10cc Japan

After the success of Bloody Tourists, and the artsy excess of Look Hear?, Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman gave the rest of the band their walking papers, and recorded this album as a duo. Sounding fresh and energized, this was by far 10cc's best album since 1977's Deceptive Bends. Maintaining a mild case of the quirkiness of old, Stewart and Gouldman embrace some of their finest melodies on this release, allowing the songs to speak for themselves. "Don't Ask" is one of those great little pop songs that you think you've heard somewhere before, but haven't, and it should have been a massive single, but wasn't.

With 10cc's last album, Bloody Tourists, having spun off the monster hit "Dreadlock Holiday," it would be a very brave person indeed who could argue that the most consistently inventive band of the previous eight years had finally run out of steam. But there were clues; no follow-up hits on the last album, a certain lack of pizzazz on their most recent tours, and an incapacitating car accident that kept Eric Stewart immobile for almost nine months. Put all that together and, when Look Hear? did finally materialize, the surprise might have been that it was as good as it was.

Have You Ever Been Experienced? Third release from the "This is SHM-CD" series of low-priced SHM-CD music samplers with bonus CDs to compare the quality of SHM-CD to standard CD. The high-fidelity SHM-CD format is fully compatible with standard CD players.