Homecoming
Artist: America
Community Score: 8.50

Homecoming, America's finest album, refines and focuses the folk-pop approach found on their debut release. The songs here are tighter and more forthright, with fewer extended solo instrumental sections than before. The sound quality is clear and bright; the colorful arrangements, while still acoustic guitar-based, feature more electric guitar... Read More

Just a Boy
Artist: Leo Sayer

Before Richard Perry took Leo Sayer to the top of the charts in 1976 and 1977, his former bandmate and sometimes songwriting partner David Courtney provided all the music to Sayer's lyrics here and co-produced with manager Adam Faith 1974's Just a Boy album, featuring the Top Ten 1975 hit "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)." Leo Sayer had a geeky... Read More

Silverbird
Artist: Leo Sayer

Leo Sayer's debut album introduced a singer/songwriter (actually he wrote just the lyrics; David Courtney did the music) of some talent, though not remarkable talent. The production screams 1973, with its mainstream pop and hard rock beds and some overlays of symphonic strings, and Sayer sometimes strongly echoes Elton John's early-'70s work,... Read More

Pilot (From the Album of the Same Name)
Artist: Pilot

With its swirling keyboards and falsetto vocals, "Magic" became one of the great one-shots of the '70s, and it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with one-hit wonders that Pilot's accompanying full-length isn't as good. Despite the lack of strong material, the album is hardly without merit. Pilot, along with producer Alan Parsons,... Read More

Horse with No Name
Artist: America
Community Score: 9.60
My Time
Artist: Boz Scaggs
Community Score: 10.00

Music critics of the early '70s kept predicting big things for Boz Scaggs, but his records of that period had trouble finding more than a cult audience. My Time continued with a mix similar to Moments from the previous year, with the opening "Dinah Flo," a great soul-drenched rocker that should have been a hit. In fact, the first three tracks... Read More

Boz Scaggs & Band
Artist: Boz Scaggs

Although most listeners know Boz Scaggs primarily for his 1976 disco-era, multi-million seller Silk Degrees, he produced several excellent recordings in the years leading up to that breakthrough. Boz Scaggs & Band is the middle release of a three-disc spurt which Scaggs produced in a two-year period, between 1971 and 1972. Although it is weaker... Read More

Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop)
Artist: Dave Loggins

Kenny Loggins' second cousin hit the big time for a couple of months in 1975 with "Please Come to Boston," a serviceable and sentimental soft rock gem from his second album, Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop). Part of the lexicon of harmless '70s singer/songwriters like Dan Fogelberg and James Taylor, Dave Loggins never again regained the... Read More

Angel Clare
Artist: Art Garfunkel
Community Score: 9.00

Garfunkel (he was billed without his first name here) had a lot riding on his debut solo album, and Angel Clare, named after a character in Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, lived up to the heightened expectations for the man who had sung "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and other Simon & Garfunkel favorites. Garfunkel took no chances,... Read More

Close to You
Artist: The Carpenters
Community Score: 7.46

Hurriedly put together in the wake of the success of the title song, and containing the follow-up hit "We've Only Just Begun," Close to You is a surprisingly strong album, and not just for those hits. Richard Carpenter's originals "Maybe It's You" and "Crescent Noon" are superb showcases for Karen Carpenter's developing talent, the latter a... Read More

The Singles 1969-1973
Artist: The Carpenters

There's a certain inherent sadness listening to this concise 12-song collection of the Carpenters' early hits, especially as it opens with "We've Only Just Begun," with its hopeful, dreamy lyrics -- for it was never supposed to be definitive, just the first of at least two such collections. But changes in the public's taste and a slackening... Read More