Wednesday, 2 August 2017

Cross Country - Cross Country


Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very decent album



This is a very decent album, originally released in 1973.  It has some great moments and the overall sound is lovely, but some of the material isn't all that great.

Cross Country produce a lot of very nice close harmony.  It's not just lazy cliché to compare them with CS&N – they often use very similar harmonic structures and their sound is often somewhat similar to them.  Other obvious influences are The Byrds and The Beach Boys, while the title track is very reminiscent of a couple of Beatles songs – principally the "sun, sun, sun" bit in here Comes The Sun.  They do it all very well and the effect is enjoyable.  (I confess that when I first heard the Wilson Pickett classic The Midnight Hour given the hippy-harmony treatment I rather recoiled, but I was utterly seduced by the end and I love it.)

Not everything works so well.  The opening of the album is very good, but tracks like Things With Wings and a couple of others seem like filler to me – a pretty sound but not much substance.  However much Cross Country may resemble them stylistically the material certainly doesn't have either the musical or lyrical quality of songs by Lennon & McCartney, Stephen Stills or David Crosby, for example.

Reservations notwithstanding, I think this is very well worth investigating if you like that late 60s/early 70s harmony sound.  It's stood up pretty well after all this time and I can give it a slightly cautious recommendation.

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