's 1980 album is a strange mix of topical songwriting, , and -- from its opening seconds, is pressing serious messages and social commentary on their listenership amid swirling keyboards and catchy guitar hooks and choruses. The whole package is challenging in ways that should have put them on the cutting edge of music at the outset of that decade, but one suspects that and company were too musically adept and sophisticated for their own good -- a little dumbing down and maybe a little less musicianship on display would have made them more accessible to the coming generation. As it is, the album has held up remarkably well across a quarter century, however, even if it now seems an uncomfortably accurate warning of the way the world would go, in terms of politics and society, in the decades to come. It would also be three years before another album was forthcoming, and that one would be steeped in sounds. [ was reissued in Japan and elsewhere in 2006 in an expanded edition (in a mini-LP CD format in Japan) with four bonus tracks adding 14 minutes to the original album's running time -- these include one outtake, and the single versions of and ] ~ Bruce Eder