One of Chicago's greatest efforts. I still love the album today from an artistic standpoint. However, ever since 1970 I've wondered why this album has such a incredibly distant, super-compressed, mid-range sound with absolutely no bass or dynamic range? Was it intentional?

A great sophmore effort by Chicago, though it doesn't compare to their debut. The best songs to be found here are 25 or 6 to 4 (My personal favorite), To Be Free, Poem For the People, and the It Had Better End Soon suite.
However, I have one major problem with this album, and that is the overly-long Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan. A twelve-part suite consisting of mostly either brief instrumental bridges or uninspired lyrics describes it quite nicely, at least in my mind. In fact, there are only four good parts of the suite; 25 or 6 to 4 (A hard, head-banging classic and, as I said, the best song to be found on the album), Now More Than Ever, To Be Free and Color My World. Even then, Color My World scores in the mid-sixes, which is another way of saying "Just barely good". The antiwar suite It Had Better End Soon is a lot stronger.
Where's all the jamming? They should've definitely ditched most of Ballet for something along the lines of Poem 58, South California Purples, or I'm A Man from their debut album. But both Chicago and Chicago II should belong to any classic rock fan.

chicago's 2nd album was quite different form their first..instead of relying on the longer cuts like they did for the first album they worked on much shorter songs for this one and also had 2 suites in this akbum too the excellent "ballet for a girl in buchannon" and the somewhat annoying "it better end soon" peter cetera(god) makes his songwriting debut on this disc too with "where do we go from here" the most noticeable song on here is the classic "25 or 6 to 4" that song never gets old for me anyway while this album ins nto as good as their first(none of them are) this is still a very good cd well worth a listen