Spirits Having Flown
| Bee GeesSpirits Having Flown
Spirits Having Flown is the fifteenth album released by the Bee Gees. It was the group’s first album after their collaboration on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The album’s first three tracks were released as singles and all reached No. 1 in the US, giving the Bee Gees an unbroken run of six US chart-toppers in a one-year period and equaling a feat shared by Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. It was the first Bee Gees album to make the UK top 40 in ten years (not counting the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever), as well as being their first and only UK No. 1 album. Spirits Having Flown marked the tail end of the band’s most successful era, prior to a severe downturn in the early 1980s when they would endure a near-total radio blackout (particularly in America) that Robin Gibb would refer to as “censorship” and “evil” in interviews. Reprise Records remastered and re-released the album on CD in 2006, although it did not include any additional bonus tracks, demos or outtakes.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
Throughout Spirits Having Flown, the synthesizer is integrated with far more assurance than before, so that the strongest songs outstrip Abba in sophistication while maintaining the requisite Europop tone of brittle, ultraaccessible cordiality. Spirits Having Flown is a Sunday-school heaven of eternal childhood, stringently regulated by “angels.”
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All Music
Spirits Having Flown is regarded today as something of a letdown, representing the tail-end of the Bee Gees' period of greatest success, perhaps because it preceded a two-year layoff that, in turn, heralded a decline in their fortunes. At the time, however, no one heard anything less than what they expected -- beautiful slow dance numbers , achingly gorgeous romantic numbers , soaring ballads , and pounding dance-rock numbers .
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Albumism
The Bee Gees’ sound on Spirits Having Flown is an evolution of the soulful flavors they unearthed for Main Course, which had pulled them out of demi-obscurity in the middle of the decade.
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Pop Dose
You could certainly dance to the tracks on Spirits Having Flown, but getting would-be Travoltas and Gorneys to strut their stuff under the mirror ball was no longer the raison d’etre of the band’s music. In its place was a purely pop mission, taking that urgency that was their hallmark and churning out as many great potential pop singles as they could. And boy, did they ever succeed.
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