Created at a time of intense turmoil for -- they scrapped a planned international tour in the wake of 's car accident in Greece in August 1975 -- is a strange, misshapen beast of a record that pulls upon its own tension. With somewhat on the sidelines -- he recorded many of the vocals while in a wheelchair -- reasserted himself as the primary creative force in the band, helping steer toward a guitar-heavy complexity, perched halfway between a return to roots and unfettered prog. This dichotomy means it feels like sprawls as wildly as even though it's half its length: the four epics tend to overshadow the trio of lean rockers that really do hark back to the boogie and rockabilly that informed 's earliest work. Each of these three -- "Royal Orleans," "Candy Store Rock," "Hots on for Nowhere" -- plays as snappily as the throwaways on the second half of , containing a sexy insouciance; the band almost seems to shrug off how catchy 's riffs and how thick the grooves of and actually are. No matter how much fun this triptych is, they're lost underneath the shadow of "Achilles Last Stand," a ten-minute exercise in self-styled moody majesty and the turgid blues crawl of closer "Tea for One." In between, there are two unalloyed masterpieces that channel all of the pain of the period into cinematic drama: a molten blues called "Nobody's Fault But Mine" and "For Your Life," as sharp, cinematic, and pained as ever were. Added together, winds up as something less than the sum of its parts but its imbalance also means that it's a record worth revisiting; it seems different upon each revisit and is always compelling. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine