Blood, Sweat & Tears (Vinyl record album review)

Record basics

Album name: Blood, Sweat & Tears

Group name: Blood, Sweat & Tears

Year: 1968

Number of discs: one

Label: Columbia Records

Collection: Brenner / Gessner

Distinguishing characteristics: “G” written on top left of album, indicating that my father owned it

Buy it on Amazon: $105.00

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’ve definitely heard of Blood, Sweat & Tears and expect to recognize some of this music, but can’t name or imagine a single Blood, Sweat & Tears song.

What I expected

Describing the band, the album itself says: “Brash and exciting, their music is a wedding of rock and jazz.”

What it was actually like

This record was terrible. I didn’t expect to love it, but it was a thousand times worse than I imagined. But it was definitely “brash”!

Here’s what I hated the most: if you take bad rock music and mash it up with bad jazz music, it doesn’t turn into something brilliant. There’s nothing clever at all about that. It’s like The Godfather: Part II taking a boring storyline set in 1970s Las Vegas and another boring storyline set in 1920s New York, alternating boring scenes between those two boring storylines, and trying to tell people that it’s a masterpiece.

Blood, Sweat & Tears definitely had plenty of musical talent, but so much of this record was filled with anti-melodic, arrhythmic, even atonal crap – in a word, “brash.”

I recognized Spinning Wheel. And When I Die had some distinct Oompa-Loompa tendencies.

Probably the dumbest part of the whole record was opening and closing it with Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie. That might have made sense for a different record, made by a different band, but all it did here was highlight how much crap the rest of it was.

The only part I liked was the few bars of Blues – Part II that channeled Sunshine of Your Love.

Grade

1/5: horrible enough that I couldn’t make it through