Horizontal

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The Bee Gees’ second internationally released album <i>Horizontal</i> extends the group’s creative and popular streak with an increasingly orchestrated and somber pop sound. Their sensitive vocals and pitch-perfect harmonies made them immediate standouts, but it was their songwriting that ensured their staying power. <i>Horizontal</i> begins with “World,” one of the group’s most enduring hits (though oddly not in the U.S.), the deeply dramatic “And the Sun Will Shine,” and the ripe for the era of psychedelia “Lemons Will Forget” (a nod at the Beatles’ Apple Records business enterprise). The group’s perverse and experimental side was also fully executing as the guitar-led harder rocking “The Earnest of Being George” illustrates. The reissue’s additional tracks put things in grander context. Several singles of the era expose the group’s extreme ends: “Barker of the U.F.O.” “Sir Geoffrey Saved the World” and “Mrs. Gillespie’s Refrigerator” contain either backwards guitars or other trippy sitar effects for a strong late-1967 psychedelic sense, whereas the classic hit “Words” was inexplicably left off the album. For all their first-rate professionalism, the group easily alternated between silly and sublime (“Deeply, Deeply Me” and “All My Christmases Came At Once” rest side by side). A playful era for all.

via Apple Music