1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 108. The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)

 

I’m not sure why Dimery has such a thing for The Byrds; this album is fine, but doesn’t feel particularly historic or notable. It’s The Byrds doing what they do, some San Francisco Sixties folk-rock, in particularly melodic and harmonic form. A couple of tracks have country elements – Change Is Now flits between C&W and more psychedelic sounds, while Old John Robertson is pretty much a bit of hoedown. There are space-rock flights, such as the Hawkwind-esque Space Odyssey, and some anti-war sentiment in Draft Morning.

On the extended version, there is a track called Moog Raga, which is just that, an Indian raga piece but the “sitar” and “tabla” are actually electronic sounds on a Moog synth, and it’s really in the “so bad it’s good” territory. Coming in after The Call of the Valley, the electronica is no substitute for real instruments. And this, I think, is where this album fits into history, since it is pretty much the first to feature the Moog synthesiser. There’s also a lot of use of the phasor guitar effect to give the swirling, spacy sound of any and all acid rock from now on.

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