Customer Reviews

Blood, Sweat & Tears 4

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you like horns, these horns roar. Possibly the best horn band ever. Listen to the beginning of Redemption where the King of all drummers Bobby Colomby let's loose. This is, by far, the best B,S & W album to buy. Period.

This is an excellent album. I started listening to it almost thirty years ago and have never tired of it. The horns are phenomenal. When combined with David Clayton Thomas's unique voice, it's nearly unbeatable. Momma Gets High is a soulful, gritty song with very seductive horns and DCT's vocal at it's finest. Cowboys and Indians is a very strong track. It and Momma Gets High are worth the price of the CD. Look to My Heart is a quietly beautiful instrumental that eases into your head and leaves you smiling. High on a Mountain is a smooth track that lazily draws you in as DCT sings the story. Lisa, Listen to Me is a little weaker but a nice track with lyrics that all women will appreciate. John the Baptist has sharp lyrics and DCT's voice makes the song. Go Down Gamblin' is a bit of a let down but only because the other songs are so good. For My Lady is a beautiful song and a joy to listen to. Valentine's Day is also a pleasure. You can't go wrong here.

I always refer to this as their mellow LP becuase there is no breakout, absolutely driving uptempo tune (More and More from 2, Lucretia MacEvil from 3) although Go Down Gamblin' tries but, for me, does not succeed. Overall it is still great to listen to this CD when you are in a laid back mood. HOWEVER Sony has doon a terrific job remastering this recording and bringing together the original LP graphics. If my memory serves, there was a Quad release of this LP...how about a 5.1 SACD guys!!

This 2009, just-released, remaster is stunning.

I always thought that the Columbia/Legacy edition of many years ago could never be beat. But wow...I compared the Legacy to this and this new version is marvelous. The album has even more power than before, the instruments have a clarity unimagined, and it simply roars past the Legacy edition.

This is like hearing the album for the first time.

Even if you already have this, it's worthy of an immediate re-buy. I'm not familiar with this Friday Music label, but the remaster producer, Joe Reagoso has done a spectacular job with this classic album.

This particular album accentuates how a band that enjoyed such tremendous success, could be so unaffected as to turn out a mature and well constructed album of charts that are similar but vastly different from their previous albums. This innovative band continued, with this recording, to be one of the great aural joys of their era. For all those who have this on vinyl you MUST have this on CD, a masterful job of engineering. The highpoints are "Go Down Gamblin'" with David Clayton-Thomas being surprisingly good on guitar. Raunchy guitar lines over awesome brass, with Jim Fielder humming on bass. "Cowboys and Indians" - mature, thoughtful. Dave Bargeron's mellifluous trombone gliding above the arrangement. "Redemption" - strong unorthodox drumming(Max Roach meets Butch Trucks) by Bobby Colomby. Sharp Brass attach lead by the stratospheric Lew Soloff, and Dave Bargeron taking off at dead run and shifting to fourth gear on trombone. The touching "Valentine's Day" with Steve Katz plesant easy vocal style and the classically inflected piccolo trumpet solo of Lew Soloff over Chuck Winfields trumpet, "Mama Gets High" - Dixieland Rock and the intropsective piano , trumpet collaboration of Lew Soloff and Fred Lipsius. It is a shame that this band has become one of the best kept secret joys in music, when far lesser bands have been lionized. They were the first of their kind and there never was another. Some say that you cannot wed one musical idiom to another. This is proof that you can.

of all of the early BS&T albums, I think this was the best. Some will disagree and favor their 2nd (the first with David Clayton-Thomas), but I think that this is such a cohesive work that it deserves the nod. It is listenable from start to finish. Cowboys & Indians is my favorite track, but there's not a bad one on it. I hope it gets the remastering treatment it deserves, like their earlier works.

This one goes with me there.

I remember a review of this saying that the band showed how discipline actually means freedom. Such is the case on this one.

Cut after cut is wonderful, not a trace of filler. But my personal favorite is Mama Gets High. Compare it to anything in music, it is so different, a rock song with Dixieland-style horns. Can you imagine the program director of a radio station getting this and listening to it?

Sadly, little of this CD was ever played in any of the BS & T concerts I attended.

This is a favorite mainly because Dave Bargeron joins the horn section. That's him all over redemption and his tuba adds more depth. Plus, he wrote Mama gets high with Steve Katz and that's his horn arrangement too.This album is not as strong as some of the other B,S and T. But, Dave Bargeron playing more than makes up for it.

I have always love tha originality of BS&T. Their first three albums showed that they could take other singer/songwriter's music and create such a completely different version that the song would belong to BS&T forever. Blood Sweat & Tears 4 was going to be the album where they put their own songwriting to the test. All but two songs on this CD was written by the group. The exceptions: "John the Baptist" (by Al Kooper, ex-BS&T member) and "Take me in your arms" It's also interesting to note that while recording this album the group got so frustrated that they even asked Kooper to help produce it.

Music-wise, this is a very good CD. Although only two songs got any real airplay, "Go Down Gambling" a Clayton-Thomas rocker, and "Lisa Listen to Me" a upbeat melodic number, just about all the songs are great. My favorite is Redemption, a hard driven song that has your classic BS&T sound. Although not their best (Blood Sweat & Tears, their 2nd album will always be their bench-mark) this by far tops BS&T 3 and anything that came after.

This cd is excellent! All the tracks are remarkable, however, "Redemption" "John the Baptist" and "Cowboys and Indians" have to be some of the finest arrangements and overall musicianship ever recorded by a horn band or any band for that matter! Simply an exciting and inspiring achievement. One of my top twenty cds.