Daniel Amos - Mr. Buechner's Dream (Collector's Edition) (2011)

Front man Terry Taylor and his cohorts in Daniel Amos have been together, in one formation or the other, since the mid-1970s. Putting their longstanding association into perspective, when the group's self-titled debut long-player first hit the shelves in 1976, unleaded gas was 60 cents a gallon, Jimmy Carter was still a year away from taking his seat in the Oval Office, soon-to-be Apple Computer co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still building prototype PC boards in Jobs' garage, and rapper-turned-pop-superstar TobyMac was just beginning his second semester of fifth grade. Even as early as the next full-length, 1977's Shotgun Angel, though, the group began to leaven the country-rock of the first record with straight ahead rock and roll fare. Between 1978 and 1995, the band put out a fairly regular stream of albums, each of which added one or two new wrinkles to their ever-broadening musical palette.

Released in 2001 (and recently reissued), the two-disc Mr. Beuchner's Dream, as much as anything else, works as a sort of summary of that which has transpired in the band's musical development, and that of the music world in general, over the previous three decades. The opening cut, "This is the One," will bring a sparkle to the eyes of those old enough to remember Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys. "The Author of the Story," on the other hand, is a raw, droning, riff-driven piece that sounds like a lost artifact of the late '60s psychedelic movement. "Over Her Shoulder," with its languishing, laid back instrumental portion, is pure Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, right down to Taylor's spot-on Petty vocal impersonation. "A Little Grace" could well have been a working demo for Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs' 1965 garage rock classic, "Wooly Bully." And the genre-defying "Faithful Street" sounds like Burt Bacharach covering The Beatles with Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass on instrumental support...