Roger the Engineer

著名的早期英国摇滚乐队， 三位著名的吉他手，Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, 和Jimmy Page都从The Yardbirds开始了他们的音乐生涯。这张1966年的专辑是乐队唯一一张纯原创专辑，某些歌曲被认为开了重金属的先河。但用现在的眼光来看，整体风格实在重不到哪里去，倒是那些属于迷幻摇滚时代的和声和装饰音让人印象深刻。 这张专辑最通行的名称是Roger the Engineer，尽管这个名称并没有出现在专辑封面上，封面上的名称是乐队的名字，而在美国发行的时候使用的名称是Over Under Sideways Down。 这张专辑在滚石杂志选出的500张历代最强专辑中排名第349位。 Once Jeff Beck joined the Yardbirds, the group began to explore uncharted territory, expanding their blues-rock into wild sonic permutations of psychedelia, Indian music, and avant-garde white noise. Each subsequent single displayed a new direction, one that expanded on the ideas of the previous single, so it would seem that Roger the Engineer — Beck's first full album with the group and the band's first album of all-original material — would have offered them the opportunity to fully explore their adventurous inclinations. Despite a handful of brilliant moments, Roger the Engineer falls short of expectations, partially because the band is reluctant to leave their blues roots behind and partially because they simply can't write a consistent set of songs. At their best on Roger, the Yardbirds strike a kinetic balance of blues-rock form and explosive psychedelia ("Lost Woman," "Over, Under Sideways, Down," "The Nazz Are Blue," "He's Always There," "Psycho Daisies"), but they can also bog down in silly Eastern drones (although "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" is a classic piece of menacing psychedelia) or blues tradition ("Jeff's Boogie" is a pointless guitar workout that doesn't even showcase Beck at his most imaginative). The result is an unfocused record that careens between the great and the merely adequate, but the Yardbirds always had a problem with consistency — none of their early albums had the impact of the singles, and Roger the Engineer suffers from the same problem. Nevertheless, it is the Yardbirds' best individual studio album, offering some of their very best psychedelia, even if it doesn't rank among the great albums of its era.