80. Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again (1967)






















Track Listing

1. Mr Soul
2. Child's Claim To Fame
3. Everydays
4. Expecting To Fly
5. Bluebird
6. Hung Upside Down
7. Sad Memory
8. Good Time Boy
9. Rock 'n' Roll Woman
10. Broken Arrow

Review

Ok firstly I am a long time Neil Young fan (Neil Diamond... not so much). So bias out of the way. Buffalo Springfield are indeed a weird band, I'd really call them 3 bands, Young and Buffalo Springfield, Stills and BS and Furay and BS. Frankly they are all amazing and therefore the album comes out good. Neil Young is definitely the more experimental of the three and his tracks have something different to them.

Stills' tracks are also pretty amazing, Furay lags behind slightly but not enough to make any bad songs here. You can see Young developing here some of the things that he would further use mainly on Harvest, his tracks, and particularly Expecting to Fly and Broken Arrow have this orchestral feel to them. Stills, on the other hand is much more of a traditionalist but also a very innovative one and his tracks not only have amazing technical prowess with the instruments but are also beautifully constructed.

Furay leads the group into a much more folksy part of the folk-rock that they are supposedly playing (frankly this album defies categorisation), but this is a welcome change from the more rocksy tracks, so in the end the album comes together really well even though it comes from a completely fragmented band. And this is a problem that will occur in a lot of projects that members of the band get involved in such as Crosby, Still, Nash and Young for example where the album works very well although you can tell where each song is coming from.

So get it on Napster or Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Expecting To Fly
2. Bluebird
3. Broken Arrow
4. Everydays

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

I wanna have like a million of Neil Young's babies.

From Wiki:

The album was released in December 1967 (see 1967 in music) after a tense, protracted period of recording, during which Young was often absent and the band was unable to keep a permanent bass player. (The group's first bass guitarist, Bruce Palmer, spent much of the sessions detained on drug charges.) A number of Los Angeles session players also make appearances.

Among the notable tracks are Young's minor hit, "Mr Soul", a variation on the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction". The album also includes two orchestral experiments Young produced with Jack Nitzsche, a Phil Spector associate: "Expecting to Fly" and "Broken Arrow". Both tracks were intended for solo release, and feature Young only, backed by session players (though Furay overdubbed a harmony vocal on the latter).

Stills contributed four tunes, among them "Rock and Roll Woman", a song apparently about Janis Joplin cowritten (uncredited) by David Crosby, and allegedly featuring Crosby on backup vocals. (He had just been fired by The Byrds.) This song was probably the first collaboration between Stills and Crosby. Simultaneous tension in the Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and The Hollies would eventually augur the formation Crosby, Stills, and Nash.