Search - Duncan Browne :: Give Me Take You

The exquisite 1968 debut album of Duncan Browne

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 01/15/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There are several elements that make. Duncan Browne's 1968 debut album "Give Me Take You" stand out. One is that Browne's lyricist David Bretton is a legitimate poet, which gives these songs a dimension usually missing in folk and folk-rock music on either side of the Atlantic. Additionally, Browne has a superb singing voice that matches well against any other singer-songwriter from that period. Browne's work also introduces elements of classical music into the fusion of folk, rock, and pop that are covered by these songs, that gives several of these songs a most distinctive sound. Unfortunately because the label he recorded for was going down for the count, Browne's debut album was not the commercial success it should have been; only one single, "On the Bombsite" was released and Andrew Loog Oldham cut short the recording sessions. The result was that it five years before Browne released his next album, a self-titled work that is just as good; but it is difficult not to think on what Browne might have done during that period in the studio. "Give Me Take You" is a melancholy collection of introspective songs (e.g., "I Was You Weren't," "Alfred Bell"), and while I came across Browne's work because I was trying to get beyond the work of Sandy Dennis, Richard Thompson, and other luminaries of the British folk-rock scene, the classical elements make it unique. There is a simple innocence, if not a naïveté to these songs, that give Browne his own niche in this genre. As is often the case with these remastered and reissued albums from the 1960s and 1970s, there are five bonus tracks, including the Mono Single Versions of "On the Bombsite" and "Alfred Bell," along with the demo version of the former, and a pair of previously unreleased tracks, "Resurrection Joe" and "Final Asylum." David Bretton does the liner notes, a necessity forced by the death of Browne in 1993. There are a lot of excellent albums from this period in British folk-rock music waiting to be rediscovered by new generations on this side of the pond, and Duncan Browne's "Give Me Take You" is one of them. One of the nice things is that most of the reviews of this album will lend you to more such gems for you to track down."