Wednesday, November 6, 2024

The Hollies - Listen to Us (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Open Up Your Eyes
2. Do the Best You Can
3. Relax
4. Tomorrow When It Comes
5. Man With No Expression
6. Like Every Time Before
7. Everything is Sunshine

Side B:
8. Jennifer Eccles
9. Wings
10. Try It
11. Water on the Brain
12. When Your Light's Turned On
13. Pegasus
14. Listen to Me

The last album I talked about by The Hollies was Bus Stop, an album that's American in origin but combines tracks that didn't get issued on American versions of their albums. Well they actually do have an unreleased album which would've been their last before Graham Nash left the band and joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash. If we're to assume that this album will be American too then we can't use tracks that were already on American versions of albums but we can use tracks that didn't make it onto them. I also didn't wanna use tracks from the first Crosby, Stills, and Nash album cause it would've been out of our timeframe but I think we have enough tracks without it.  

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

The Kinks - Where Was Spring? (1969)

 

Side A: 
1. Till Death Do Us Part
2. Lavender Hill
3. Rosemary Rose
4. Pictures in the Sand
5. Where Did My Spring Go?
6. When I Turn Off My Living Room Light
7. Creeping Jean

Side B:
8. Plastic Man
9. Groovy Movies
10. King Kong
11. This Man He Weeps Tonight
12. Mindless Child of Motherhood
13. Mr. Shoemaker's Daughter
14. Hold My Hand

As mentioned in my last post about The Kinks, they planned to release an album alongside Village Green Preservation Society in 1968 called Four More Respected Gentlemen but chose not to, so the songs would later be released across two compilations, The Kinks Kronikles and The Great Lost Kinks Album. The title of the latter has been described as misleading cause only two songs from Gentlemen made it onto Great Lost. It turns out that most of these tracks actually came from an album they planned to release alongside Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) in 1969 called Where Was Spring?

Monday, November 4, 2024

The Small Faces - 1862 (1969)

 

Side A:
1. The Autumn Stone
2. Red Balloon
3. Call It Something Nice
4. I Can't Make It
5. The Universal
6. Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am

Side B:
7. Don't Burst My Bubble
8. Every Little Bit Hurts
9. Donkey Rides, A Penny, A Glass
10. Patterns
11. Wrist Job
12. Natural Born Woman

This was an album that the Small Faces were intending to make after their fourth album Ogden's Nut Gone Flake. However there were a good chunk of tracks that didn't have vocals so a compilation album was released instead called The Autumn Stone, kind of like what happened with The Hollies. One of the instrumental tracks called The Pig Trotter would later be released as a bonus track to the first Humble Pie album as a track called Wrist Job.

Sunday, November 3, 2024

The Zombies - R.I.P. (1969)

 

Side A:
1. I'll Call You Mine
2. Imagine the Swan
3. If It Don't Work Out
4. Don't Cry for Me
5. I Know She Will
6. Walking in the Sun
7. I'll Keep Trying

Side B:
8. She Loves the Way They Love Her
9. Smokey Day
10. Girl Help Me
11. I Could Spend the Day
12. I'm Going Home
13. Nothing's Changed
14. How We Were Before

If you remember my last post about The Zombies, I talked about their lesser known collection of singles between their only two albums but they had an unreleased album recorded after their last one. It was officially released in 2000 but all the tracks were originally featured on a box set called Zombie Heaven from 1997. I took out one track which was an instrumental called Conversation Off Floral Street so I replaced it with a track I didn't include before. 

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Herman's Hermits - Rock 'n' Roll Party (3 LP) (1970)

 

Side A:
1. Little Boy Sad
2. Story of My Life
3. Oo-ee Baby
4. Listen People
5. What is Wrong, What is Right 
6. I Can Take or Leave Your Loving

Side B: 
7. Marcel's
8. Biding My Time
9. Wait for Me, Here I Come
10. A Year Ago Today
11. The Colder It Gets
12. Big Ship

Side C:
13. Sleepy Joe
14. Just One Girl
15. London Look
16. Sunshine Girl
17. Nobody Needs to Know

Side D:
18. Something's Happening
19. My Sentimental Friend
20. My Lady
21. Here Comes the Star
22. It's Alright Now

Side E:
23. Daisy Chain (Edit)
24. Years May Come, Years May Go
25. Smile, Please
26. Bet Yer Life I Do
27. Searching for the Southern Sun

Side F:
28. Lady Barbara
29. Don't Just Stand There
30. Big Man
31. Wings of Love
32. Mum and Dad

As you can tell, I love examining these British Invasion bands like The Kinks and The Hollies, but with different albums being released in England and America, it can make their discographies confusing. In the case for Herman's Hermits, they were a band I never got into much cause some of their songs became novelties. But here's some info I found online in regards to an unreleased album by them. "The Both Sides Now MGM discography lists two Herman's Hermits albums that were supposed to have the catalog numbers SE-4590 and SE-4601, but were never released." Then someone else had this to say. "Herman's Hermits were supposed to have recorded an album similar to the Beach Boys' Party album and an album of cover songs. These albums were never released and the covers album was reported to have around 50 tracks (!!!)." But wasn't the Party album already a covers album? There was an expanded version of that one that revealed a lot of outtakes but that's its own blog post. Regardless, if this guy separated the two parts of the album's story then there must be another one out there.

Here's another bit of info that I found online. "MGM Records had scheduled a Herman's Hermits album titled Sleepy Joe but never issued it." I don't know where this guy got this info from, but he also has this to say. "Other than the title track, I wasn't sure what should be included on this album. I've seen no track list for it. But the band's Blaze album was re-released in 2001 with a dozen bonus tracks, including Sleepy Joe, and I thought aha! The only bonus cut I didn't include was the song The Most Beautiful Thing in My Life because it already appears on Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter." I don't have much evidence of this, but my theory is that if they were planning on releasing two more albums before breaking up, then one would be the "party" album of covers and the other would be the "new" album of original material. 

The last album they released in 1968 was a soundtrack from a movie named after a song they released three years before that. The movie wasn't great either so their album sales were on a decline. But I'm sure they would've liked to have released a final album. Like what if they combined both ideas and simply released a double album of all their unreleased outtakes? So I went through their bonus tracks on album rereleases as well as songs from their British versions of albums that didn't make it on the American versions of them and came up with 3 albums worth. So the Sleepy Joe album could be one of them but I didn't just wanna copy and paste this guy's track listing for it. As for the cover I used an AI image colorizer.

But what the guy failed to mention was that the bonus tracks for Blaze actually featured two songs from the soundtrack, plus both rereleases shared a bonus track, so basically I’m short by a song. I think I used all the tracks I could’ve so I went with an edited version of the instrumental track Daisy Chain from the soundtrack which combines both parts. I also included a couple previously unreleased songs from a box set but I stuck them on the first album despite not knowing when they were recorded. The final result is 3 half hour albums.

Friday, November 1, 2024

Timebox - Moose on the Loose (1969)

 

Side A:
1. Yellow Van
2. Tree House
3. Poor Little Heartbreaker
4. Baked Jam Roll in Your Eye
5. Black Dog
6. Country Dan & City Lil

Side B:
7. Eddie McHenry
8. Barnabus Swain
9. Promises
10. Stay There
11. Timebox
12. Gone is the Sad Man

Timebox were a band that existed for a brief time in the late '60s that put out a couple singles but not an album. Though they recorded an album that for whatever reason never came out. I found out about them cause two of its members would later go on to join The Rutles so some of their songs would be used in their alternate universe discography. Apparently the album was supposed to be released in 2018 with this track listing but it never came out. The person who made the Rutles albums also included two more tracks to this album to make it about 40 minutes. But as shown in their compilation albums, they actually recorded enough material to release two albums.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Your Heart - Fall (2010)

 

1. Bianca
2. The River and the Valley
3. Overturned
4. Would Would Would
5. Sadly
6. Autumn Leaves
7. Tell Me If You Like Me
8. I Like You
9. Romance, Bay Street
10. I Want to Be Where the Birds Sing
11. Breakfast

Your Heart was an indie rock side project by Andrew Huang of Songs to Wear Pants To fame, similar to the Girl album I did before. He had some side projects in the late 2000s and early 2010s before focusing solely on music released under his own name. With this he set out to make albums based on the seasons, but he only made two Summer and Autumn before giving up on it and releasing the other two Spring and Winter under his own name in 2014. However he released two mini albums during its original incarnation, Fall and Spring Fling. Fall included one song from the Autumn album and one that would later go on the Spring album. Spring Fling also had some songs that would later go on Spring. Basically this combines tracks from both albums.

The Hollies - Listen to Us (1968)

  Side A: 1. Open Up Your Eyes 2. Do the Best You Can 3. Relax 4. Tomorrow When It Comes 5. Man With No Expression 6. Like Every Time Before...