THIRD TIME AROUND: AN INTRODUCTION TO RARE BIRD

If you are a first line-up of Rare Bird fan, this compilation album can only deceive you because it is a condensé of their Polydor years/albums and excludes their first two Charisma albums (there is a compilation called Sympathy for those first two albums). Deceived as a proghead, that is because as Graham Field and another member departed, they got replaced by a guitarist breaking, thus their double KB attack and their sound was dramatically changed , grew closer to funky rock as each new album arrived even though the remaining Kafinetti and singer Gould retained the writing ends of most of the tracks. Epic Forest is present with three tracks and its follow-up Somebody has six or seven but I am not sure the best tracks are present here with the exception of Dollar. This compilation does reflect, though, well enough the new musical directions chosen by the band, hence two stars (the odd good tracks on the latter albums are not worth hunting the vinyls down. For those interested, you should hear Nic Potter's (ex-VdGG) bass on a few tracks, and I believe John Wetton might have also helped in the later days of the band. No matter how you read this compilation or the albums it's making references at, Rare Bird were out for some bland music that was just lost in the tons of radio-friendly music it had to compete with.

I have not seen the original albums of this second line-up released on Cd yet (but I have not looked them up specifically either), but I suppose Esoteric Records will someday remedy to this situation