Mr. Mister - "Welcome to the Real World" (1985)

Rating: 3

Mr. Mister was a group of L.A. session musicians who formed in the early 80s to put their own spin on the pop-rock style of bands like Toto and Chicago (that sentence should tell you all you need to know about this band, but I shall proceed nonetheless). Indeed, lead singer Richard Page was offered the opportunity to lead both those groups, but declined and was rewarded with two #1 hits in "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings." Commercially, Mr. Mister was briefly very successful before fading into oblivion. Artistically, not so much.

I listened to the first three tracks on the first side and heard nothing but flat stadium rock with dopey keyboards and sludgy power chords in place of riffs. So I was prepared to turn the record off before even making it to the end of side one but then noticed that the three major hits on the album (the two aforementioned, plus top 10 single "Is It Love") were all aligned in a row on the second side. I'm not sure if Mr. Mister thought that would give them some credibility or perhaps force listeners to pay attention to their faceless music of the first side, but either way, definitely not a good move. Sometimes you just have to admit your limitations and front-load the album because that's all anyone wants to hear anyways.

Of course, it's not like those hits were particularly good, which I strongly suspect to be correlated with Mr. Mister's subsequent decline. "Kyrie" has the catchiest chorus on the record but said chorus is indistinguishable from Toto's "Africa." "Broken Wings" is the only song here that I recognized ("take... these broken wings") and I would call it the worst song on the album if I had actually listened to every song on the album. It's a prototypical power ballad, and like many 80s power ballads of ill repute, the group seemed to think that playing the entire song at a dragging tempo and having Page offer up somber platitudes is the same thing as writing a heart-wrenching love song. It isn't. 

So while allmusic.com may give this album four stars by default for being the Mr. Mister album with the most hits, that just makes me terrified to imagine what their other albums might be like. Blue bin!