Man this thread and band is making me re-evaluate everything. I mean I've held these albums in high regard for a long time, but I always try to sell them short and then I listen to them a second or third time and they just become so classic to me.

Can't believe I forgot this one. Probably my favourite Byrds album (although after yesterday, Untitled gives it a run, particularly the live cuts at the beginning).

Yep still is. 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' is probably my favourite of their Dylan covers.

For a long time, I was under the impression that this was one of my least favorite Byrds albums or that it at least was one that seemed to be overrated and didn't really do much for me. Turns out that in this digital age, a big reason for my indifference towards Fifth Dimension can be chocked up to a really shockingly muddy and low quality rip.

I'm listening to the semi-recent Sundazed Records mono remaster now with brand new ears, and my god it's a like a totally different album. I even upgraded my digital version from a source that I don't know and it also sounds a lot better (DJ's link). What I'm saying is that, if you want to hear this album, you want to find something a pretty high quality, because there is a lot going here.

It's still not my favorite Byrds albums, but it is exciting because it's the one in which David Crosby starts to add some of his flair and the psychedelic influences of the time start to come to the front, but there is still that underlying country-rock sound they created with their previous album. For me, whereas Mr. Tambourine Man was full of 5-star pop songs and Turn! Turn! Turn! was full of great ideas, Fifth Dimension is full of...well, nothing really. It's a mishmash of styles and sounds, some that work really great (I've always loved "Why" and "Eight Miles High"), but a lot just miss the mark. It's almost as if in their efforts to increase their experimentation, to get a fuller sound, they get a bit lost in their own ideas.

That being said, it is an album called about the fifth dimension, so maybe that is part of the point. I still like this album a lot, and as is the case with all of the early Byrds albums, it gets better and better with repeated listens, but while my enjoyment of the album has increased, I'll still probably put it near or at the bottom of the first wave of Byrds albums.

How many horrific offenses have been associated with the name "Terry Melcher"? I've never heard this album before and am legitimately excited.

Since I've known The Byrds, "Younger Than Yesterday" has always seemed to be their most overall well regarded album by critics. It's the album that came out for the Summer of Love, featured David Crosby more prominently, allowed the band to really experiment with the psychedelic side of their music while still retaining a unique American, rootsy sound underlying it. It's a good record and one I've tried and tried again to love.

And it just doesn't resonate with me like a lot of their other records.

Yes The Byrds were in reality the only real American counterpoint to The Beatles, but the reason they succeeded as a band before and after this album were because they were both more poppy than Beatles and more country, genres that really allowed them to have their own sound.

So the songs that work for me here are the more straightforward ones, echo-laden, featuring the group harmonies, and ones that sound like goddamn Byrds songs. "Have You Seen Her Face" is a fantastic pop song, "Time Between" is a blast, the "My Back Pages" cover is another A+ Dylan cover, "The Girl With No Name" is one of my favorite Byrds songs (and sets the stage for the next couple albums). The rest of the record is mostly good, but it just doesn't grab like those tracks do. It's not as though going so far out that they are alienating me or anything, it's just not what I want from the band.

Regardless, a Byrds record that isn't an all-time classic for me is still a fairly great record and one that I'll continue to play lots.

By 1968 bands had begun to fully realize not only how to stretch out their sound in the studio, but had really started to grasp the concept of creating complete, unified ALBUMS.

That's how "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" succeeds where "Younger Than Yesterday" comes up short. Whereas "Younger Than Yesterday" may feature some of their most memorable songs, it also sounds like a great band consciously trying to be experimental, to mess with the studio and try to compete with everything else that was happening in 1967. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it seemed pointless and the experimentation would take precedence over the actual songs. On "The Notorious Byrd Brothers", the band is comfortable in their skin, has established a psychedelic lean to their country songs that works and have thus crafted their most confident and best album to date.

This album is really a blueprint to a handful of fringe country acts that followed for the next 40 years, the cosmic cowboys that put out some great records in the 90s and 00s - though none hold a candle to what the Byrds do here. Almost everything works, even the short, distorted guitar solo on "Tribal Gathering", which would sound out of place among the entire Byrds catalogue works in the context of this album. Songs build into one another, flow easily and there is this beautifully dreamy haze that permeates the whole record. It's still sunny pop music, but like the best music of The Beatles, there is something else at work here, something that makes it more important and more "musical" than their great early recordings.

It's a fantastic record, one that demands replays and should find itself amongst the the pantheon of other great 60s pop records more often.

Trying to determine how much I want this: http://www.popmarket.com/details/25809737

(the price is $62.99)