Year of Sunday by Seals and Crofts (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Year of Sunday

Group name: Seals and Crofts

Year: 1971

Number of discs: one

Label: Warner Bros. Records

Collection: Brenner / Gessner

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

Buy it on Amazon: $5.19

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I have never listened to this record, but it will be my third by Seals and Crofts. The previous two were:

Summer Breeze (1972): 3/5

Greatest Hits (1975): 3/5

What I expected

Soft rock.

What it was actually like

When I Meet Them had much more of a country sound than I anticipated, with good vocal harmony, and was pretty lively. I thought it was the best song on the record. Springfield Mill also was pretty country, with some fiddle, but it was not as good a song.

Parts of Antoinette had an interesting sound, perhaps from a Spanish style guitar, or even oud, and High on a Mountain had some electric guitar parts that I liked.

Sudan Village, for some reason, sounded like a calypso song. Last time I checked, Sudan was not in the Caribbean, but hey, I’m just a Geography Bee winner.

Cause You Love was easy listening crap, and pretty representative of most of the rest of the record.

The worst song was certainly the title track Year of Sunday, which was slightly Oompa Loompa and had some truly awful lyrics, such as:

Along came Moses
Gave the world a push
Climbed upon a mountain high
He got the Ten Commandments from a burning bush[1]
And put together his first tribe

And also:

And then time passed, soon the dark clouds
Came and covered up Mohammud’s sun
But the young Báb, down in persialand
Came to tell us of the Promised One

Good grief. I don’t mind religious music, and some of it is actually really good, but trying to shoehorn the latest hippy fad religion that you discovered last month into your pop record is hopelessly lame[2].

Grade

2/5: weak, but I was able to listen to the whole thing

References[+]

References

↑1 | Umm, no. The burning bush story is in Exodus chapter 3, while the Ten Commandments story is in Exodus chapter 20 – those are two completely different stories that were set at completely different times and different places. Did these illiterates even bother to crack open a bible? Obviously not.
↑2 | And by the way, Bahá’í people are wonderful, and I think there should be more of them.