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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Only The Who could have produced this, 11 Jun 2006
What separated the great British Bands (The Kinks, The Who, The Stones, Beatles, Small Faces) from the rest of the world was that their songs contained the essential elemements of great songwriting - harmony, melody, rhythmn, syncopation, quality musicianship, storytelling, pathos, humour and whimsy. Us Brits were particularly good at the last two and one only has to look at the Kinks complete masterpiece Autumn Almanac or the Small Faces Lazy Sunday Afternoon to see what I mean. I mean, c'mon gang, can you think of anybody else but Ray Davies who could come up with the chords to something lke Autumn Almanac? Well, yes, actually - Pete Townsend.
This fine, clever and genuinely funny album sprang out of those wierd "becoming aware" days of "A Quick One", pirate radio stations, mass marketing, selling the beautiful dream and so on. Some of the songs are very funny, some very moving, some very rocky, all interspersed with pirate radio jingles .. "Radio London Reminds you ... go to the Church of your choice".
I cannot think of anybody but the Who who would have produced this , at this precise time. The Band had already shown that they thought that the world was really a funny old place with "Pictures of Lily", "Happy Jack", "Dogs" and so on, but this work contains at least 4 genuine masterpieces - Sunrise, a most stunning love song with a difficult and affecting jazz chord sequence, Tatoo, which is just so funny (My Dad beat me 'cause mine said "mother"), I can see For Miles, the most savage and chilling revenge song of all time and The Medac Song - yes, I love this ... "Henry laughed and cried "I got 'em" ... his face is like a baby's ... bottom". Go on, stop smiling!! Pure genius. Pointless to detail all the tracks, but there is not one weak moment here.
But what is also remarkable is the playing and the singing. The vocal harmonies on Tatoo are just gorgeous, and when Townsend moved from Rickenbacker to Strat on "Miles" and pulled off those crunching chords and evil single note solo, there is so much of "less is more" about all this. Daltrey sings like an angel, as does Pete, and Mad Man Moon repeatedly kills the kit. Entwistle was always a stunning bass player, and it is no accident that the solo on My Generation was a bass solo, another first, played on a Danelectro bass.
God, these boys were good! Not long ago, my wife bumped into Roger at the fish farm beds at Fovant and he signed the vinyl album for her. "Blimey, love, I didn't know anybody actually bought this one", he joked. Yes, they did, Roger, and they still are. This is a groundbreaking, magical, funny, moving and beautifully played total masterpice. And don't we all wish that just for once, we could have a bath in baked beans?!
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Who as they might have been, by Pete Townshend, 16 Feb 2003
Reviews of this exquisite album usually focus on the unique "I can see for miles" with its stinging guitar and stampeding elephant-on-speed drums - a most wonderful anthem to paranoia of female treachery. But "Miles", like the opener "Armenia City in the Sky" are not really typical of the album as a whole. Forget the ad jingles too. When I had this album in the sixties I taped it without the jingles - infinitely better! The great thing about a lot of the songs is that Pete Townshend sings them in his high register and he is at his yearning best. He gives The Who a much more sensitive sound than their later heavier recordings which suited Roger Daltrey's voice. Having said that Roger does nice teenage angst vocals on Tattoo, a beautifully crafted and lyrically sophisticated song, which adds to Pete's catalogue of investigating the meaning of gender. The stand out tracks, which rarely get mentioned, are "Our love was", "Relax" and "Sunrise" - all perfect summer love songs of a wistful, blissful type for which The Who are not generally known. These songs are so good that you wonder why Pete didn't return to this style until his solo album Who Came First with songs like "Pure and Easy". Maybe it was because he had a stampeding elephant to play with! The bonus tracks are a truly great bonus with "Glittering Girl" and "Early morning cold taxi" standing out as tracks nearly good enough to go on the original. I really appreciate the way The Who give extra value on their CD re-releases but I have to say that they unbalance the perfection of the original if listened to right through. This album is so spiffing that I wish I had never heard it and bought it on the strength of this review. How wonderful it would be to hear it for the first thousand times again.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The missing link, 17 Mar 2002
By A Customer
The seminal album; what The Who did between "My Generation" and "Tommy". This excellent remastered CD has the bonus of out-takes and extra tracks, some which in hindsight would not have been out of place on the original.
From the opening Keane composition "Armenia - City in the Sky", this ingenious mix of quasi-psychedelic tunes and pirate radio jingles makes the whole package an invaluable time capsule for the period and the ultimate pop art album, at a time when they had moved away from it. Fortunately this liaison with psychedelia was short lived and by the time "Tommy" was released (check out "Rael" and "Glow Girl" and you will hear the foundations of "Sparks", "I'm a Sensation" and "It's a Boy") they had shed this in favour of a more polished rock image.
But listen to their Byrds-inspired harmonies on "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" and it's pure flower power.
The commercial links are clever in their execution and impact and were an idea spawned from Townshend's idea of selling advertising space on records; I love the Premier drums one - Keith Moon was never one for the drum solo (which is amazing to think for such a showman!) so it's a rare treat to hear him in full flow; and as a footnote when Daltrey first suggested playing commercial jingles to Townshend a year or two before he sneered at the idea.
This is a great album and a must for all Who fans.
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