Review of album by Martin Popoff, taken from his book " The Collectors Guide to Heavy Metal - Volume 1: The Seventies"

Max Webster - High Class In Borrowed Shoes
(Anthem '77)
The one unifying factor coursing through Max Webster's magnificent
premiere was a rural warmth that evoked images of. I dunno. carved
cherry wood. In comparison, High Class In Borrowed Shoes, although no
heavier, evokes a sheen of polished aluminum, with its bright,
uncompromising headphone-ready drum sound, its everlite, dewdropped
piano work, and its painstakingly perfect execution. But High Class
sails the same passionate seas of wanton adventure, offering arguably
four metal or hard rock works, most panoramic, scorching and insistent
being America's Veins and the swooping and snatching title track, the
song improbably combining boogie and pomp until circumstance breeds good
fortune. Lyricist Pye Dubois, although not an official noise-making
member of the band (in the great tradition of The Dead's Robert Hunter),
continues to be the Max Webster's philosophical engine and perfect,
crucial soulmate to Kim Mitchell's fluid guitar mathematics, Pye
offering memorable yet cryptically cast aspersions on society's ills and
man's monologue with respect to his allotted space. And as was the case
with the debut, all points of the compass lead to the heart no matter
what the action level, the album scrubbed clean then chiming by way of
elegant Terry Watkinson keyboard work, and absolutely top-of-the-line
pride in craftsmanship on the part of the whole circus. It seems almost
a mixed symbol that the band would so plainly embrace controversy with
the gender-bending weirdness of the cover art, given that all parties
involved, including producer Terry Brown, worked so hard to make Max's
challenges so warmly inviting and simultaneously so state-of-the-art. It
basically stands as more evidence that the complexities of both Max's
message and its medium were beyond marketing comprehension, and
unfortunately, as history would bear out, beyond the market.