Somewhere in England (1981)
1. Blood From a Clone
2. Unconsciousness Rules
3. Life Itself
4. All Those Years Ago
5. Baltimore Oriole
6. Teardrops
7. That Which I Have Lost
8. Writing's on the Wall
9. Hong Kong Blues
10.Save the World
This one might not be quite as bad as
Dark Horse but it comes awfully close.
There's really not that much to say when it comes to the music here, other
than it's pretty bad. The story behind the album dictates that this had
the potential of being even worse. Essentially, Warner Brothers
rejected the original album saying some of the songs weren't good
enough. "Some of the songs" is being kind. What becomes scary is that
when the songs that replaced those are, in fact, the only
listenable pieces on the album.
All Those Years Ago is one of those songs. I'm not sure of the
original history, but the version here was a homage to the late John
Lennon released very shortly after his death. Ringo and Paul are on it,
which almost makes it a "Beatles" piece. The lyrics are definitely
about John, but the music just flat out isn't very good. It was very
popular and it rose to almost the top of the chart, but one has to
wonder if it did so well because of the circumstances surrounding the
song rather than the quality of music itself. Sadly, this is one of the
better songs. The best song, which only manages to be
"pretty decent" is the poppy Teardrops, also released as a single
but didn't do that much. Oh, and yes, this was one of the "replacement"
songs as well.
George even writes about this experience in one of the songs - Blood
From a Clone, he had the habit of writing songs about his blatant
troubles with whomever. Let's just say it's barely mediocre. A couple
of Hoagy Carmichael songs are present. Whatever. They seem hopelessly
out of place but don't affect the quality either way. George just
sounds like he's lumbering through. The instrumentation and production
are just flat out boring and haphazard. He just seemed like he'd rather
be elsewhere.
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