Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful art rock, with voices to carry it off ..., February 5, 2002
This alongside 1971's "Once Again" is BJH's masterpiece. While that album came in the middle of their early period '68 - '73 of dense rock orchestrations, magnificent gloom, King Crimson inspired eerieness and Pink Floydesque dreamscapes (probably fully mastered before Floyd and Gilmour found their own perfect place in the sonic scape), "Everyone Is Everybody Else" was the first of a serious of albums from BJH with a cleaner, lighter sound which would last (albeit qualitywise, fadingly) through to the end of the decade and produce a few other good to excellent albums, though none of them ever quite reaching the cool sonic plateau where this one plays on. The wonderful voices come out clear and vibrant and searchingly, sometimes infinitely sadly across the great melodies and superb instrumentation of songs like Negative Earth, Child of the Universe, Crazy City and Paper Wings. Here in 1974 was a band at the height of their rather magnificent artform. Sure, a couple of years later, a new fashion swept away the foundations where such old stately rockers worked, and only the giants (Led Zep/Floyd/etc) survived with their reputations near intact. However, historical perspective is not a good tool to apply to music listening for critical purposes, as reading any pseudo-arty-nouveau-intellectual type NME critic will sometimes effectively show without any further explanation. Anyway, if you are alive and your ears are open, it doesn't take away from the sound of a record like this one what fashions and particular cultural hostilities come along afterwards ... if you ever want to soar away someplace where only perfectly realized music can take you, (REM, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Beatles, Neil Young, Fred Astaire! & Nena Simone, just to name a strange smattering from my own cultural mish-mash and partly to demonstrate that I am free of the type of cultural imprisonment I just alluded to) you could do worse than buy this one, turn down the lights, fix a drink and let it do what it is trying to do and take you there, gently rising the spirit, soothingly, almost at first, as the vocal harmonies come to soothe and settle in a quality quite near the magical manner of the later Beatles ... until you realize you are already listening at the end to those perplexing, strainingly deranged calls of a guitar connected to someone else's very soul ... and it's screaming an aural anguish and a telling story which is only half inside your imagination and already half alive in the room and the whole world beyond, and though it's calling "for no-one" it's really calling into some ancient place for you and everyone ...
perhaps from where everyone is everybody else ....?
Absolutely majestic, when you hear it for what it is. One of the best Albums of the 1970's.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must album for your collection, July 15, 1998
It's too bad that the only people who will read this review are those who are already familiar with "Everyone is Everybody Else." I have worn this record album out, having played it so often over the past 20 years, and yet I am still mesmerized by this utmost work of art. It's too bad BJH got so little attention in the United States. Had this album been discovered here, every melodic, perfectly crafted song on it would be considered a classic, known in the same way we know so many Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel songs -- it is that good. This album is Barclay James Harvest's finest work, done before the band got infatuated with itself and its overly ambitious -- and disappointing -- orchestral work. With a deep foundation in the blues, "Everyone is Everybody Else" is one of the few Barclay James Harvest records that has stood the test of time, the other being "Time Honoured Ghosts," which is of equal merit. --Richard McCormack
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
outstanding music in every sense, February 1, 1999
After a quarter century of waiting for them to tour (maybe they did , but I missed it) I would still go and see them today. Every moody blues lover has to love BJH who are a little more mellow in their delivery, but also very enchanting. This effort and time honoured ghosts are my favourites, and will always be welcomed as a soothing and relaxing bit of history that I will play forever. John Ridpath,
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by Barclay James Harvest 
