Blue-eyed soul is often maligned for being a noncommittal, compromised genre. Its very name seems to bear this out—even though it's only admitting something that's been well known about rock 'n roll from Elvis to The Beatles and The Stones, and beyond. The artists and producers showcased on Hide and Seek: British Blue-Eyed Soul 1964-1969, though, are utterly shameless about the hybrid nature of their music, and thank god for it. Arrangements expertly meld plangent girl-group strings, soul horns, and blues and fuzz guitar. Vocal performances cover the same wide spectrum, with male, female and mixed leads, and no shortage of harmonies that were seemingly recorded underwater.

There are 20 songs with not a loser among them, but a few draw extra attention to themselves. On the murder ballad "Now I Taste the Tears," the frazzled vocals of Fearns Brass Foundry's improbably blue-eyed lead singer are matched by heavily reverbed strings and horns that sound like they've been fed through Keith Richards' "Satisfaction" amp. "You Got Me Baby" pairs the most traditional of soul/blues sentiments with shimmering organ and the snarliest garage-rock guitar on the disc, while "Don't Knock It" and "Help Me" best represent the comp's melted aesthetic—piano, horns, guitar, bass and back-up vocals are all gloriously indistinct from one another, as if an intoxicated '60s sidewalk celebration has somehow been preserved in amber for all time.

—Nate Cunningham
05.21.07

Hide and Seek: British Blue Eyed Soul 1964-1969 collects 20 tracks from an overlooked aspect of the '60s U.K. rock scene, namely the blue-eyed, mod soul sound that lurked behind the scenes between 1964-1969. Some well-reissued bands like the Action or the Small Faces dipped their toe into similarly soulful waters, but the bands here for the most part go all out and draft in big horn sections, chunky Hammond organs, backing singers and a feel pitched somewhere between a Northern soul All-Nighter, a sweaty night at the cabaret, and the bottom half of a package tour. In other words, you're looking at pure gold here. Well, almost pure. As with most collections the track list has some clear winners (Barry St. John's devastatingly hot "Turn on Your Light" that out-Lulu's Lulu by a mile, Jon & Jeannie's strutting "We Got Lovin,'" Kevin "King" Lears' wild, indescribable take on "Cry Me a River" (think Bobby Darin on peyote and you're halfway there), the funky antics of Johnny & John on "Bumper to Bumper," the chunky bubblegum soul of Bernie & the Buzz Band on "Don't Knock It") and some dogs (Stone Graphics' cheesy slice of hippie soul "Traveller Man," the corny vocals of James Royal on "I've Lost You") with a whole bunch of interesting goodness in-between. In the final tally the winners far outnumber the dogs and compiler Nick Saloman (known in his day job as the Bevis Frond) proves himself to be a first-class archeologist. Too bad he didn't make the effort to clean up the sound, but Hide and Seek: British Blue Eyed Soul 1964-1969 is still a vital piece of crate digging scholarship that fills a gap most U.K. music geeks didn't even know was worth investigating. ~ Tim Sendra, All Music Guide