"Blood, Sweat & Tears" by Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968)

View the Premise & Ground Rules for Revisiting Vinyl

Fun Fact: I got my entries out of order and wrote up what was supposed to be this Thursday's entry today and skipped Fine Young Cannibals.  My bad, but I'm not rewriting this now, so we'll just push FYC back one - no harm, no foul.

Filed bewteen: Blondie and The Blues Brothers

"Did you find a directing sign on the straight and narrow highway?"

Key Tracks Big Hits:
And When I Die, Spinning Wheel, You've Made Me So Very Happy

Obvious Filler & Swings-and-Misses:
Once again, we run into that scenario of "hey, we've got a band member who is not the regular singer and doesn't usually write songs who wrote a song and we're going to let him sing it, even though it doesn't sound like anything else we do and isn't particularly good" - that song is Sometimes in Winter

My Overall Rating of the Tracks Separately:
Average (2/4 stars) - this was hard to rate because there are things I really like and really dislike withing almost every song

I'm not much into modern jazz, which means I'm not that much into fusion rock either.  However, the name of the genre does include the word "rock," which means I'm into it at least a little bit.  Strangely enough though, the songs I enjoyed most were the ones that drifted toward psychedelic R&B, like More and More and You've Made Me So Very Happy.

But for the most part, it was songs I liked interrupted by odd detours or songs I didn't care for with interesting
snippets in the middle.

For example, I personally don't see the need to expand God Bless the Child into a long bebop jam number, but I also fully realize that is a matter of taste.  It turns out that my taste is latched firmly onto the original version sung by my favorite vocalist of all time, so that's the version I'm going to link to today.

And that's the really odd thing - "Blood, Sweat & Tears" is not without merit.  They've got some good ideas and seem to dig what they do.  I'm sure there's somebody out there who insists that their version of God Bless the Child is the only one worth hearing, and that's a valid argument from a certain point of view.  It's just not mine.

So, is it an album?  Yes.  Even though it left me kind of cold, "Blood, Sweat & Tears" delivers a complete package.

Up next, "The Raw & The Cooked" by Fine Young Cannibals.  I promise.