Toto The Seventh One 1988 (Columbia)
The land we call the home of the brave.
The Lowdown
As the album name suggests this was album number seven from Toto and most importantly it would signal the end of the band’s first stage as it were, where the band had been seen as one of the premier AOR bands from the last ten years. Within this time they had proved that they were one of the most eclectic and best of all the bands that fell under the AOR banner, but as the genre had more or less died its commercial death by the time of the Seventh One, album sales for this album would suffer which was a shame as its one of the band’s most accomplished releases. Also on this point, the album surprisingly was ill-received by critics, who saw the whole thing as having an almost ‘anonymous’ sound, which is strange as to me as it feels like how I imagine a Toto album from this period to sound. The two main singles from the album “Pamela” and “Stop Loving You” were both far better than those off Fahrenheit, but like the album turned out to be poor commercial achievers as well. The album is also noted by the fact that its title track never actually appeared on the album but instead was resigned to only appear on Japanese copies of the album.
The Seventh One in many ways sounds like the band pulling out all the stops to try and make an impressive record and its dominant purple cover instantly makes it the band’s most striking album cover, along with the red of Toto IV. The line-up also remains complete from the Fahrenheit album and musically it remained the same, but stylistically the songs are superior here, harder edged where it matters, with a number of musical surprises that really work this time and the commercial material is decidedly less generic as well, sadly though the videos hadn’t improved that much and in my mind are inferior to the videos seen on the first five albums.
The album was jointly produced by the band with George Massenberg and Bill Payne of Little Feat and the album would be the final release at the time with Joseph Williams as lead vocalist. This negative factor now proved that the band seemed incapable of holding onto a highly talented vocalist, as not too many bands out there would’ve departed company with vocalists of the caliber of Bobby Kimball, Fergie Frederiksen and Joseph Williams in just over a five year period, this now led to serious credibility problems by the band which I remember were highlighted at the time.