Eric Burdon & The Animals - The Essential Eric Burdon & The Animals - A Decade Of Rock Blues (1990)

The main problem with this Australian compilation is its subtitle, "A Decade of Rock Blues." Fans of the Animals will be aware that the group wasn't actually around for anything like a decade, but the tenure of the unit known as Eric Burdon & the Animals was even shorter, stretching only from the fall of 1966 to the end of 1968, and the length of time covered by the recordings on this disc is even shorter. Then there is the phrase "Rock Blues." Actually, Burdon & the Animals had shifted musical styles by this point. So, to be accurate, the subtitle of this album would have to read "18 Months of Psychedelic Rock." By that measure, however, it really does include the short-lived unit's essential recordings, among them its U.S. Top 40 hits "San Franciscan Nights," "Monterey," and "Sky Pilot," as well as the chart entries "Anything" and "White Houses," along with LP tracks from Winds of Change, Every One of Us, and Love Is. For the most part, the band's originals were the singles (the exception here being the title song from Winds of Change), while the album tracks tend to be covers. Either way, Burdon and the band often stretch out and improvise so that, for example, the leadoff track, "River Deep Mountain High," one of four tracks on the disc that run more than seven minutes, veers into a Burdon ad lib about Tina Turner, the singer on the original version of the song. Traffic's "Coloured Rain," which runs nine and a half minutes, features plenty of psychedelic guitar, presumably courtesy of John Weider, who also contributes the instrumental "Serenade to a Sweet Lady." The digital transfers leave much to be desired, sounding like they were made from a source far removed from the original master tapes. But the album is a reasonable representation of the music of Eric Burdon & the Animals from the summer of 1967 to the band's demise a year and a half later.