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Title: Past their brief peak
Review: Audience, at their best, have a hypnotic mid-tempo sound made almost opiate through Keith Gemmell's restrained saxophone. It found full bloom on their third album, House On The Hill. Lunch, their fourth, goes for a bigger sound with more musicians in the studio. The extra horns and backup singers don't make a better album, though and singer Howard Werth doesn't duplicate the full-throat commitment his singing had on previous songs such as Jackdaw. By this album, according to Wikipedia, the band was pretty much exhausted by non-stop touring and in the process of breaking up; this, their swan song, does indeed sound like a group at the end of their creative rope. Some of the old Audience musical tropes are there, but the album is a letdown.
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