Cheap Birthday (Music) (Association) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Birthday

It's like doing doob at Disneyland
Classic California Pop. Perhaps the group's best produced & most coherent - if not strongest - LP, with a few serious songwriting lapses as each of members jockey'd for center stage. The cover art & Bones Howe's production reached out to a potential potheads-with-earphones audience, to no avail. Like a similarly virtuoso vocal group, Free Design, there's some strange goings on beneath even the wimpiest surfaces. Unless you're a fan-atic collector of the Association, skip this & pick up "Just The Right Sound; The Association Anthology," a pricey but worthwhile two-CD set that incorporates the better half of "Birthday". It's like doing doob at Disneyland.

Bob Rixon

---

Good Sunshine Pop, Lacking Diversity
Here we have another budget-line reissue of an Association album, courtesy of the Collector's Choice label. The sound quality is very good, and Richie Unterberger's liner notes, featuring quotations from Associate Jim Yester, are okay and somewhat interesting. But since specific songwriting credits were not part of the original album artwork, we don't get them here!

BIRTHDAY, the group's fourth LP, once again used session players for the instrumental tracks, but thankfully they have loosened up a bit since the previous LP, INSIGHT OUT. The vocal arrangements remain impressive as usual. The problem with this LP is that the stylistic diversity which characterizes most of the Association's albums is missing here. This is all just good sunshine pop which, when listened to all at once, leaves this reviewer wanting more variety.

That said, there's nothing bad here, and many of the songs are worth noting. "Everything That Touches You," despite being a rather lame sequel to "Cherish" (written and sung by the same guy, no less), is an excellent record that became the band's final Top Ten hit. The groovy "Time For Livin'" (one of the few outside compositions on the disc) was their final Top 40 entry on the hot 100. Larry Ramos' "Like Always" is a lively R&B-influenced tune with a clever barbershop quartet-style interlude, while Russ Giguere's "The Time It Is Today" is an exceptionally personal and serious piece of social commentary. Ted Bluechel Jr.'s fantastic "Hear In Here" is an introspective piece, his best composition since the first album's "Standing Still." You could argue that his lead vocal on this track is weak, but the delicate naivete in his voice fits the song to a T. Yester and his friend Skip Carmel came up with "Barefoot Gentleman" and "Birthday Morning," two beautiful ballads that are nonetheless out of place here, drawing too heavily from Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols" for lyrical inspiration. In other words, not even every member of the band understood these songs!

I would definitely recommend this CD to Association fans and sunshine pop collectors. Otherwise, don't go out of your way for it.