The promise is all in the first eight minutes. The harmonica is in all fifty-six.

BUT ANYWAY is a textbook radio hit. Popper's vocal is the biggest thing here and the harmonica solo earns its place, even if it's ten seconds too long. That turns out to be the smallest of this album's problems. GINA follows and does roughly the same job a rung or two down the ladder.

What the band does with the remaining forty-eight minutes is run two arrangements over and over. The first is a poor man's BUT ANYWAY: a couple of verse and chorus pairings, then soloing until deciding to return to another verse. The second is a rollercoaster, where the push and pull of the tempo is more jarring than exciting.

MULLING IT OVER and DROPPING SOME NYC almost sound like demos that haven't been fleshed out.

CRYSTAL FLAME is the lowest point of the record at nine minutes and thirty-nine seconds, roughly a sixth of the running time, demonstrating that length and quality are different things. ALONE is the lone ballad and it's not overly noteworthy. WARMER DAYS is the only thing in the back half I'd actually circle back to.

This is the debut of a band that already knows exactly what it is and hasn't yet found out what else it could be. Two and a half spins, and it's mostly carried by the strength of BUT ANYWAY.