Song Kansas

Kansas' third album, Masque, is a lyrically dark effort courtesy of guitarist/keyboardist Kerry Livgren's brooding songwriting. Musically, Masque foreshadows the tight melodies and instrumental interplay on the next two albums, Leftoverture and Point of Know Return, which together serve as the peak of Kansas' vision. The band deserves more respect than it gets for incorporating British hard rock and progressive rock to become the only U.S. progressive rock band of note during the genre's 1970s heyday. Robbie Steinhardt's violin work certainly helped give Kansas a distinctive sound. The liner notes indicate Masque is a "concept album" thanks to the title's definition: "A disguise of reality created through a theatrical or musical performance." Vocalist/keyboardist Steve Walsh's "It Takes a Woman's Love (To Make a Man)" is the leadoff track, and it's atypical of the rest of the album. The song is a fairly basic yet groovy pop/rock tune about musicians' loneliness on the road, but it is spiced up with some saxophone lines.

Coming off the surprise new studio album Somewhere to Elsewhere in 2000 Kansas seemed to have a bit of a resurgence in popularity, with an increased tour schedule that hasn't let up yet, and a rapid-fire series of reengineered back-catalog albums, compilations, and reissued live releases. In the summer of 2002 the band auctioned off several hundred premium tickets for this concert at Earthlink Live in Atlanta, and drummer Phil Ehart realized a long-time desire to record a full-length concert of the band in a small-venue setting. The result was the two-disc "Device - Voice - Drum", released with little fanfare by Compendium Music Group…

For a library user these multi-album sets are very handy! This contains the first five albums of the American Symphonic / Hard Prog legend Kansas, covering their best era. As usual, the original vinyl covers are duplicated as they are, which causes some uncomfort if one wishes to read the texts…

Legacy’s The Classic Albums Collection 1974-1983 should provide endless hours of arena/prog/AOR-pop bliss for fans of Kansas, as it features ten of the band’s career-defining albums, including an expanded edition of the live album Two for the Show. Each studio album (Kansas, Song for America, Masque, Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Monolith, Audio Visions, Vinyl Confessions, and Drastic Measures) has been remastered and peppered with bonus cuts, and all of the original album artwork has been lovingly reproduced. Best of all, the box set is priced to move. Kansas is an American rock band that became popular in the 1970s initially on album-oriented rock charts and later with hit singles such as "Carry On Wayward Son" and "Dust in the Wind". The band has produced nine gold albums, three multi-platinum albums (Leftoverture 6x, Point of Know Return 4x, The Best of Kansas 4x), one other platinum studio album (Monolith), one platinum live double album (Two for the Show), and a million-selling single, "Dust in the Wind".

Sail On: The 30th Anniversary Collection 1974-2004 is certainly the most lovingly crafted of the many Kansas retrospectives. Featuring 27 album cuts that range from classic FM hits like "Dust in the Wind" and "Point of No Return" to fan favorites such as "Song for America," and a 16-track DVD that collects numerous television appearances, videos, and live recordings, Sail On seems to be the definitive tome of the Midwest art rock band's very existence…

Epic/Legacy's four-disc, budget-priced Kansas box set is cut from the same cloth as previous label collections like 2004's Sail On: The 30th Anniversary Collection 1974-2004 and 2008's Ultimate Kansas. Longtime fans will find nothing here that they don't already have in their libraries, but casual listeners will find that the bare-bones package offers up a nice cross section of radio hits and album cuts, without the exorbitant price tag.

The summer of 2020 marks the release of The Absence of Presence, Kansas’s sixteenth studio album. The wide-ranging progressive rock album, released by InsideOut Music, follows-up 2016’s The Prelude Implicit, which debuted at number 14 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart.