63. The Byrds — Fifth Dimension (1966)

Magic carpet ride?

1. I really dug the last Byrds album, so I was pretty amped to hear this one, and found myself a bit disappointed. It’s solid, if unremarkable at a high level. Which is a somewhat odd thing to say for an album that tries to do as much as this one does. You’ve got folk-country tunes (“Mr Spaceman”), proggy, psychedelic rock bangers (“Eight Miles High”), a song with a learjet taking off dominating half of the stereo mix (“2–4–2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)”). You’ve got lovely harmonic folk rock that still call to mind modern Fleet Foxes (“Wild Mountain Thyme”). But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, I think.
2. “Eight Miles High” really is wild — I’ve seen it described as attempting to play Coltrane on a guitar, and that tracks. If you’d asked me to guess which of the bands in this list were most likely to register as a Rush precursor, I’m not sure The Byrds would’ve been my pick, but here we are.
3. The problem comes in the juxtaposition of sounds. “Eight Miles High” is followed up by a cowbell-driven, propulsive cover of “Hey Joe,” which works. But it’s preceded by the languid “I Come And Stand At Every Door,” which is incredibly jarring. The band can’t seem to decide where to fall on the folk vs rock spectrum, and rather than blend the sounds effectively, they end up sounding like a mixtape of 3–4 different bands.
4. Still, there’s a lot of good here. It’s not a bad listen by any means. Just a frustrating one. I can see a world in which The Byrds were the biggest band around. Instead, they’re left as one of the most influential, with incredibly high peaks, but never able to put the whole package together. Not a bad outcome, I suppose.

One Essential Song:

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