Search - Eric Burdon, Animals :: Every One of Us

St. James Infirmary

M. Fantino | San Francisco, California USA | 10/09/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a great album, but, the best thing about it, and what really gets it five stars out of me is the first song on side two, in it's original format, otherwise known as the sixth song, St. James Infirmary. St. James Infirmary is quite possible the finest original blues song to come out of the British Invasion. It would have some competition from their earlier hit, Maudie, which, is probably even better than St. James infirmary but it is a cover of John Lee Hooker's song to his wife. So, disqualified for being a remake.St. James Infirmary is a song about devastation, in the vein of Tim Rose's Long Time Man, not just about love gone wrong, but about the lover dying. You gotta hear it. You just gotta."

Guts

M. Fantino | 07/21/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I am so old that I remember when this recording was first released on vinyl. This recording of St. James Infirmary is the guts of the blues; and it is unforgettable. The entire album pretty well captures the essence of those times. Pretty somber rock and roll."

I don't know

whodoithinkiam | Fullerton, CA | 01/14/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I'm quite the Eric Burdon apologist, especially in the New Animals years, but this album stretches things to the limit. The seven tracks that make up Every One of Us consist of three solid post-psych rockers, a gorgeous instrumental, two meandering spoken word numbers (one being of epic length) and a little dinky one minute blurp. What makes this album essential to the completist is that with the exception of "White Houses", you won't find these tracks anywhere else. "White Houses" is the big single taken from the album and it's one of their best, featuring the one and only Zoot Money, now an bonafide Animal. "Uppers and Downers" is a minute of weird, pretty much to get the listener to track 3, "Seranade to a Sweet Lady" which is my personal favorite of the bunch. It's a instrumental, so Burdon sits on the sidelines while Vic Briggs & co. go through the quiet six-minute jazz number. Then we get "The Immigrant Lad" - huh? About half the track is a confused dialogue, complete with the bad words bleeped out! How considerate. Luckily we get back in the grove with the hard rocking "Year of the Guru" which shows that this lineup could be hard hitting. Same deal with "St. James Infirmary". I've heard many version of this standard and the New Animals pull off one of the finest renditions.
You can pretty much stop the disc at this point, but for those who dare, keep going into "New York 1963/America 1968" - a 19 minute ramblethon that almost casts the a pall on the entire album. There's a huge spoken word chunk smack in the middle of the track. It's a nice story, but my biggest problem with spoken word recordings is that they tend to only be interesting for the first listening. Then you just start fast forwarding to get to the groove-olympics jam session which is pretty cool, but I was pretty winded from the monologue.All in all, this is a pretty good album as long as you can navigate around the filler. It's tough to be profound and pull it off without sounding full of yourself and Eric Burdon walked a dangerous path through this album. He essentially abandoned the "high-psychedelic" style of the previous two albums for a more stripped-down approach, but it came at a time where the band was dissolving around him. The following album, another Animals rarity called "Love Is" introduced a new New Animals with Zoot Money providing most of the musical direction (and stealing a bunch of vocal spotlight from Eric). The Vic Briggs era ends here, with this album, and it is quite apparent on this recording that the times and the sounds were changing.This CD is incredibly difficult to find. Hopefully this track by track summary will be useful to anyone lucky enough the have the option to purchase this disc."