Kansas was a bit of an anomaly within the seventies rock landscape. Their first four albums – or five, if you ask anyone else than me – are when the band was at their best. Back then, they had all the unexpected twists in the songwriting that progressive rock bands had, especially in the compositions by guitarist and keyboard player Kerry Livgren, but their wide experience as a bar band in their home state that gave them their band name also made Kansas particularly good at relatively straightforward rock grooves. As a result, Kansas’ early albums both surprise and rock.

Their third album ‘Masque’, their second in 1975 – talk about being prolific – is not quite as good as its immediate predecessor ‘Leftoverture’, but that is mainly due to the latter being more consistent. ‘Masque’ has a couple of highlights that I consider some of the best songs Kansas has ever recorded. The album also sees the band expanding their sound a little, experimenting with both more complex and more accessible elements to their sound. Some of the experiments are more successful than others, but because of that, I feel like ‘Masque’ is an album Kansas needed to make in order to even be able to make ‘Leftoverture’.

Opening with ‘It Takes A Woman’s Love (To Make A Man)’ is a bit unfortunate. The song is a pleasant enough listen with a pretty good hook, but the lyrics are quite clunky and it is fairly obvious that the song was a somewhat forced attempt to deliver the hit single their label boss Don Kirshner was asking for. Ironic too, given that the far more proggy ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ actually was their breakthrough a year later and ‘Masque’ itself had a far more natural-sounding brief, accessible tune in the delightfully melodic ‘It’s You’. In addition, ‘Two Cents Worth’ has a bit of a Steely Dan-like jazz and soul vibe that I think would have worked very well on certain American radio formats at the time.

By far my favorite track on ‘Masque’ and in deed of Kansas’ entire discography is ‘Child Of Innocence’. It starts out with a cool, rhythmically unpredictable guitar harmony and develops into a powerful rocker with a downright beautiful vocal harmony in its chorus. ‘Mysteries And Mayhem’ is the hardest rocking track on here. On the more proggy end of the spectrum, there is ‘All The World’, which could have worked in a theater production were it not for its almost Tony Banks-ish extended keyboard break and the fantastic epic closer ‘The Pinnacle’, which is a dynamic journey through multiple excellent movements. ‘Icarus (Borne On Wings Of Steel)’ combines both approaches in a very pleasing manner.

‘Masque’ is in no way the greates album Kansas has ever recorded, but I feel it often gets unfairly lost in the shuffle between two highly regarded albums, one of which I actually prefer it to. At its best, ‘Masque’ shows Livgren and singer/keyboard player Steve Walsh at the peaks of their creativity. The performances are incredible as well. This line-up of Kansas was a band that could take the smart approach of progressive rock, but didn’t make it sound like they were trying to be clever. It is a good thing that they had their proficiency with rock grooves that pleases a bar crowd in the pocket, as it made them the most listenable of all seventies prog bands.

Recommended tracks: ‘Child Of Innocence’, ‘Icarus (Borne On Wings Of Steel)’, ‘The Pinnacle’