Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by The Moody Blues (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Group name: The Moody Blues

Year: 1971

Number of discs: one

Label: Threshold Records

Collection: Brenner / Gessner

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

Buy it on Amazon: $9.89

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’ve previously reviewed two Moody Blues records: On The Threshold of a Dream and a compilation called This Is The Moody Blues. My general impression is that they had some good parts, but that the self conscious weirdness (“Space Oddity vibes”) detracted significantly from the overall experience.

What I expected

More progressive rock with Space Oddity vibes.

What it was actually like

That was basically right, and Procession, the opening track, was exactly what I meant; it would be difficult for me to imagine a dumber song than this. One More Time to Live must have been their attempt to do that: it’s an attempt to see how many words they can rhyme with “Desolation” (answer: a lot).

The Story in Your Eyes, however, is about as good as progressive rock gets: coherent, rhythmic and melodic, and with a guitar riff that evokes the Allman Brothers (or something) – which is far better than Our Guessing Game, which I kept thinking was about to turn into Somewhere Over the Rainbow (and not the ukulele version by that extraordinarily large Polynesian fellow on youtube, but rather the version you remember from “The Wizard of Oz”).

Emily’s Song was familiar to me, though I don’t think this is the version I’ve heard in the past, and very Beatlesque.