Track Listing
1. Scarborough Fair/Canticle
2. Patterns
3. Cloudy
4. Homeward Bound
5. Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
6. 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
7. Dangling Conversation
8. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
9. Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert MacNamara'd Into Submission)
10. For Emily Whenever I May Find Her
11. Poem On The Underground Wall
12. 7 O'clock News/Silent Night
Review
This is a most beautiful album, indeed. Ok, this album has amazing harmonics, but you put it side by side with the Mamas and the Papas it sounds even better. You are bound to know these songs but if you've never taken particular attention to the lyrics there's a lot you are missing here. In fact I don't think I've ever heard an album which is so subtly political, almost subliminary in its politics and it starts and ends political.
Scarborough Fair political? I hear you ask. Indeed. One of the most wonderful things in that track is how it is mixed with the so called Canticle, a completely different track which is intertwined in the harmonies about the Vietnam War. The same is done at the end in Silent Night, the traditional carol is played over a radio broadcast of the news that day. A harrowing state of affairs which puts the whole carol in a sarcastic perspective.
The songs between these two are also amazing, Homeward Bound is a classic, and the social commentary continues in songs like Simple Desultory Phillipic about Dylan (making fun of Dylan, the fucking bitches, who do Tiny Guy and Male Pattern Baldness Man think they are?). Sometimes the fact that they are literate songwriters doesn't help them that much. Dangling Conversation is a bit name-droppy, as is the Phillipic, and also has an over the top string arrangement.
It is however, one of the most beautiful and finely crafted album that I've had the pleasure to review. They will eventually get better, and Simon is great solo. Bald Bloke... not so much. Bright eyessssss burning like fire.... yes. Napster has an incomplete version of the album for download, which is missing the important last track, so buy it at Amazon UK
or US.Track Highlights
1. Scarborough Fair/Canticle
2. Homeward Bound
3. Patterns
4. Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
They look so uncool. Don't hold it against them (I wouldn't hold it against them if they paid me.)
The News Bulletin:
This is the early evening edition of the news.
The recent fight in the House of Representatives was over the open housing section of the Civil Rights Bill.
Brought traditional enemies together but left the defenders of the measure without the votes of their strongest supporters.
President Johnson originally proposed an outright ban covering discrimination by everyone for every type of housing but it had no chance from the start and everyone in Congress knew it.
A compromise was painfully worked out in the House Judiciary Committee.
In Los Angeles today comedian Lenny Bruce died of what was believed to be an overdose of narcotics.
Bruce was 42 years old.
Dr. Martin Luther King says he does not intend to cancel plans for an open housing march Sunday in the Chicago suburb of Cicero.
Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogleby asked King to call off the march and the police in Cicero said they would ask the National Guard to be called out if it is held.
King, now in Atlanta, Georgia, plans to return to Chicago Tuesday.
In Chicago, Richard Speck, accused murderer of nine student nurses, was brought before a grand jury today for indictment.
The nurses were found stabbed and strangled in their Chicago apartment.
In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities continued its probe into anti-Viet Nam war protests.
Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans.
Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Viet Nam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war.
In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.
That's the 7 o'clock edition of the news, good night.
Scarborough Fair/Canticle Lyrics
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
(On the side of a hill in the deep forest green)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground)
Without no seams nor needlework
(Blankets and bedclothes the child of the mountain)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
(Sleeps unaware of the clarion call)
Tell her to find me an acre of land
(On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Washes the ground with so many tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strand
(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
(War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Generals order their soldiers to kill)
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
(And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten)
Then she'll be a true love of mine
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
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