Asia: Asia (Geffen)
Richard Riegel, Creem, July 1982
HOW FITTING to confront this record at the same moment the Royal Navy is steaming toward the Falklands, in the last-hurrah hard-on of Tory imperialism. Asia, you see, longs for that 1970's heyday when "progressive rock" from Britannia ruled the airwaves, and as they seem to think that their mannered style has lost some ground to powerpop or whatever here in the '80s (yeah, my local FM outlet played Jethro Tull's Aqualung only 5,999,999 times a year, down a whole thousand or so from '80), they plan to reassert their class-will-tell chart primacy. By force. If necessary.
Total word count of piece: 650