B, S & T 4

Blood, Sweat & Tears is a terribly uneven band. Though bursting with skill, musicality and vision not many albums are solid. Often enough they are a collection of good, great and even boring material. Unlike other bands in the genre they seemed to draw in opposite directions at times, resulting in an uneven spread. The good parts are superior. The bad or not so good are, quite frankly, not that interesting.

In the year of 1971 Blood, Sweat & Tears released this album, simply entitled 4. As on previous albums the musical contents are made up of jazz, rock, blues, folk and classical elements. The difference being that 4 is a very cohesive and enjoyable album. It is held together in a way I feel some other records fail to do.

The opener, "Go down gamblin", is a terrific piece of raw and heavy jazz-rock. A great riff, fantastic energy and Clayton-Thomas' vocals makes it one of their best hard rock tracks. "Cowboys and indians" is a ballad-ish song with great lyrics and warm atmosphere. "Redemption" opens with a fantastic drum beat and heads into distinctly jazzy territory, as is the case in "Mama gets high": Again, I am not one to go through every track, so I will settle with some final words on the album as a whole.

I think this is a tremendous album. Apart from "New city" this is the one album of Blood, Sweat & Tears I return to the most. It is great from beginning to the piano led end and it's classical theme. What Blood, Sweat & Tears managed to do on 4 is simply to put all that made them great into one fabolous piece of art. Not too sentimental, not too slick and not too overbearing. It still sounds fresh to me and as vibrant as it ever did back in 1971. It did not break any new ground but consolidated what had already been gained over the past few years. The even mixture of hard rock, rock, blues, jazz, classical, folk and what not is very comforting and thrilling, 4 is a charming, energetic and lively album that really shows what Blood, Sweat & Tears was all about in it's first years of existence.