It's New to Me: 2 Years On by the Bee Gees (1970)

Photo of Mona Kingsley from Screenland magazine, April 1922

Sometimes I think that I damage my credibility by raving about every new thing I hear. I'm the kind of guy that looks for the good in everything, but there's such a thing as going too far. Which I may be doing today, by writing some very positive things about one of the Bee Gees' post-Odessa records. Odessa is a handy stopping point for the band, marking the end of their run of great albums in the '60s as well as being the last record before Robin Gibb quit the group. But, as it turns out, a year later Robin was back and the band recorded a new album celebrating the time apart, appropriately titled 2 Years On.

2 Years On opens with its title track, a grandiose pop song in the Odessa style - for some reason, I assumed that this had been the big single from the album. It wasn't - the song on the record that brought the Bee Gees their first Top 5 hit in the US is "Lonely Days", a song that I don't particularly like. With a stark contrast between its wistful verses and stomping, bluesy chorus, "Lonely Days" gets compared to the sophisticated pop approach of Abbey Road, but it really doesn't work for me. It doesn't help that the chorus lyric is a simple repetition of the non-rhyming, "Lonely days, lonely nights - where would I be without my woman?" It's one of few weak spots on the album, though.

"2 Years On" is the only obvious single on the record, but there are also a few surprisingly rocking songs that work really well (like "Back Home" and "Every Second, Every Minute"). But if you're listening to the Bee Gees because of their ability to rock hard, you're doing it wrong - the Bee Gees are all about the melodramatic balladry. And 2 Years On has its share of great ballads. "The 1st Mistake I Made" has a Dylan-esque sadness to it, and the closing track "I'm Weeping" (possibly the perfect title for a Bee Gees song from this era) features little more than Robin Gibb's bell-clear voice singing a hymn-like melody over a pulsing drumbeat and organ. My favorite, though, may be "Alone Again", the song that follows "Lonely Days" on the record and is a much better take on the same theme. It has the biggest chorus on the whole record, so big that it comes close to sounding totally maudlin, but that's a gray area where the Bee Gees do some of their best work.

Overall, I find 2 Years On to be an album that doesn't break much from where the band had left off the previous year with Odessa. The interesting arrangements and harmonies are great and bring me back to listen to it again and again, but I'm starting to worry where I'll draw the line now when it comes to the bee Gees. Do I just give up and buy Saturday Night Fever?

"Alone Again" by the Bee Gees