Reviewed by Sheffield Chastain
Released: 1981 The Foxrun Band Embrace Genre: Canadian Regulated AOR Pop Rating: 2.75 out of 5 Highlights: Untouchable Hearts Cops And Robbers The Foxrun Band - originally calling themselves Darkstar and changing it to The Foxrun Band after little to no success as Darkstar (Allen reviewed their 1980 album “Escape Routines”, giving it a rating of 1.5 …. so the name change was certainly warranted), were surely beneficiaries of the CanCon Regulations. This pop heavy AOR Canadian outfit offers up a pretty tepid album of easy AOR songs with a smattering of interesting jangle-y sophisti-pop. CanCon, for those who don’t know, is the “Canadian Content Regulations” instituted in 1971 in Canada that ensures that a certain percentage of content disseminated IN Canada is made/produced BY actual Canadians (currently that percentage is 40% for radio, up from 25% in 1971). What this gave us is a catalogue of Canadian acts that were propped up by quotas, rather than quality, with Canadians themselves perceiving these acts as “inferior products”. After listening to The Foxrun Band - milquetoast AOR “rockers” serving up adequately palatable AOR "sophisti-pop" - can one blame the Canadian music listening populace? The Foxrun Band succeeds best when there’s a bit of jangle-y edge coupled with an undertone of sophisti-pop - à la The Style Council or Prefab Sprout - like on the opening track Untouchable Hearts or the bright and chipper Cops And Robbers. But those successes are few and far between. Merely competent production, competent musicianship, palatable singing, and inoffensive song writing undercuts what, I think, CanCon was meant to do. Though I’m sure CanCon gave us many, many wonderful things we would not have gotten without the Regulation this, unfortunately, was not one of them.
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