BGO Records
has done all listeners a favor with this double-CD release --
Winds of Change
and
The Twain Shall Meet
were the two most accessible albums in the output of
Eric Burdon & the Animals
, both aglow in the spirit of the Summer of Love and its long aftermath in San Francisco, and if they had flaws (mostly an over-reliance on
Burdon
as a profound talker on
and too little time to do the extended songs full justice on
), they were still solid pieces of
psychedelia
. Indeed, although they're often maligned by the critics and scholars, this version of
the Animals
produced some of the ballsiest, most intense and involving
psychedelic
music of the late '60s in the form of these two albums -- in truth, once you got past
the Beatles
,
the Stones
the Who
, and
the Yardbirds
, most
British psychedelia
was winky, lightweight stuff, all tinkling harpsichords and
pop
melodies that were too pretty, without a lot of power or much that was memorable. These two
Animals
albums, by contrast, both lingered, mostly by virtue of their singles (which, to be fair, have been excerpted onto a best-of compilation CD); heard in context here, those singles deeply evoke the passions of the period, from the consciousness expansion embodied by tracks such as
"We Love You Lil"
to the powerful and (sadly, in 2004) still-relevant
"Sky Pilot,"
one of the most bitterly powerful of all antiwar songs ever to aspire to popularity during the Vietnam era. The mastering of both albums is very clean, and the annotation is surprisingly thorough. ~ Bruce Eder