For a short work week it felt like a long one, but I’ve made it to Saturday, and ready for another music review. Are you also ready for another music review? Well if so, please read on!
Disc 1714 is…The Time Has Come
Artist: The Chambers Brothers
Year of Release: 1967
What’s up with the Cover? Some sort of nature shot. The tree on the right looks to have been previously struck by lightning. To the left we have a bloom of calla lilies.
In the middle the Chambers Brothers, sporting a wide assortment of striped pants. These are some great clothes but not ideal for whatever amount of hiking takes you to this woodland location. I hope they at least wore sensible shoes. Actually, who am I kidding? I’ve never had much time for sensible shoes. I hope they’re wearing shoes as dope as their pants.
How I Came To Know It: You know that Fatboy Slim song, “Weapon of Choice”? The one with the dope bassline, and the video with Christopher Walken dancing?
I loved that bassline and went on a journey to find out where Mr. Slim had sampled it from. Turns out, it was from the Chambers Brothers song “All Strung Out Over You”. That, plus knowing a few other tracks on the album and I was inclined to a deeper dive. And here we are.
How It Stacks Up: The Chambers Brothers released six studio albums, but this is my only one, and so it can’t stack up.
Rating: 4 stars
Half of the songs on the Chambers Brothers debut “The Time Has Come” are covers of other people’s tunes, but it is easy to forget that when you are immersed in the record’s magic. These lads put their own twist on every song, whether it is an original or a timeless classic.
The first song – and the record’s best – is one of the originals. As I noted earlier, “All Strung Out Over You” has a bassline that is so Goddamned groovy it carries the load for two totally different songs. The Chambers Brothers original is offset with hand claps, and some first-rate soul singing with the boys adlibbing off one another in a way that makes you wish it would never end.
“All Strung Out Over You” is also our first taste of the interesting mix of styles this record explores. The Chambers Brothers are one third gospel, one third soul and one third flower power. All that stuff was front and centre in 1967 but blending it all into a single sound is what makes this record stand out amongst its contemporaries.
After the original, we get into a cover tune. “People Get Ready” is a remake of the Impressions’ devotional released two years’ prior. The Chambers Brothers version is chunkier and more grounded (hard to ground the Impressions with the airy vocals of Curtis Mayfield). The remake also feels decidedly more…hippy. You can imagine hearing the original in church, but the Chambers Brothers version is more at home at a sit-down campus protest.
A similar treatment is later applied to Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”. Is it as good as Pickett’s original? Reader, it is not, but is still awesome and puts a fresh twist on the song and lets the Brothers briefly call it their own.
Which brings us back to the album’s other original masterpiece, “Time Has Come Today”. With its signature guitar bit, and a sound that will make your soul be psychadelized” this is one of the great “restless youth” tunes of a generation.
And yet the Chambers Brothers manage to wreck it with a lot of excess noodling. The first three and a half minutes, pure gold. The next eight (yes, the song is 11 minutes long) a mix of distortion fueled stoner guitar and unfocused drumming. Yuck. I held hope for the fact that my CD copy had a bonus track of the song that was only 3:52 and called “radio edit”. Surely this would be the song minus the noodle!
Reader, it was not. It was the radio promo for the album, so you get the song in snippets with some sixties dude talking over it to exhort you to buy the album, “now available on Columbia records.” Barf.
Fortunately I have a five-minute version on the Crooklyn soundtrack, so I’m set. But since that version doesn’t feature on this record, it can’t help the ranking. Sorry - not sorry, Chambers Brothers.
Best tracks: All Strung Out Over You, People Get Ready, I Can’t Stand It, Romeo and Juliet, In the Midnight Hour, 1/3 of Time Has Come Today (up to the moment they start noodling incessantly)
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