marți, 24 martie 2009

Harmony Grass - This Is Us (1969)

A late-'60s band that anticipated Prelude's highly commercial harmony vocals, Harmony Grass evolved out of Tony Rivers & the Castaways. They were signed to RCA a year after being formed in Essex, and scored aTop 30 British hit with "Move in a Little Closer Baby."
Harmony Grass' sole LP has a few songs from their late-1960s singles (including "Move in a Little Closer," their only British hit), and it's also filled out by a few Tony Rivers originals and an assortment of covers. This odd, occasionally impressive and sometimes saccharine mix of pop/rock casts the group among the few British exponents of sunshine pop. Sometimes the airplane-commercial harmonies and cheeriness is vacuous. On the other hand, Rivers proves himself a competent emulator of the Beach Boys' most upbeat material on "Summer Dreaming" and "My Little Girl," as well as the Pet Sounds era on "I've Seen to Dream." On yet another hand, with "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "Tom Dooley," and the weird "(It Ain't Necessarily) Byrd Avenue," the group sounds like a college glee club, here to entertain for your social function, backed by extremely competent studio musicianship. On "Ballad of Michael," Rivers grapples with somewhat more serious lyrical themes in a tale of a philandering bachelor, but the song also finds him trying to squeeze too many words into too little space. (AMG).


Tracklist :
1. Move in a Little Closer Baby
2. My Little Girl
3. What a Groovy Day
4. I've Seen to Dream
5. (It Ain't Necessarily) Byrd Avenue
6. Chattanooga Choo Choo
7. Good Thing
8. Mrs Richie
9. Summer Dreaming
10. I Think of You
11. Ballad of Michael
12. Tom Dooley
13. What Do You Do When Love Dies

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