Spanky & Our Gang - Without Rhyme or Reason (Anything You Choose)

The best (though not the best selling) of the group's three original albums, Without Rhyme Or Reason (which is also sometimes known as Anything You Choose/without Rhyme Of Reason) was their most ambitious creation and the album of theirs that holds up best on CD, a 40-minute soundscape in which songs drifted from one into the other. The wryly cynical "Leopard Skin Phones (cleverly describing the needs of the modern recording process) slides into a Little Brother Montgomery narrative, which dissolves to Elaine "spanky" Mcfarlane giving her best blues performance ever on "Mecca Flat Blues," a co-creation of her and Montgomery; the smooth, relaxed title track with it '50s pop-jazz style harmonies, which leads into "1-3-5-8 (Pedagogical Round #2), a more musical successor to "My Bill" from the previous album and segues effortlessly into the wordplay of "Jane" (sung by Malcolm Hale, his only lead vocal on this album), which manages to recall the Serendipity Singers at their most playful, this is the prelude to "Since You've Gone," which starts out as an ethereal ballad but ends as an impassioned, screaming (yet elegantly produced) rocker reminiscent of The Grass Roots from the same period; "Anything You Choose" may be the hardest rock song the sextet ever recorded, and it precedes the romantic, folk-pop/rock styled "And She's Mine," written and sung by bassist Kenny Hodges; "Yesterday's Rain" was a valiant attempt at an upbeat, serious philosophical song, the other side of early hits like "Sunday Will Never Seem the Same" and "Lazy Day"; Hoagy Carmichael's "Hong Kong Blues" gets a lean, fresh treatment, a lively, busy vocal arrangement without too much instrumental embellishment; and "Nowhere to Go" isn't much more than a song fragment, but it makes a compelling intro to "Give a Damn," enhancing the familiar single. Read More