Neil Diamond - Moods (1972)

There's an old saying in show business that when you put on a show, you have a hell of an opening, coast for awhile, and have a hell of a close.  Moods, Neil Diamond's eighth album and final LP before leaving Uni Records for Columbia, seems to have been concocted on that premise.  It opens with "Song Sung Blue," an introspective expression of how a song develops and evolves, and it closes with "Morningside," an achingly beautiful elegy of an old carpenter's death whose handcrafted table is a legacy bequeathed to his thankless children.  Much of everything in between, however, is Neil coasting.

Moods is crafted like a song cycle, and it shows a great deal of care and ambition with some beautiful orchestral arrangements and intricate acoustic guitar riffs, but too many of the songs are burdened by simplistic lyrics and asinine subject matter.  Tunes like "Porcupine Pie," which imagines a dinner of the roadkill main course complemented by vanilla soup (a double scoop, please, and don't forget the chicken ripple ice cream!), and "Gitchy Goomy," a bit of nonsense Neil wrote for his then two-year-old son with aimless words that don't make sense but are meant to sound fun (but only do sound fun if you're a two-year-old), don't even have memorable melodies.  (And there's nothing really cute about the Native American name for Lake Superior.)  Diamond's attempts at soul and gospel are equally inept; "High Rolling Man" and "Walk On Water" don't benefit from the choirs backing Diamond's lead vocals, as the words to both ditties are thinner than the paper they were written on. Ain't it right?  I said, ain't it right? Ain't it right?  (And the less said about his bilingual "Canta Libre," the better.)

Geez, what does it say about an LP whose best cuts include a pair of brief instrumentals, "Theme" and "Prelude in E Major," the latter being the lead-in into the aforementioned "Morningside?"  It's easy to understand, after listening to Moods, while everyone thought Clive Davis was crazy to spend $4 million to bring Diamond over to Columbia.

There are two standouts in the middle of this LP.   "Captain Sunshine" takes advantage of the neo-classical music around which Moods is centered to create a dreamy ballad worthy of comparison to Rodriguez's "Sugar Man," and the much-maligned "Play Me" - forever cursed to be identified as the song about the songs she sang to him and "brang" to him - is actually a charming number that looks at the yin-yang of human relationships through the metaphor of composing music.  The music itself is an irresistible repetitive acoustic guitar riff (provided by session man Richard Bennett) supporting a beautiful string section.  If Diamond had changed the words or the verb tenses and maybe hadn't sweetened the sound so much, "Play Me" would rank as one of his greatest achievements.  Because even though Neil Diamond got and may still get derision for inventing a new past-tense word that no Delta bluesman would be given a hard time for (critics would have celebrated a blues lyric like "She done brung me a song" as profound), he's even had fans come up to him and say they wish he'd worked more on the song's words.

While Moods has its defenders, the best evidence of Neil Diamond as a pop singer-songwriter with classical flourishes can be found elsewhere.  In fact, it can be found on his follow-up album, his Columbia debut - the eponymously titled soundtrack for the movie Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was successful as the movie itself was not, vindicating Davis' then record-setting $4 million deal with Diamond.  And despite some fine moments, Moods is still a weed in Neil Diamond's underrated and impressive career.  Bob Dylan had Self-Portrait, Elton John had Blue Moves, Neil Young had Everybody's Rockin' . . . every garden grows one.                   

(This is my last review for awhile, as there's too much going on in the world right now for me to bother with record reviews.  I just hope we're not at war with Denmark by the time you read this.)