314. Supertramp - Crime Of The Century (1974)















Track Listing

1. School
2. Bloody Well Right
3. Hide In Your Shell
4. Asylum
5. Dreamer
6. Rudy
7. If Everyone Was Listening
8. Crime Of The Century

Review

I am actually pretty surprised that the guys who made the list chose this album to be in it instead of Breakfast In America, which is the best Supertramp album. Although best Supertramp album is a bit like saying best fungal infection. While researching this album I have found loads of comparisons between this and Dark Side Of the Moon, and frankly there has rarely been a more desperate case of grasping at straws.

The album isn't that bad, but it really isn't that impressive. If there are similarities to any other band it would very much be Genesis, but post-Peter Gabriel Genesis. The album is pleasant enough, it is light, easy music, prog for those with no intellectual commitment. And that is fine, just don't try to pass it off as something else.

The album is perfectly entertaining, but the more you listen to it the more you start spotting its problems, from the lazy keyboards, where the guy must be arthritic and therefore simply repeats the same chords over and over again to the pretty infantile lyrics to the unsuccessful pretentiousness of the whole thing. But as I said before it is entertaining, just not something that I really have much time for. Get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Dreamer
2. School
3. Crime Of The Century
4. Bloody Well Right

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Many of the songs on the album are still staples of the band's shows ("School", "Bloody Well Right", "Rudy", and the title cut). Almost all of the album appears on the band's 1980 live album Paris although the tracks which featured orchestrations on the original Crime of the Century album ("Asylum", "Rudy", and "Crime of the Century") were replaced by string synthesizers or Oberheim synthesizers which were played mainly by John Helliwell with some help from Roger Hodgson.

The album was Supertramp's first U.S. Top 40 album and was eventually certified Gold in the U.S. in 1977 after the release of Even in the Quietest Moments.

Dreamer: