Cheap Trick: At Budokan (Epic)

CHEAP TRICK are encouraging evidence of a new fluidity beneath the rigid fragmentation of today's pop music scene; they're proto types of the nouveau ironic rock 'n' rollers who couldn't have emerged, let alone become mushrooming phenomena, as late as say, 1975. Cheap Trick hail from Illinois and Wisconsin, and thus seemed to come out of "nowhere", as outsiders fondly describe our shared Midwestern origins. In a little over two years, Cheap Trick have leaped into the forefront of the heavy-weight-contender ranks, via three well received studio LPs, an unstintingly energetic tour schedule, and one of 1978's brightest AOR moments, the breathless 'Surrender'.