Brown Earth/When I Was A Freeport & You Were The Main Drag/Blackpatch/Been On A Train/Up On The Roof/ Upstairs By A Chinese Lamp/Map To The Treasure/Beads Of Sweat/Christmas In My Soul
This strangely titled album from singer-songwriter Laura Nyro’s includes the final original material from her early most creative phase. It features several short pop songs, together with an extended more experimental suite. (US:51)
“My favourite Laura Nyro album: somehow both the shorter, relatively catchy songs on the first side, and the suite (not one superfluous note) on the second side, touch me in a more immediate way than any of her other albums. This is probably because here her expressionism never seems overbearing, and there's a feeling of intimacy that her previous albums only hinted at sporadically.”
“It is divided between joyous, uplifting soulful pop songs and more expansive, experimental, piano-driven epics. Christmas has its own distinctive flavour in that it is more exotic and Oriental sounding than its predecessors. There are subtle Latin inflections in the rhythms and arrangement of Blackpatch, and of course the Oriental arrangement and melodic structure of Upstairs By A Chinese Lamp and aquatic harp lines in Map To The Treasure."
“The first side was on the whole fairly accessible soul-pop, with Nyro's brilliant piano and angelic voice giving it a delicate beauty. The second side was Nyro's most experimental work, and probably one of the most influential works in the development of singer/songwriter music.”
“It's another altogether brilliant album but perhaps not as profoundly so. Stripped down to voice and piano much of the time, with those big brass arrangements somewhat toned down and a smoother 70s sound creeping in, Nyro's self-styled music seemed to be breaking down into its constituent parts.”
“Nyro repeatedly uses pop music idioms, but she never actually allows them to evolve into anything that could be remotely described as pop music per se, and in the process she repeatedly leaves the listener hanging, waiting for musical phrases that she never creates. The result is a very strange tension between what one expects to hear and what one actually gets.”
“This is the last album of original material that Laura Nyro released during her most prolific and inventive years and remains a landmark album, a seamless blend of jazz, pop, soul, gospel, rock and folk.”
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