Vinyl Reissue of The Animals' 'Animalisms'

While their top-tier British peers were progressing emphatically by the spring of 1966, The Animals were perfectly happy to continue on as if it were still 1964, doing what they always did best: putting their Newcastle stamp on American blues, soul, R&B, and tin pan alley tunes. "Shapes of Things","19th Nervous Breakdown", "See My Friends", "Substitute", and "Nowhere Man" were not enough to throw them off course. So May 1966's Animalisms was yet another platter of mostly other people's material, the two exceptions being Eric Burdon and new keyboardist Dave Rowberry's "You're on My Mind" and "She'll Return It" (I refuse to acknowledge the lame minute of clapping credited to Rowberry alone...whoops!). 

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Reviews: 'My First Holly Golightly Album' Vinyl debut

Emerging at the peak of the brit-pop boom, Holly Golightly was a bit of an odd duck. Unlike Blur, Oasis, Charlatans, and the rest, she sidestepped the most Union Jacky, tea-sipping mid-sixties references to dredge up the swampy blues of the early Stones and Animals. Hard riffs, harder backbeats, and 1-4-5 progressions were her stock-in-trade, and she began to prolifically grind out raw records beginning with 1995's The Good Things. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Dantalian's Chariot's 'Chariot Rising'

Zoot Money's Big Roll band is one of those group's you read about a bit if you're into sixties British rock, but outside of the ephemeral live scene, their biggest contribution to rock was a certain young guitar-whiz named Andy Summers. Their music was fairly generic big-band British soul and blues in the vein of Manfred Mann, although Money's mildly hoarse soul shout was full of personality and Summers, of course, is no slouch when wielding an axe. 

Review: Vinyl Edition of The Animals' 'Retrospective'

Last spring ABKCO reissued The Animals' first four U.S. LPs with excellent mono sound, and the excellence of most of those albums rebutted any notion that The Animals were never much of an album group. As essential as those LPs are for British blues fanatics, The Animals were mostly a singles group who did their best work when slathering some Newcastle grit and growl over Tin Pan Alley tunes. One of their very best single sides, Atkins and D'Errico's "It's My Life", was not on a proper LP, so the first release of the 2004 compilation Retrospective would be a crucial compliment to those four proper LPs if "It's My Life" was its only track. 

Review: 'Britmania: The British Invasion of the Sixties in Pop Culture'

That The Beatles changed the world is as widely known as how there's this fiery thingy in the sky called "the sun." The most obvious offshoot of the international success of four British lads was all the English groups that went global in their wake: not just critical dah-lings like the Stones, Who, Kinks, and Animals, but also cuddlier fave raves like Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and Petula Clark. But the influence went deeper, farther, and weirder than that, as shaggy, buck-toothed, often incongruously posh British characters began invading American sitcoms, comics, dopey beach movies, cartoons, bath products, and pretty much everything else an ad-man could imagine. The British Invasion was a siege fought and won in the record shops, but its aftershocks rattled everything everywhere. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of The Animals' First Four U.S. LPs

The most important British Invasion groups tended to follow a pretty clear path. The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Zombies, Yardbirds, Moody Blues, etc. emerged from seedy clubs where they cut their teeth on covers of American rock, blues, and soul numbers. They next gradually developed strong and distinctive songwriting voices of their own and flourished on LP. 

The Animals were the one significant exception. There was no development period; they came out of the gate doing what they'd always do best: brooding their way through American rock, blues, and soul numbers. When Mick Jagger was still struggling to interpret the black American artists he worshipped, Eric Burdon did it effortlessly with a deep, seasoned, utterly distinctive bellow that sounded decades beyond his two decades on Earth. However, despite the occasional gem like "I'm Crying" or "Inside Looking Out", neither he nor any of the other Animals developed as fully as Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/ Richards, Townshend, Davies, or the rest while in the band (Alan Price became a fine songwriter in his post-Animals days). When Burdon attempted to compete during rock's most progressive years, he could only produce silly schlock like "San Franciscan Nights", "Monterey", and "Sky Pilot" with a faceless band that was The Animals in name only. 

That means ABKCO's new reissues of The Animals' first four U.S. albums--all recorded before Revolver or Odessey and Oracle or Village Green or Tommy or any of the other albums that define the pinnacle of British pop--represent the pinnacle of The Animals. Perhaps they couldn't compete with those other groups in terms of progressiveness or originality, but when it came to the kind of traditional rock, soul, and blues that make up The Animals, Animal Tracks, Animals on Tour, and Animalization, no one could beat Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine, and John Steel. The use of their American LPs also makes a place for the singles that were The Animals' ultimate raison d'être.