In the liner notes for 'Third Stage,' amid plugs for such organizations as the Vegetarian Information Service and the Animals' Agenda, Boston scholars will discover the first recorded evidence that the group's reclusive leader, Tom Scholz, has a sense of humor. In an essay titled "For the Technically Curious, or How to Make a Record in Just Six Years," Scholz spends a few paragraphs talking around the issue of why it took him substantially longer to finish Boston's third LP than it took, say, James Joyce to write Ulysses.

But what is one to make of Third Stage, the first and probably last Boston album of the Reagan era? Certainly, there's nothing here to suggest years of work and thought (the group's last LP, Don't Look Back, came out in 1978). If the record represented an ambitious artistic leap, perhaps it wouldn't seem so strange that it took the group (Sib Hashian, Barry Goudreau and Fran Sheehan fans, beware – Scholz and lead singer Brad Delp are the only returning alumni) the better part of a decade to complete it. Instead, Third Stage is a predictable repetition of Boston's hugely successful formula: a melodic hard-pop sound, chock-full of Scholz's epic power chords, that remains, for better or worse, a staple of AOR radio.

Still, much of the charm that made Boston the best-selling debut album of all time is still in place, albeit in a somewhat staler form. "Amanda," the first single from Third Stage, is a pretty enough love song that builds to a typically tasty Scholz guitar solo. Even better is "Can'tcha Say," a romantic rocker that captures much of the radioactive spirit of Boston's best work.

The most telling track on Third Stage, though, is the closing "Hollyann." Here, on a song that pays tribute to the optimistic spirit of the 1960s, Scholz comes out of the closet as the warmhearted, high-tech hippie we always guessed he was. He writes of "a past decade so far behind," of his encounter with "a blue jean lady so eager to be free," about how he can "still hear guitars in the air as we sat in the sand." Scholz, a former engineering whiz kid, is no doubt smart enough to realize how dated these sentiments sound, and the song seems his way of saying he just doesn't care. Unfortunately, Third Stage isn't an album mired in the Sixties but one that seems to have been beamed up from the mid-Seventies, a period in rock history that has aged with considerably less grace. (RS 487)

DAVID WILD