Blood, Sweat & Tears – Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 (1970) [MFSL 2003]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 42:36 minutes | Scans included | 1,74 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 869 MB
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2013

After the huge success of their previous album, Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 was highly anticipated and it rose quickly to the top of the US album chart. It also yielded two hit singles: a cover of Carole King’s “Hi-De-Ho”, and “Lucretia MacEvil”. However, the album relied heavily on cover material and it received lukewarm reviews…

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Blood, Sweat & Tears – Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968) [MFSL 2005]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 68:54 minutes | Scans included | 2,79 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 1,33 GB
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2009

Blood, Sweat & Tears is the second album by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears, released in 1968. It was a huge commercial success, rising to the top of the U.S. charts for seven weeks and yielding three successive Top 5 singles. It received a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1970 and has been certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA with sales of more than four million units in the U.S. The album was selected for the 2006 book “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”.

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Blood, Sweat & Tears – Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968) [Audio Fidelity 2015]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 & DST64 4.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 44:50 minutes | Scans included | 3,39 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | 45:53 mins | Scans included | 914 MB
Features 2.0 Stereo and 5.0 multichannel surround sound | Audio Fidelity # AFZ5 198

The difference between Blood, Sweat & Tears and the group’s preceding long-player, Child Is Father to the Man, is the difference between a monumental seller and a record that was “merely” a huge critical success. Arguably, the Blood, Sweat & Tears that made this self-titled second album — consisting of five of the eight original members and four newcomers, including singer David Clayton-Thomas — was really a different group from the one that made Child Is Father to the Man, which was done largely under the direction of singer/songwriter/keyboard player/arranger Al Kooper. They had certain similarities to the original: the musical mixture of classical, jazz, and rock elements was still apparent, and the interplay between the horns and the keyboards was still occurring, even if those instruments were being played by different people. Kooper was even still present as an arranger on two tracks, notably the initial hit “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.” But the second BS&T, under the aegis of producer James William Guercio, was a less adventurous unit, and, as fronted by Clayton-Thomas, a far more commercial one. Not only did the album contain three songs that neared the top of the charts as singles — “Happy,” “Spinning Wheel,” and “And When I Die” — but the whole album, including an arrangement of “God Bless the Child” and the radical rewrite of Traffic’s “Smiling Phases,” was wonderfully accessible. It was a repertoire to build a career on, and Blood, Sweat & Tears did exactly that, although they never came close to equaling this album.

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Blood, Sweat & Tears – Child Is Father To The Man (1968) [Audio Fidelity 2014]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 & 5.1 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 49:28 minutes | Scans included | 3,11 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 946 MB

Child Is Father to the Man is keyboard player/singer/arranger Al Kooper’s finest work, an album on which he moves the folk-blues-rock amalgamation of the Blues Project into even wider pastures, taking in classical and jazz elements (including strings and horns), all without losing the pop essence that makes the hybrid work. This is one of the great albums of the eclectic post-Sgt. Pepper era of the late ’60s, a time when you could borrow styles from Greenwich Village contemporary folk to San Francisco acid rock and mix them into what seemed to have the potential to become a new American musical form. It’s Kooper’s bluesy songs, such as “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” and “I Can’t Quit Her,” and his singing that are the primary focus, but the album is an aural delight; listen to the way the bass guitar interacts with the horns on “My Days Are Numbered” or the charming arrangement and Steve Katz’s vocal on Tim Buckley’s “Morning Glory.” Then Kooper sings Harry Nilsson’s “Without Her” over a delicate, jazzy backing with flügelhorn/alto saxophone interplay by Randy Brecker and Fred Lipsius. This is the sound of a group of virtuosos enjoying itself in the newly open possibilities of pop music. Maybe it couldn’t have lasted; anyway, it didn’t.

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Blood, Sweat And Tears – Greatest Hits (1972) [Audio Fidelity 2016]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 41:15 minutes | Scans included | 673 MB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 866 MB
Mastered by Steve Hoffman & Steven Marsh | Audio Fidelity # AFZ-241 | Genre: Rock

Sometimes, a greatest-hits set is timed perfectly to gather together a group’s most successful and familiar performances just at the point when that group has passed the point of their maximum exposure to the public, but before the public memory has had a chance to fade. That was the case when Columbia Records assembled this compilation for release in early 1972. At that point, Blood, Sweat & Tears had released four albums and scored six Top 40 hits, each of which is heard here. But lead singer David Clayton-Thomas had just quit the group, so that the unit that recorded songs like “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” was not working together anymore. And even when Clayton-Thomas returned, the band would continue to decline commercially. As such, BS&T’s Greatest Hits captures the band’s peak in 11 selections–seven singles chart entries, plus two album tracks from the celebrated debut album when Al Kooper helmed the group, and two more from the Grammy-winning multi-platinum second album. Using the short singles edits of songs like “And When I Die” emphasizes their radio-ready punch over the more extended suitelike arrangements on the albums, but this selection gains in focus what it lacks in ambition. For the millions who learned to love BS&T in 1969 when they were all over AM radio, this is the ideal selection of their most accessible material.

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