Chicago comes at us in 2022 with 14 new songs on their 38th studio album, Born For This Moment. With more than 100 million albums sold worldwide, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2016, and multi-Grammy Awards, this legendary rock and roll band with horns is back in familiar territory with their white soulful funk, horn bleats, and soaring vocals that spearheaded them to MTV-fame in the mid 80s. No, there is no vestige of the rock-jazz innovators from this band’s early days. But Born for This Moment reveals some solid songwriting and playing.
Featuring three original members — Robert Lamm on keyboards and vocals, Lee Loughnane on trumpet and vocals, and James Pankow on trombone — Chicago is rounded out with Ray Herrmann on sax and flute, Wally Reyes, Jr. on drums, Ramon “Ray” Yslas on percussion, Tony Obrohta on guitar, Loren Gold on keyboards and vocals, and Eric Baines on bass and vocals. Born For This Moment is also the first Chicago album of original material to feature singer Neil Donnell, who joined the group in 2018.
Sly percussion and horn stamping the melody get us into the pop-snap title track opener, setting the MOR groove pretty much for the first half of this collection. Along the way, we also get mid-80s style Chicago ballads in “Someone Needed Me The Most,” featuring guest vocalist Bobby Kimbell of Toto, and “If This Isn’t Love,” which sounds straight out of a John Hughes’ movie soundtrack.
It’s tunes that come after that lift this album above the ordinary. Robert Lamm leading with his growly vocal, along with guitarist Tony Obrohta rocking out on “She’s Right.” Lamm also takes the vocal on the bossa-nova based “The Mermaid-Sereia Do Mar,” complete with an extract from Caetano’s Veloso’s “Samba de Verão.”
The band nods to their earliest days with the deliberate guitar-strummed beginning of “Our New York Time,” plucked right out of 1969’s “Beginnings.” But this is really where any comparison of this band’s 70s days ends. Still Born For This Moment delivers where other rock albums fail — the perfect complement of in-the-pocket horns with a crackerjack big band around them, playing modern rock for audiences young and old.
~ Ralph Greco, Jr.
