JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE

I think I actually had their first two albums, which are great, a few years before I got around to getting this one. What a surprise I was in for. Where the first two are great psychedelic folk pop classics. JB is a huge departure into a wispy folk jazz genre that I'd never heard before and seldom since. It crept up on me over time, to where when I replaced it on CD, it was playing it at work ALL the time. Great background music but also great active listening music.

Like so many bands at the time, they must have been influenced by The Band, and explored an earthier type of music than the pop, rock and psych of before. Unlike others that went back to more straight up blues, folk, or country. Traffic pursued and delivered this modern near jazz take on an old Renaissance era troubadour traditional song. This is oddly more "rootsy" than their earlier psychedelic stuff. Yet this is almost a new form of psychedelic, where they stretch out, but in a more folky and earthy way than their earlier world of 1967.