RARE BIRD

Ever since I first heard EPIC FOREST in 1975, I've wanted to hear the tracks - Hey Man - Turning the Lights Out - Her Darkest Hour - Fears of the Night - Turn It All Around - Title No. 1 Again (Birdman) and I feel compelled to listen to them again and again. Melancholy and outbursts in both the lyrics and the rhythm create a pleasant sense of tension. The polyphonic harmony vocals are magnificent. The rhythm changes fit perfectly. Epic Forest is also a success in terms of composition. - Baby Listen - House in the City - Epic Forest are excluded from this. I couldn't warm to them. After Rare Bird's debut album, Epic Forest is my favorite.

I would have to disagree with some reviewers here regarding Epic Forest. I have several Rare Bird albums, and my opinion is that this is their best. Back in the 70's a member of one of the bands I was in discovered this album and shared it with all of us. We loved it so much that we ended up playing two of the songs off this album several times live. That is actually saying a lot, in that at that time we were mostly covering southern rock...no progressive songs. I remember wearing the album out basically, even though I had a pretty great sound system at the time. I would have to go to my local music store and sift through an immense record catalog to find it and special order it. Nowadays it's pretty easy to find on eBay. Unlike their other albums, I find this to be a cover to cover album. I can start one side and listen all the way to the end of the other side. Being a guitarist, I can appreciate the licks. Also having an appreciation for melodic things, I can appreciate the intricate melodies and harmonies. I'm thinking that maybe some reviewers are put off by some of the sentimentality of a few of the tracks. Personally, I just enjoy the melodic nature of them. Some listeners may be put off by a few lyrics that seem nonsensical, but nearly every progressive rock band has a few of those. (Yes comes to mind specifically) In closing, I am quite serious about my rating. I have never purchased as many copies of a single album as much as this one...mostly due to the vinyl wearing out!

"Rare Bird" is the eponymously titled debut full-length studio album by UK rock/progressive rock act Rare Bird. The album was released through Charisma Records in late 1969. Rare Bird was formed in in 1968, originally working under the Lunch monicker, but in late 1969 they changed their name to Rare Bird and soon after signed a recording contract with Charisma Records and recorded their debut album. The release of the album came only a month after signing the contract with Charisma Records. That´s how fast things went back then. Rare Bird released the "Sympathy" single from the album, and it was a highly successful single, worldwide selling more than a million copies.

Stylistically Rare Bird play an organ/electric piano dominated type of rock/progressive rock music, featuring no less than two keyboardists in the lineup, and a powerful, organic, and technically skilled drummer/bassists/guitarist duo to support them. Lead vocalist Steve Gould handles both guitars and bass on the album. The music is predominantly rooted in 60s psychedelic rock rather than looking forward to the 70s progressive rock sound, although the structures and some of the more progressive oriented songwriting ideas do point in that direction (especially a track like "Iceberg").

The album is well produced, featuring an organic, analog, and overall well sounding production. Upon conclusion it´s a good quality release from Rare Bird, featuring memorable songwriting, strong musical performances, and the above mentioned well sounding production job. A 3 star (60%) rating is warranted.

This boxed set brings together Esoteric's welcome remasters of the five Rare Bird studio albums, a biography of the band, and a hitherto-unreleased live set hailing from a few months after the release of their swansong, Born Again. The albums are presented in nice-quality cardboard sleeves replicating the LP releases (including gatecovers), which feel nice and sturdy in contrast to some of the thinner buncha-albums-in-a-boxed-set releases out there, so Esoteric have kept up their usual good production quality here.

The remastered studio albums sound as good as they ever have; the tune-up is particularly welcome when it comes to their self-titled debut and As Your Mind Flies By, both albums affected by fairly hasty and low-budget recording processes. I'd say that only As Your Mind Flies By is truly essential - but having good versions of the rest available in a well-priced package is certainly nice, and perhaps this offering might prompt people to give more of a chance to their Polydor-era albums, which seem to get short shrift - whilst I wouldn't put them on the level of As Your Mind Flies By, I think they're rather neat, and a bit more consistent than the debut.

If there's one disappointment to be had here, it's that the live set doesn't really touch on the band's early, more emphatically prog-oriented style. It's a fairly terse set (they weren't headlining, but were playing support for Barclay James Harvest), and it consists solely of songs from Born Again itself and Somebody's Watching - the band clearly wantng to promote their newer sound instead of harking back to their original style. On the plus side, the live set absolutely cooks, injecting a little extra life into this material.

It would have been good to be able to get a nice-sounding live release from their more symphonic era - there's bootlegs which circulate with material from some German dates on the As Your Mind Flies By tour, though having not heard those I can't speak to their sound quality and it's entirely possible that they are simply unusable, so I can't really mark down the box for not stretching to include substandard material.

As it is, this provides a nicely complete summation of the Rare Bird story, a worthwhile archival release that should help ensure the legacy of a band who never enjoyed the mega-success of Charisma cousins Genesis (or, for that matter, the cult stature and the rapturous reception in certain markets that fellow family member Van der Graaf Generator enjoyed), despite the early chart success of the Sympathy single. It's an OK song, but it'd be a shame for their reputation to rest solely on that; with this set, Esoteric have helped make sure that doesn't happen.

Born Again was Rare Bird's third album on Polydor, and final album of their run; they would split up within a year or so of its release, the band having become discouraged by their lack of commercial success and popular acclaim. In the essay accompanying Beautiful Scarlet, the recent boxed set which offers tasteful remasters of this and their other albums, Steve Gould describes the album title as "wishful thinking"; far from finding the band Born Again, it saw them bowing out.

Even without the benefit of hindsight, the album title is faintly misleading; far from being a radical reimagination for Rare Bird, a last stab at a new musical direction in the hope of righting the ship (like Dave Kaffinetti's most successful band project, Spinal Tap, attempting their "jazz odyssey"), the band give one last try to the same general approach they took for all their Polydor albums, having debuted it on Epic Forest. This veers away from the proto-prog and symphonic prog of their debut and As Your Mind Flies By (their masterpiece) and instead mashes up elements of bluesy hard rock, West Coast folk rock, and perhaps a little funk, and applies progressive songwriting sensibilities to the overall package.

Once again, proceedings are softer this time around than they were on Epic Forest - the hard rock elements of Epic Forest having been toned down - and as a result this release can be seen as a companion piece to Somebody's Watching. For my part, I quite like it - it's got an air of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young jamming with Supertramp at points, with the closing song, Last Tango In Beulah, in particular sounding a little like a prototype for mid-1970s Supertramp, thanks to Kaffinetti's keyboard contribition.

On balance, it really feels like time had already passed Rare Bird by in 1974. Sure, CSNY might have been riding high in the early 1970s, by the middle of the decade they were a little past their peak, as were the Byrds and other West Coast groups whose sound influences Rare Bird here; whilst Epic Forest still felt close-ish to the zeitgeist, here on Born Again it feels like Rare Bird are digging in their heels as the rest of the musical world is passing them by. As such, it's no surprirse that the album was a flop on its original release. Equally, the passage of time has left it ripe for a reappraisal, and Esoteric's sensitive remastering job (available by itself or, more conveniently, as part of the aforementioned Beautiful Scarlet box) helps to tease out its finer points.

Somebody's Watching - but is anyone listening? That was the question which Rare Bird were grapping with as they crafted their fourth album, since it was now some four years after Sympathy gave them their last hit single and fickle audiences hadn't stuck with them in the intervening time.

Anyone who was still paying attention, though, may well have concluded that this album was Epic Forest Part 2, a similar mix of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young-esque West Coast folk rock with elements of bluesy hard rock, all mixed together with progressive sensibilities that retained a link to their early albums without going for a full symphonic prog compositional approach.

This time around, the West Coast folk rock aspect seems to be a bit more prominent, the hard rock seems to be dialled back a little, but at the end of the day it's a similar enough prospect that if you liked Epic Forest, you will like this - but if you think Rare Bird took a wrong turn on that album, this won't convince you otherwise.

Rare Bird's third album finds the band going through a heap of changes. Graham Field is out, and the old "two keyboardists, no lead guitar" approach of the band is no more - indeed, this time they have two lead guitarists.

This would prompt a shift in their sound, even if they had otherwise stayed the course stylistically, but there's more changes involved; having produced an early prog masterpiece in the form of As Your Mind Flies By, the group seem to have decided that the side-long Flight from that album was about as far into symphonic prog as they wanted to go, prompting them to dial back this time around. The songs are shorter, there's more influence from the sort of bluesy hard rock which was then-current, and in general the whole package seems much more conventional.

Whilst I can't say this hits the heights of its predecessor, I have to admit the band are quite good at this new sound. There's just enough progressive and power pop ingredients in the mix to stop affairs descending into tedious Led Zeppelin posturing, it's clearly a notch more thoughtful than much of the hard rock/blues rock at the time, there's an interresting dose of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-esque harmony vocals and folk-rock influence on the title track, and on the whole it's an interesting new sound for the band. It's not the direction I'd have chosen for them in an idea world, but they make it work and more or less win me over.

The production values on this are notably tighter than on their preceding two albums; their debut was the first release from Charisma, and so was recorded on a tight budget and in a hurry because the fledgling company simply didn't have the resources to offer more. Their second album saw the band themselves try to take on the production process, and in later years they've admitted that they were a bit in over their head. By comparison, the album sounds remarkably good, the band certainly not wasting the opportunity presented by virtue of being on a major label.

The first issue of the album included a bonus 7" single with three extra songs on it; these have been appended to recent CD editions. Whilst "bonus tracks" are more of a product of the CD era, these songs very much fall into that category - in other words, they're inferior material which didn't make the cut for the main album. Setting them aside, though, Epic Forest provides a solid basis for a new beginning for what you could think of as Rare Bird Mk. II - there's no going back to the approach of the first two albums, but the fresh approach here is interesting in its own right.

Today I review the album that has spawned my name and been quite influential on me as an artist, Rare Bird. I know this album like the back of my hand, having heard it many times yet as can't give this album higher than three stars. Albums are a collection of songs, should even one falter the album is stricken from god tier 5*. Rare Bird has many beautiful songs that are unfortunately counteracted by equally terrible songs.

Iceberg opens the album, the longest track and one of the best. It opens with energetic keyboard chords and possesses effulgence vocal lines delivered by Steve Gould (Fantastic singer). Great song.

Times follows and is just awful 2* filler material. Cheesy vocals and annoying drums propel this song to cringe inducing territory. Fortunately a distorted key solo saves the song from 1*.

You went away is quite sublime, a pretty ballad lamenting the going away of another.

Melanie is a song with an absolutely horrific head. Downright agitating, bad enough I'm considering removing the bridge from it. Speaking of the bridge it is great, jazzy, chill and intoxicating.

Beautiful Scarlet, my namesake is a song that just resonates with me. Memorable.

Sympathy was a hit in Europe back in 1969, it's ok.

Natures fruit is not bad, worse then some of the better tracks while similar enough to not be needed on the album.

Bird On A Wing is the same as Nature's fruit.

God Of War is an epic closing track with a dark edge the song proves to be a haunting coda to Rare Bird

Overall this album is 3/5, however I do recommend listening to some of the tracks, specifically; Iceberg, Beautiful Scarlet and God Of War.

Kind of bad.

Continuing there move from their early sound into a less successful rock band Rare Bird created Born Again. This album has the same unremarkable albums you find on the previous album without anything verging on good. What really drives this down to 2* is the song Last Tango In Bellulah. Large portions of the song consist of the cringe inducing line, "truckin' on down" repeated over and over. I find this song to be pretty much irredeemably bad, thus the otherwise average album falls to bad territory.

Overall I don't recommend this album, even if you like Rare Birds previous efforts I don't recommend "Born Again" as the album adds nothing you haven't already heard done much better.}

Solid album.

Most of the songs on here follow the sound of Epic Forests 3 minute long songs. One song, Dollars (8 minutes) is purely instrumental and really delightful music. It plays an old westerns theme then heads into jazzy goodness lead by guitar and returns to theme but at half the tempo to create a really majestic sight. I think this song shows the wasted potential of Rare Bird and this album. I wish Your Lost off Epic Forest was included on this album as it could have marked a lovely change from that Early British sound of Rare Birds first two Albums towards Jazz Fusion/Funk.

Overall this is a solid album, if you like Rare Birds previous album then I'd recommend this for sure, particularly the song Dollars.