1. You Can All Join In*
2. Pearly Queen
3. Don't Be Sad
4. Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring*
5. Feelin' Alright*
6. Vagabond Virgin
7. 40,000 Headmen
8. Cryin' to Be Heard
9. No Time to Live
10. Means to an End
B+
I really wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. My only real experience with Traffic up to this point was the overproduced John Barleycorn Must Die. Thankfully, Traffic is a much more grounded album. The sound is blues rock, mostly, with obvious nods to Hendrix, Cream and the Who. Traffic also had an interest in jazz, though, so the songs have a looseness and expansive quality at odds with the claustrophobic production and composition common in rock music of the time. Steve Winwood is a brilliant guitarist and singer, and Jim Capaldi is an excellent and innovative drummer. So musically, this album is pretty damned impressive.
What isn't really impressive is the lyrics. They sound cool, but they're largely pointless. A good example is "40,000 Headmen". It's a pretty cool psychedelic number, with lots of long pretty passages and flute accents and lilting keyboards. It also makes zero fucking sense. I guess if I were stoned I would think the imagery was cool, but I'm not high. It's 10:30 in the morning. I haven't even had a drink yet.
Much more successful are the Dave Mason compositions "Feelin' Alright" and "You Can All Join In". The first is a pretty ballad about depression. The second is a jaunty sort of hoedown-come-country reel the title of which really says it all.
Not to disparage Winwood and Capaldi. There are lots of great moments here. Like the so-so "Pearly Queen", at the end of which the drums kick in and it wanders into a sort of hypnotic psychedelic territory. Really, the whole first half of this album is great. It's just that, as is so often the case with albums, most of the best stuff is loaded onto the front end and it starts to get a bit weak after a while. Although to be fair, I think if you view this as a drug album then if you started when you put the record on, you'd be pretty into the music by the time side two wrapped up.
So I guess doing this project is a good thing because it's caused me to reassess my views on a lot of bands I'd written off over the years. It will be interesting to see what happens when I get to Billy Joel's The Stranger.
Also I'm doing quicker reviews and such from now on because I did the math and at my previous rate I'd still be doing this project when I was 45. The main point was just for me to listen to these albums and think about them a bit, after all.
