EVERYONE IS EVERYBODY ELSE

Everyone Is Everybody Else finds Barclay James Harvest taking the Supertramp approach, offering up a charming and accessible brand of soft prog that may lack flashy displays of technical complexity but makes up for it in spades with a deeper and more direct level of emotional engagement. Opening with the majestic and melancholy call for peace of Child of the Universe, it presents a selection of songs which inaugurates Barclay James Harvest's most successful period and represents them hitting the ground running with their new label Polydor, who had snagged them away from Harvest. (Should they be called Barclay James Polydor at this point, in that case?)

Perhaps I should say that, rather than Barclay James Harvest taking the Supertramp approach with this album, instead Supertramp took the Barclay James Harvest with Crime of the Century, seeing as this one predated the other. At the same time, when it comes to making this sort of sonic shift I think Supertramp were mildly more successful at capturing a truly timeless sound and a broad emotional palette. Conversely, the material on this album feels very much of its time, to an extent where it can feel a little dated, and the songs all tend to bleed into each other a little as the band rely a bit too much on the same set of emotional levers.