{"id":833,"date":"2012-07-23T05:38:38","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T10:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=833"},"modified":"2026-09-02T12:06:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T16:06:29","slug":"cd-review-asia-xxx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2012\/07\/23\/cd-review-asia-xxx\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Asia &#8211; XXX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/asia_xxx.jpg\" width=\"280\" height=\"280\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" \/>Listening to <em>XXX<\/em>, I can&#8217;t help but think two things. One, this is <em>really<\/em> catchy music. Despite the fact that the group has always been built around seriously ace players from the prog end of the pool \u2013 extraordinary vocalist\/bassist <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=578\"><strong>John Wetton<\/strong><\/a>, guitarist <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=550\"><strong>Steve Howe<\/strong><\/a>, and drummer <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=722\"><strong>Carl Palmer<\/strong><\/a> (keyboardist <strong>Geoff Downes<\/strong> is always impressive, but inevitably a notch below the legendary status of his bandmates) \u2013 <strong>Asia<\/strong> has always, <em>always<\/em> been a song-based group. And thirty years after the MTV success of \u201cHeat of the Moment,\u201d they still deliver on tracks like the leadoff \u201cTomorrow the World.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But the thought I have in tandem with that is this: there&#8217;s not really a big market for this highly-polished, radio ready music. I mean, <em>I<\/em> dig it, and I know people who&#8217;ll enjoy it (perhaps some of my readers among them), but there simply isn&#8217;t a chance that <em>XXX<\/em> is going to catch on commercially in 2012. Instead its best hope (and probably its goal) is to remind fans how catchy the band&#8217;s approach has always been, and to hope that will bring fans out to see live dates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listening to XXX, I can&#8217;t help but think two things. One, this is really catchy music. Despite the fact that the group has always been built around seriously ace players [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32363,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions\/32363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}