with two very good blues-rock songs: Of a Lifetime and In the Morning Day.

Topaz and Kohoutek are excellent instrumental monsters. I think Topaz may be Journey's best song on any album; it's essentially just an extended guitar ad lib: you got your rock guitar solo, your fusion guitar solo, your screaming guitar solo followed by your blues guitar solo; I love it! Kohoutek has a great extended guitar-keyboards-call-and-response-segue-guitar-ad-lib bridge that really isn't found anywhere else in music.

Between those two lies To Play Some Music, a nice pop-like song. After them is In My Lonely Feeling/Conversations which is nice, but doesn't have the punch of the other songs on the album. And finally Mystery Mountain, a song about a volcano. That's right, a volcano.

If you don't have this album, and you like the sounds of Journey and Santana, then go get it.

Now, clearly, this is not Rush's best album. It also has the unfortunate place of being between Fly by Night and 2112. So, it's easy to overlook the album.

And yet...

Bastille Day rocks; it's a great song all around, tying the French Revolution to modern-day politics. Lakeside Park is a good follow-up to the softer songs on Fly by Night (Making Memories & Rivendell). I Think I'm Going Bald is a little silly, but is good filler.

The Fountain of Lamneth is a long, long song. And yet, it has one of the great riffs by Lifeson, and the "inner songs" (No One at the Bridge, Panacea and Bacchus Plateau) are all very good.

The Necromancer is an excellent semi-Tolkeinian inspired song.

The album is the most musically complete album by Rush, along with Fly by Night and Hold Your Fire; if you like a variety of styles and sounds, then be sure to pick this one up.

This album is a complete album: by that, I mean it's not easily categorized into one genre of music. Who'd expect to hear Rivendell and Anthem on the same album? Every song on this album is excellent. Most bands have a sophomore blues album, but Rush instead shifted gears and kept trucking.