This year, Every Sunday Evening, Album Rock WXYG, The GOAT will be featuring a full album at 8:00 PM from the halcyon musical days of 1976. 1976 was one of the top Years in Album Rock history. Another year of tough choices every week. So many great ones to choose from. After 52 Weeks of featuring so many of the great albums that debuted in 1975, next Sunday we will be moving on to another amazing year of ALBUM ROCK EXCELLENCE, 1976.
Tune in at 8:00 PM, Next Sunday Evening, July 19th for “Leftoverture”, the Fourth studio album by Kansas, released in 1976. It was the band's first album to be certified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and remains their highest selling album, having been certified 4× platinum in the United States.
"Leftoverture" is that album that put the band on the map internationally, as the band reconciled its "progressive" influences with the pop sensibilities of the times. There isn't a weak moment among the album's eight songs, which features Classic Rock standard "Carry On My Wayward Son", power ballad "The Wall" and Prog-Rock classics "Miracles Out Of Nowhere", "Cheyenne Anthem" and the hyperkinetic "Magnum Opus".
Arguably the band's best album from a wonderful stretch of albums beginning with their eponymously named debut through "Vinyl Confessions" which put them in a league of their own as far as commercial Progressive Rock from the United States goes.
For any art rock band, the fourth album means it's time for a self-styled masterpiece -- if you need proof, look at Selling England by the Pound or Fragile. So, with Kansas, the most determinedly arty of all American art rock bands, they composed and recorded Leftoverture, an impenetrable conundrum of significance that's capped off by nothing less than a five-part suite, appropriately titled "Magnum Opus," and featuring such promising movement titles as "Father Padilla Meets the Perfect Gnat" and "Release the Beavers." Of course, there's no telling whether this closing opus relates to the opener, "Carry On Wayward Son," the greatest single Kansas ever cut -- a song that manages to be pompous, powerful, ridiculous, and catchy all at once.
Leftoverture is not only the strongest and grandest album Kansas ever recorded; it is one of the classic albums of the 1970s, not only in the art rock genre but in any genre.
Tune In and Turn On the evening of Sunday, July 19th at 8:00 PM for The GOAT'S "The Long Play with Al Neff”.
