Holiday

Performer: America
Distributor: Gotham Distributing Corp.

Notes: America: Dan Peek, Dewey Bunnell, Gerry Beckley. America fully recovered from Hat Trick's dismal results with 1974's Holiday, with producer George Martin's influence rubbing off on both of the album's Top Five singles. With "Tin Man"'s wonderfully polished soft pop ease and the wispiness of "Lonely People," the band was able to recapture the same formula that put early hits like "A Horse with No Name," "I Need You," and "Ventura Highway" in the Top Ten. The difference with "Holiday" is that their light and breezy melodies and attractive folk-rock sound filtered through more than just the two hit tracks on the album. "Another Try," "Old Man Took," "In the Country," and even the clich�-sounding "Baby It's Up to You" contain a sturdy enough mixture of guitar and harmony to rise them above inessential filler, at least as far as America's material is concerned. Cuts like "Mad Dog" and "Hollywood" suffer somewhat from trite lyrics and a seemingly hurried compositional formula, but this album as a whole ascertained that the group was definitely showing their true potential once more. The album that followed Holiday, 1975's Hearts, showed even stronger improvement, taking the overly catchy "Sister Golden Hair" to number one and scoring a Top 20 hit with the Sunday morning frailty of "Daisy Jane." ~ Mike DeGagne

The first half of the 1970s was the heyday of introspective songwriting and close-harmony singing. The band America was at the forefront of the commercial end of this movement, releasing a string of singles that dominated the radio for years. Following their debut smash, "Horse With No Name," a Neil Young-derived, hallucinatory song-story, America scored again and again with singles and a series of records whose titles for some reason all began with the letter "H." Despite the group's indelible association with soft rock, America's understated pop found an unlikely new legion of fans in the '00s indie world.

Click Here for Shipping Options and Policies

Shipping or Dimension weight in pounds: 0.25